Taster’s Choice

Today I find myself preoccupied with questions of taste for a variety of reasons, none of them especially good.  The first prompt, tragically enough, was a photo spread in Entertainment Weekly, the usual post-award show grading of fashion.  They had a little continuum from A-F going on, with Jennifer Hudson and Sara Bareilles at one extreme and Estelle and Paula Abdul at the other.  For the life of me, however–and this despite the fact that Estelle looked like she was auditioning for a Ziggy Stardust video–I could not identify the principles of taste that informed their ranking.  While I gathered some basic sensibilities (corsages, I now know, can lead to nothing but tragedy), I thought Hudson (who from the side appears to be wearing a starchy upturned lobster bib) and Bareilles (whose skirt might have been stitched from bathroom rug remnants) looked just as goofy as the folks who earned low marks.   I clearly lack whatever apparatus is necessary to make such judgments.

I also had my curiosity piqued by the new series Lie to Me, which features Tim Roth as a human lie detector.  The comparison is unfair, as LTM was probably in development for many moons, but I can’t help but think that the new kid on the block will strike most viewers as a cheap knock-off of The Mentalist.  I quite like Roth, and I know a few folks who are exceedingly eager to see what he’ll do with the material–they are predisposed to like the show, and it will need to suck pretty badly for them to opt out.  Every promo I’ve seen, however, features Roth doing nothing more than staging a gotcha question and promising the person so interrogated that he’ll be able to tell if he’s a fibber.  (The most recent gem?  If someone is sporting a very angry face, he just might be very angry.)  The Mentalist, in contrast, is working with a much roomier premise and a much sunnier lead, Simon Baker, whose character wears his shenanigans-sensitive skill set lightly.  I’m more attuned to the procedural genre than Grammy fashion, but I know full well that in the minds of some media consumers the part (Tim Roth) may be enough to sustain the whole.  While I appreciate that particular principle of taste, it strikes me as problematically partial.  I wouldn’t wade through a mess of jambalaya myself just because I have a hankering for andouille sausage.

And of course the question of taste is especially relevant to the appraisal of literature in general and poetry in particular.  I recently learned, for example, that one of my compañeras detests Jane Austen, another cannot stomach Frost in any form, and yet another will have nothing to do with formal verse.   Most tastes are defensible or can at least be attributed to the relativism and perspectivalism we’re all allowed to wallow in.  When it comes time to wrangle with the Big Questions, however, I think we more often than not find ourselves obliged to refer to standards of judgment that are durable if not definitive.  Consensus (historical, ahistorical, hysterical) would seem to have precious little to do with it, and the old throes of canon formation don’t seem to have a strong bearing on the tastes of a new generation of readers–exposure alone (enthusiastic or merely dutiful) may be enough to whet their appetites. 

That’s all I’ve got time to jot down today, and I reckon I made it further than I thought I would.  This week is filthy with meetings, but if I can find the time to rattle the subject around my skull for awhile I may circle back before long.  I’d be eager to hear where y’all stand on the subject of taste.