The one guy was so clear you had to be on a commercial airliner to get the truth of it 30,000 feet up. The other was so opaque you had to get a PhD in his life in Ireland to begin to understand him.

Neither one was interested in meaning. Hemingway discarded meaning in World War I. After that it was the cool fresh taste of middling Spanish-accented wines. Joyce never cared about meaning at all. He just wanted to be a poetic conundrum. Named Stephen Dedalus. Follow the spider thread to the elastic end of nothing.

Oh. Gertrude Stein and Picasso. A rock and a jock. She made a joke of static writing while he made a joke of accomplished three-year-old finger painting. Great? Sure. Headed somewhere, leading us to a new vision of possibility??! uh, No. Dead ends, both of them. Just like Hemingway and Joyce.

Want to bring anyone else up? Name someone who tried to stitch up the gaping holes in art created by Picasso and James Joyce and their other pals. No one will tell you who that might be. Who might have been. Matisse? All he cared about was sex. There was nobody, has been nobody.

I tried, but I’m mostly dead now too. Life is fleeting. Haven’t heard of me? William Blake sold 300 copies. I’m okay with everything.