Doubleplus sprezzatura.
Here’s how it all went down:
I was blitzing through my Bloglines feeds and tripped over this entry by Atrios, which, and it’s not really his fault, reminded me of the existence of that odious little troll reactionary young pundit, Ben Shapiro. What’s Ben up to? I asked myself.
—Using a template with badly specced code and no permalinks, for one thing.
Scroll down to Thursday, 5 August, for his list of a few good books that are out, including Michelle Malkin’s fascinating read on Japanese internment camps, Michael Barone’s intriguing and incisive look at hard and soft Americas, and Hugh Hewitt’s important book on how to crush the opposition while maintaining friendship and civility across party lines. Also recommended: Brad Miner’s book, an insightful and witty look at how men should ideally act.
So I went after The Compleat Gentleman, and was rewarded pretty much right out of the gate:
According to Miner, an executive editor at Bookspan, former literary editor of National Review and author of The Concise Conservative Encyclopedia, a true gentleman is a master of the art of sprezzatura. The term, as used by the Renaissance writer Castiglione, refers to a way of life characterized by discretion and decorum, nonchalance and gracefulness—or, as Miner defines it, the cool exemplified by the men in first class on the Titanic who went bravely to their deaths in evening clothes. Underneath this unflappable quality, which [he] says is not determined by birth or class…
Why not? After all, Leonardo DiCaprio proved anybody could worm their way into first class on the Titanic, so long as they had enough pluck, and a suit of evening clothes.
At least Bracy Bersnak over at Brainwash realizes the inherent problem in trying to appropriate all the exclusive advantages of an always-already dying breed without also owning up to the very real price one must pay for that exclusivity:
A later section of the book on the difficulty of being a gentleman in a democratic age fails to resolve the problematic relationship between the exclusive nature of gentlemanly ideals and social equality. Instead of addressing this issue, Miner characteristically wants to be on both sides of it. On the one hand, he contends that a gentleman must have a discriminating intellect and taste. On the other hand, he is unwilling to say what precludes one from becoming a gentleman. While the idea of the gentleman has always been relatively democratic, being based more on individual merit than noble lineage, it has never been inclusive. It has always been easier to say who manifestly is not a gentleman than to point to someone who manifestly is. Discrimination between who is a man of honor and who is not, between whose word and reputation are considered beyond reproach and whose are not, and between who has decent manners and who has not, have always been essential components of gentlemanly identity.
There is something rather perfectly disingenuous about writing a book that insists lording it over everyone else is within the reach of us all. (And I can’t resist quoting this next bit: “Since he does not apply gentlemanly principles to thorny problems of modern manners, it is no wonder that Miner has a difficult time finding model gentlemen in contemporary culture. When Miner searches for a model gentleman found in popular culture, the example he offers is… Superman.”) —Bersnak goes on rather tiresomely to blame the death of the gentleman on deconstructionism and feminism (you expected maybe the butler?), stooping perilously close to Ryan Thompson’s “positions on why females are ‘special’ in a moral sense” with a lament for the death of the lady, this “finest fruit of civilization,” “turned to rot beneath the withering contempt of feminism.” Presumably, had she never wasted away, gentlemen would still be a dime a dozen in the first class compartments of the western world. But Bersnak (much less Miner) never gets around to telling us when exactly it was that the gentleman wasn’t a rara avis, thin on the ground—for the proper response to “You, sir, are a scholar and a gentleman” has always been “And there are damn few of us left.” Nor does Bersnak seem to realize that the gentleman is as sexy and popular as ever.
In some quarters.
Count Ludovico, a fictional character, explains the contradictory grace of sprezzatura thusly: “It is an art which does not seem to be an art. One must avoid affectation and practice in all things a certain sprezzatura, disdain or carelessness, so as to conceal art, and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it….obvious effort is the antithesis of grace.” And maybe that makes you think of Zen; me, I’m thinking of cool—specifically, Donnel Alexander’s essay “Cool Like Me” from Might magazine, back in 1997. I only read it the one time, and haven’t seen it since; the internet couldn’t save Might, it seems. (Then, it couldn’t keep Suck alive, and Suck was already in here.) But it stuck with me, and what luck! There’s a review of Street Sk8er on the Electric Playground, which quotes a significant chunk of one of the passages that wouldn’t stop echoing in the back of my brain:
…cool was born out of that inclination to make something out of nothing, to devise from being dumped on and then to make that something special. […]
…music from cast-off Civil War marching-band instruments (jazz); physical exercise turned to spectacle by powerful, balletic enterprise (sports); and streetlife styling, from the pimp’s silky handshake to the crack dealer’s sag… Cool is about trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents… Cool is about turning desire into deed with a surplus of ease… It’s about completing the task of living with enough ease to splurge it on bystanders, to share with others working through their travails a little of your bonus life. In other words, you can give value to your life just by observing me.
So. Those Titanic gentlemen, so inspirational to Brad Miner, going discretely into that good night in their evening clothes? All I have to say to them is this:
Dying is easy. It’s completing the task of living that’s hard.
—And I do hope we’ve also put paid to Nick Confessore’s charmingly silly idea of reforming the military by recruiting liberal gentlemen to the officer corps, which is what Atrios was on about in the first place?
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A few quick links
Catholics for Choice responds to the Pope's recent thoughts on "the woman question." Well worth reading. The New York Times provides an amazingly useless article on the new overtime regulations. It points out that critics claim that Bush's new rules...
Might magazine is gone, but a retrospective anthology lives on; it includes "Cool Like Me".