A writer I really don't like, and why

Some morning's I wake up and want to criticize everything I think about, everything I see.

For example, there's this writer I really don't like.

Everything he writes is a parody of the way I think of writing--the words he chooses, the subjects he chooses to write about, the people he invokes as models for his way of writing, the cliques he belongs to and the following he carefully cultivates among those cliques.

I know I'm right not to like this writer. He's really an evil, pernicious little prick who poses as a writer by befriending writers with at least a little talent and then flattering other writers who have just a little more talent than the writers he befriends. An actual writer reading him knows immediately he doesn't have a soul.

At least I'm willing to acknowledge that perhaps the most interesting thing about me is how I arrange the water glasses in the cupboard after I've washed and dried them, the most recently washed and dried glasses going in the very furthest reaches of the cupboard so that the less recently washed and dried glasses come to the front, in order to make sure we're not using the same old glasses over and over.

As a writer, I'm reading a book by the French historian, Marcel Detienne, The Greeks and Us (Polity Press, 2007). The book shows step-by-step how historians tend to separate history into pre-writing and post-writing; that primitive people's language was a combination of speech and song; that gradually language itself became an imposition on experience, that the wonder and awe of a being a human being in the natural world was replaced by words , representatives of wonder and awe.

I'm at a place in the book where Detienne is arguing that the basic inclination of the human mind is (and always has been) "manifested in mythology." The Greeks produced a body of myth that testifies to what one of the anthropologists Detienne cites as, "original experience made manifest."

Everytime I think about the world I'm producing a mythology, and everytime I write about it I become part of a tribe producing a mythology that others may take as mythology, a story about how to live their own lives

Thinking about language this way makes me feel better about myself and worse of the writer I don't like. It must be miserable to be a writer like him.