Will Bilowich 3 (cont’d)

Will Bilowich 3 (cont’d)

       By Barking Billy Beatrice

A conceited person. Pretender to wit, wisdom, or accomplishments. A coxcomb. Like a coxcomb on a chicken’s head, dibbling and rubbering, he garbled on about his own brandishments. ‘Yeeeesss, I have written about absence, too. Yeeeesss, I and that other successful writer know absence. Oooohh ceeeeertainly, I have written fully about the unhiding of the hidden. I have a new book of poems out that makes the unhidden its central subject. I know the hidden, let me tell you. My, of course I have written about the vagaries and vicissitudes of that and that Canadian literary star’s career and he stayed at my house when he came to do a Canada Council reading in my city, organized by me last summer. He loved my house! Yeeeesss, the Canada Council has often supported my efforts to educate local westerners about Canadian literature.’

       A foolish man. A dandy. An exquisite. He wore his jeans and jean jacket with pride. He was easily hurt, though. If you forgot to mention his latest book in the bio of a magazine in which he was being published he let you know it. Say, this is outdated, he would say. This doesn’t show my Saskatchewan Blue Snow. What’s with that? And when someone would apologize for the oversight he would launch into a grandeloquence about all his life’s cultural activities and make everyone hate him thoroughly. He knew he was hated then but throve on same. In another age he would have been shot. Or whipped. He could not easily have given his sperm to offspring for a multitude of reasons, I thought, watching him from my solitude.

       He sat always in the best-appointed locations where other well-known ones would be. At readings by local writers, the guest writer would by his mark. At the conference banquet he could be found within two chairs of that eminence every time. If a woman renowned for her treatise on American noodle-making in relation to recent poetic trends in the northern states came to his city to speak he would be seen within two chairs of her at meals. He preferred to be at the center, not the periphery. Not on the outside. Not a watcher, but a watched. What a little shit.

       He enjoyed crowding with others of his sort. Other milksops and muscleless type who milled around licking each other’s behinds he especially adored. His conical head, looking like the spout of a funnel, poked its way about in and out here and there in such a literary bustle. He snuck, plied, swang, sniveled, oozed, wheedled, warbled, wibbled and performed other forms of creeping and crawling at the centre of things till he began to feel full, having maybe drunk a glass of wine and partaken of a decaf coffee.  He is the future of our great literary tradition, Canad. We have paid his way with grants, degrees and a generous university salary (commensurate with regular sebaticals). Vive la dork.