While the lefty blogs are enjoying the downfall of The New Republic's culture blogger Lee Siegel, who was canned for creating a "sock puppet" commenter called "sprezzatura" to defend him in comments, I find myself torn. For while I as an observer of web culture love the idea of the coiner of the term "blogofascists" losing his job over a blogging malfeasance, as a big literature geek, I hate the thought that this is most people's introduction to the very useful and far-too-underutilized concept of "sprezzatura."
The term comes from Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528), and it means, basically, hard-won graceful mastery that betrays none of the effort of its creation. Something that seems effortlessly perfect, even if tons of effort goes into it. Think of what Martha Stewart might be like if she were able to unclench, and you'll get the idea.
When we learned the term my first year in grad school, I understood it immediately. In college, sprezzatura had been the unnamed goal of all my friends: even the papers you pulled an all-nighter on, you'd claim gave you no trouble at all. Dense philosophical treatises? You skimmed them before class, of course, although how anyone could have made such a good point about Husserl on only a brief acquaintance with the material boggled all your friends' minds. It was an attitude I had to unlearn in grad school, because of course in grad school the thing to do is bitch and moan about how hard it all is.
There was, however, one of my grad school cohort who managed to embody what can only be called a surly sprezzatura -- Mike, who would famously say things like "I'd rather be asleep than having this conversation" and yet was probably the most incisive reader of the lot of us. It was Hilary who first started calling him "Spretz," and it stuck for a while, despite Mike's wanting to have none of it. As a result, when I think of "sprezzatura," I don't think of the chain-smoking semiotots of my undergrad years, but an amused bearded guy who told me that if you didn't wake up every morning of your graduate education and think "do I still want to do this?" you were doing it wrong. I'd hate to think that the term will be associated for a larger public with a James Kincaid-hating, Jon Stewart-bashing, pretentious jerk. Take back the spretz!