No Sympathy, Please

Thank you for the outpouring of sympathetic notes regarding my relegation to the Siberia of academia. But quite frankly, I'm happy where I am. I prefer the coolness and distance of academia. I feel comfortable with its glacial tempo, its seriousness, its studiousness, and the dryness of its protocols. I prefer the long shelf-life of the academic book to the person-to-person immediacy of the reading or slam.
I'm interested in less emotion, not more. The idea of a "warm" literary festival or even worse, a "cozy" residency turns my stomach. The last thing I want is to meet my readership in the flesh. I prefer email to hugs, culture to nature, air-conditioning to gentle breezes, fluorescent lighting to tropical sunsets, theft to originality, falsification to truth, the manufactured to the hand-crafted, Barry Bonds to Hank Aaron, and value artifice more than life itself.
"To only speak with the words of others, that's what I'd like. That's what freedom must be." ("Ne parler qu'avec les mots des autres, c'est ce que je voudrais. Ce doit tre ca la liberté.") - Raphael Rubinstein