finding taste

In Kailua, HI there is a bookstore called BookEnds that we visited while waiting for a dinner reservation. It's the kind of bookstore where piles of books surround the shelves and lean on the walls, leaving only enough room for one person to weave through the mess.. a place where each person drifts to their own corner of the store, and you don't really notice the time passing, and you don't worry about others not noticing the time passing because there is an unspoken understanding that everyone is content getting lost among the books.

the aisle with science and math books lacked much organization between disciplines, to the degree that some pseudoscience worked its way in — astrology books accompanied Sagan, and crystal energy manuals leaned blithely against chemistry textbooks. I guess someone thought it was all just stars and rocks. Maybe it's bad organization; maybe it's good to put all the ideas out there and let people learn to discern science from non-science.

I usually don't look too long in the visual art section, but I noticed that this one had a few M.C. Escher books. I read Godel, Escher, Bach this year, which features some of his most popular ideas, used as visual metaphors for concepts like recursion and tangled hierarchies. When one learns about an artist, specific works become recognizable before the artist's technique and style. Eventually you can deduce the identity of the artist of a piece on first viewing. This, to me, is a fairly intimate knowledge, having grown up without many influences from classical art; this ability is surprising and impressive. I'm excited to glimpse the beginning of my own understanding of Escher in that way.

There is a coveted relationship with art that one finds without recommendation from others. Most of the threads we follow come up as suggestions, based on what someone (or some algorithm) thinks we might enjoy. I often lack the patience for all the things I "should check out" as many don't have a particularly good fit with my actual taste (however, this makes the people who give good recommendations extremely valuable to me). I find it annoying to have my attention jerked around by someone else "look at this", "look over there"

Taste has been important to me this year, as I have learned to explain the odd disconnection one feels with others who have done nothing wrong, really, they are totally normal... there's just nothing to talk about... and I think it comes down to taste. Taste is different from interest, in that it defines a boundary around many things which one is not yet aware of. Interests may be thought of an instantiation of taste; the latter is an abstract description of a set of sensations, and an interest concretizes it.

With taste being a level of abstraction above interest, connecting with another person on that level is richer than connecting over interests. Those with similar taste will be pleased and displeased by the same novel experiences. The occasional overlap in interest does not imply a large overlap in taste.

optimistically, I believe it is possible to change taste, though it takes time and discomfort. There may be another level above taste, openness?, which represents one's willingness to give new things a try and → expand one's taste. Openness may be confused with a lack of selectiveness (e.g. buying random wall art from Target because it's "different", or always shuffling an autogenerated playlist because "I listen to everything"), but the difference is that openness is a deliberate and genuine exploration into unfamiliar territory. "I listen to everything" is generally an excuse for a lack of taste in music because yr unable to even describe the kinds of sounds you like.

A good friend of mine always asks me "why?" when I say I like/don't like something, which has made it habitual for me to answer that question for myself. That's a powerful tool, making me realize I sometimes lack the vocabulary to describe the specific properties of a thing; the best I could do was "good" or "bad". using coffee as an example: Once you start developing vocabulary, you move from the binary, information-lossy top level judgement to.. dark or light or fruity or chocolatey or caramelly or light or heavy or bitter or acidic, and it becomes nonsensical to say "good" or "bad", and that is the development of taste