We weren’t just having beer with Nelson and Bérubé because they were left wing intellectuals who generally sympathized with our goals in terms of restructuring American society. We wanted to talk to them, and they wanted to talk to us, because they were literary critics and every movement needs a couple of decent critics to describe how important literature is to society as a whole and to assure that the work of its writers will be taught well after the writers themselves are dead. Things hadn’t turned out so well with McCaffery in San Diego, but we thought Bérubé appealed to a wider audience anyhow. If McCaffery felt slighted, they could always take turns.

Nelson is a jovial, Falstaffian man, full of fire and revolution. Bérubé is hyperkinetic, a whirling dervish of a man who fed the jukebox full of Motown and was able to deconstruct the entire ironic structure of our gathering within that particular restaurant in that particular moment in the history of American society within two minutes flat, so we wouldn’t have to dwell on it when the conversation turned to the topic of serious literary criticism of The Unknown: An Anthology. And serious literary criticism of The Unknown: The Criticism. And, of course, the hypertext. Which everybody really wanted to talk and write about which is fine but hey, Michael, I said, hey, let’s not forget that the hypertext was basically a publicity stunt for the anthology itself.

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