Hm. I haven't been paying much attention to what's being said about average Joes in the wake of the last presidential debate, although the spate of profane outbursts from various corners of my blogroll has been entertaining. What has started to catch my eye are pronouncements about the general public's educatability when it comes to good taste.

For instance, in this morning's Wall Street Journal, Eric Felten has an essay on "Making a Bad Cocktail Better", in which he talks about teaching people to refine their preferences:

...a good bartender respects the preferences of his patrons.
Mr. DeGroff [a bartending maven] quotes Harry Johnson, author of a 19th-century bar manual: "The greatest accomplishment of a bartender lies in his ability to exactly suit his customer." And when it comes to drinks, customers not only have opinions but are wont to express them. In his youth, Mr. DeGroff worked as a waiter, and he writes: "I was never instructed by a customer on how the chef should prepare his hollandaise sauce." By contrast, "with very few exceptions, people have a lot to say about the preparation of their Bloody Mary, Manhattan, old-fashioned, and even the ultimate classic cocktail, a dry martini."

Mr. DeGroff is quite right about this, though I might quibble that people are opinionated especially about their Martinis. And, I would suggest, they are often wrong in their opinions. The challenge for the bartender, as Mr. DeGroff is the first to recognize, isn't just to give the customer what he wants, but to help him discover that he wants something better than what he's had before. [Emphasis mine.]

(For what it's worth, I don't care much for martinis in any configuration, but I actually like Long Island iced teas. I'll forever associate them with my first visit to Second City Chicago, which was a very good time indeed.)

In the October issue of the Atlantic, Jed Perl profiles "The Man Who Remade the Met", Philippe de Montebello. Here's the paragraph that leapt out at me (again, emphasis mine):

In a period when museums seem increasingly schizophrenic—bouncing between a curator’s desire to present the best work in the most illuminating way and a marketing executive’s obsession with the next blockbuster show or high-profile building scheme -- the Metropolitan offers nuance and coherence. Rather than herding visitors into the big show or the galleries with the greatest hits, the Metropolitan encourages them to take in a variety of unexpected treasures, often less well-known but equally worthy of attention. Every day, visitors linger over works on paper -- a Rembrandt drawing, for instance, or a 19th-century children’s book, or a 20th-century photograph -- placed front and center, just off the great staircase on the second floor. In most museums, prints and drawings and vintage photographs are relegated to a remote location, filed away as specialized items for specialized tastes. Here they occupy prime real estate, where they can’t be missed. The assumption at the Metropolitan -- the most visited attraction in the most museum-conscious city in the country -- is that the public can respond to anything beautiful or curious or rare, if only given a chance.

In the same issue, there's a marvelous poem by Billy Collins called "Searching", in which he offers an illustration of how a reader may fall into love (or obsession) with some small, inexplicably compelling detail rather than the comprehensive magnificence of an epic.

These things are on my mind as I watch friends and acquaintances struggle with variations of "what's the use" syndrome -- e.g., how hard should one strive to get x printed or y exhibited when one's probable audience is so damned small? When it will eventually end up in recycling bins or vanish into the mist of expired domains? I don't have ready answers for this -- I'm itching to spend the rest of today working on some new poems, but I've also got a heap of billable work and a backlog of correspondence. Hell, I hop back and forth over the fine line between "sharing" and "self-indulgence" so much that it's a blur.

Hm. That there could be the start of a poem. Think I'll go think about it while I deal with the ironing.