Page 34

By Jack Joseph Smith

Understand "Meddling Pickalous", And under- standing "Waiting for Gado", And "Finnegans Wake" is Admitting some- thing good, And good, And special, And hard About getting old.

Original Scan

Page 34

AI Interpretation

GPT

This page treats understanding difficult or demanding works as a moral and emotional admission that there is still something good, special, and hard worth meeting in age.

The page reads like a defense of difficult reading rather than a casual literary note. The scan-confirmed quoted-title structure makes taste and comprehension feel bound up with endurance, patience, and a willingness to keep meeting complexity.


Claude

Three roughly spelled high-modernist touchstones - 'Meddling / Pickalous', 'Waiting for / Gado', and 'Finnegans / Wake' - are stacked as a single act of comprehension. To 'Understand' them is 'Admitting some- / thing good, And good, And / special, And hard About / getting old', so literary difficulty becomes a way of conceding the difficulty of age itself.