I pretend to be a wine expert.  I do offer advice, cover the bases, give out a sip here and there.  Taste with food, this ought to work with what you're having--that sort of thing.  And wine pretends to be something worthy of expertise, beyond simple enjoyment of what's good about it or how it reflects from where it came.  Wine is a weakness, a bit medicinal, one of life's mellow pleasures, and I know, as far as weaknesses one could do far far worse.

I mean, take Hemingway:  he's simply one of the great variety of writers.  (And perhaps limited from seeing himself only as that.)  None of us have any more talent or great insight beyond the rest.  Just a kind of spilling of one's guts and leave it as it is.  Maybe he's not even particularly good, but that somehow he makes his point, and Kundera applauds him for this, that in the scale of things, the art of writing is good.  Journalistically?  For bringing out the bad guys from disguise?  For showing what makes us tick?  Academically, I know full well, you would do a lot better studying some other guy, Robert Lowell, Andrew Marvell, Larkin perhaps.  Someone with a better diction than "the horse smelled the water."  Someone less of a lout.  (But Hemingway is a sensitive guy, I would argue, just dealing with being alive.  I have him as a Type O.)

There are, I suppose, Hemingway experts.  And then there are legions of people who are drawn back to nature by him, by his trout holding themselves steady over pebbled stream bottoms, or who get oysters or Paris.  Simpatico types who sense his simpatico type.

But I am reminded of a story.  A fellow goes to President Lincoln, wanting to be a doorman.  Have you ever been a doorman?  No.  Have you ever attended a lecture on being a doorman?  Uh, no.  Have you ever read treatises on the subject?  The guy quietly leaves.

I guess, on the other hand, you have to pay your dues.