Literary Deal Breakers

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.

full story.

Maybe this is a big problem for for lit majors from liberal arts colleges back east, but can't say literary taste has ever played a role in my failed relationships.

Not the case for the wife, who dumped one fellow for insufficient adulation of Nabokov.

And my literary tastes are decidedly lowbrow.
I've improved significantly the last few years, to the point where I'll read straight fiction if the wife is really over the moon about it, and I genuinely like everything I've read by Michael Chabon.

But I'm happiest with genre slop skimmed off the top of the SF/Fantasy bucket, leavened with the occasional mystery.
My problem is the more 'real' fiction I read the less tolerant I am for the kind of linguistic butchers who hide out in the genre stacks, camouflaging pre-school school prose with phalanxes of elves and spacemen.

I've historically had more trouble with musical tastes.
One ex, who's entire collection consisted of Jimmy Buffet cassettes, caused me no end of consternation. She literally had no opinion on anything, everything was "ok".
Except Jimmy, who she adored.

That was rough.

And I knew it would never work with another gal when every song on the mix tape she made me provoked groans of dismay. I just have no room in my heart for low fi indie pewp like Sparklehorse, Palace Brothers and Sebadoh. I lack the gene to appreciate them...sorry Jamesy!
Although I didn't actually hate Neutral Milk Hotel. Maybe there's hope for me after all.

Also, I just realized that I'm old enough to have gotten mix tapes, fossils my YOUNGFRIENDS (tm) recognize only because they saw High Fidelity on DVD.