Charles Bernstein arrived and sauntered over to our group, wearing new glasses in very hip red frames. So my sudden insider's scoop on the poet's tennis shoe endorsement contract probably seemed rather plausible, and Charles was hooked. For this he would receive a hundred thousand a year and a white Camaro Iroc, with a license plate which read, of course, Adidas I . In any case, on my return I called Bill and told him this story. In his relative seclusion, he had never heard of Bernstein or Language Poetry, but he really seemed to love the story.
Life really is often way weirder than art, however.
I'm sorry that Bill didn't live long enough to see last night's premiere of the new high-tech Nike television spot featuring Old Bull himself, William Burroughs. This is the last piece I expect to write on Bill or his work, and I want to say that I feel blessed to have been allowed such a unique place in his life over the past twenty years. A few weeks later, I took him up on the invitation and spent the day with him, partly at Kingfisher Flat, partly at UC Santa Cruz, where he was teaching his Birth of a Poet course. Over the years I returned to Big Creek countless times and spent three days with Bill at an MLA Convention where Diane Wakoski had arranged for a special section devoted to his work. I traveled with him to Berkeley, Davis, and Portland.