We may affirm that to be true art which does not appear to be art; nor to anything must we give greater care than to conceal art, for if it is discovered, it quite destroys our credit and brings us into small esteem.

Baldassarre Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier

The concept of sprezzatura must surely point to a defining cultural anxiety of the renaissance Italian courtier: they needed to invent a word to mean "the ability to pull off some crazy impressive shit without breaking a sweat". I wonder if Castiglione was the world’s first hipster. I guess avoiding the appearance of trying too hard is a little bit of a simplistic, mom-type explanation of what hipster normally means, but still. I can’t think of an earlier historical precedent for hipsters than renaissance courtiers, a bunch of guys whose major concern was figuring out how to impress one another without being too obvious about it. ("Hm. Do you think this codpiece is too obvious?") The courtier’s problem with trying too hard will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s been to a school dance:

Which of you is there who does not laugh when our friend messer Pierpaolo dances in his peculiar way, with those capers of his,—legs stiff to the toe and head motionless, as if he were a stick, and with such intentness that he actually seems to be counting the steps? What eye so blind as not to see in this the ungracefulness of affectation …?

Of course, in those days, looking cool also involved being able to do hard stuff, like politics and poetry, but hey, no analogy’s perfect.

So anyway, somebody once described sprezzatura as a kind of "defensive irony", hiding one’s earnest attempts to impress behind a mask of nonchalance (thanks, Wikipedia!). Affecting unaffectedness. Defensive irony. A phrase that implies not just sprezzatura, but a whole lexicon of unfortunate human behaviors, a rich variety of defensive postures taken up to avoid appearing ridiculous, held together by the seductive idea that a tincture of irony will turn your particular mess of gooey sentiment, social gaffes, and pimples, into something way more presentable.

This is a losing game, of course, as good old Mom might have told us if we’d had ears to hear. Not that wisdom from that humble source ever went heeded. As a teenager, for example, I tried to cope with an acute fear of appearing ridiculous by being as silly as possible. Defensive irony. At one point, I taught myself to sew so that I could make silly hats:

That’s yours truly, aged 16, there on the left, on a school trip. In retrospect, it’s pretty obvious that being fake-ridiculous, adopting goofiness as a form of defensive irony, isn’t all that useful if what you really want is to do spend your day thinking about something besides whether or not you look stupid at the moment. The trick, of course, is not to avoid looking ridiculous but not bothering about it at all in the first place. I’m reminded of the match trick scene in Lawrence of Arabia: "the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

But the point of that scene is that it takes a real, um, special kind of person to not mind that it hurts. So I wonder what the alternatives are, the fear of appearing ridiculous being one of the more inhibiting forms of self-consciousness.

In true American fashion, let’s look to pop culture to figure out how to live. Rockers have a particularly urgent need not to appear ridiculous, as in their case being cool is more of a job description than a simple desideratum. And the problem of being cool can only be more confusing in the emerging, post-superstar era, when terms like "underground" and "mainstream" are just about equally useless, and market visionaries are predicting that the pop-culture icons in the future are going to be small-potatoes, audience-wise, compared to the acts from our childhood. Trying to be an indie rocker today means (1) trying to market yourself in the absence of any real consensus about what’s currently hip, thanks to (2) the music scene’s pathological and self-contradictory relationship to its own hype machine ("nothing is good that anybody likes"). The distinction, never very clear, between the hackneyed and the avant-garde, between aw-shucks sincerity and caustic irony, between the ridiculous and the hip, is hazier now than ever.

Will Sheff, 30-something front man of a 10-year-old roots-rock band from Austin, Okkervil River, isn’t exactly an icon of cutting-edge hipness, but he does have an interesting approach to the problem of being hip.

Have a listen to "Pop Lie," a song from Okkervil River’s most recent album that packs a lot of contorted self-consciousness into a glib little package. There’s no shortage of songs about rock’n'roll, but most of them seem to be making the point that "rock and roll is extremely awesome and so am I" (e.g. pretty much every AC/DC song). "Pop Lie", however, is a loud, upbeat, catchy little song about how creepy catchy little songs are.

And, mouths wet and blonde hair braided,
By the back room the kids all waited
To meet the man in bright green
Who had dreamed up the dream
That they wrecked their hearts upon—
The liar who lied in his pop song
He’s the liar who lied in his pop song,
And you’re lying when you sing along.

Who writes this kind of stuff? If the point of sprezzatura is to conceal art, this is pretty much the opposite. Even so, the albums are thick with defensive irony: they’re full of sing-along songs that keep insisting there’s something weird and actually maybe a little disturbing about singing along. Think the band’s classic-rock stylings are a touch outdated? Think Sheff’s ecstatic, warbling, sloppily emotional vocals are kind of silly? Think the whole idea of some skinny young guy singing songs about God knows what and trying to coax a crowd of strangers into mystical, wet-mouthed (which, ick) transport is inherently a little stupid? Sheff, painfully aware that any minute somebody is going to start finding him ridiculous, is already one step ahead you.

I could try mining the following quotation for some deep insight into "the hacker’s psychology" or some other such nonsense. But it’s much funnier if I just leave it alone.

The first time I spoke with Richard Stallman, he took off most of his clothes. Clad only in his pants, he marched down a long, busy corridor in MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science. His destination was a room full of large computers, in which he had installed a NordicTrack exercise machine. In front of the exercise machine stood a big fan, which Stallman switched on. To keep the computers from overheating, the room was air-conditioned to about 65. When I mentioned the cold-catching potential of shirtless exercise in a frigid wind, Stallman replied that he did not like to sweat. Then he began talking about copyright. Still talking, he stepped onto the NordicTrack and began to exercise vigorously. The fan blew his long hair out behind him like a flag. All the while he spoke with fluency, in neatly organized paragraphs, about copyright in the Information Age.

from: Charles C. Mann, ‘Who Will Own Your Next Good Idea’ Atlantic Monthly 9/1998 (66)

Here is how a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education glosses “pwned”:

A neologism with varying pronunciations coined by online gamers and made popular by bloggers and discussion-board posters, it refers to the act of being thoroughly bested.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a cell phone bill from Sprint that was a lot bigger than I thought it should be. I went to the Sprint customer service website to figure out what was going on. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear they’d "upgraded" their website and I had to reset the password on my account before I could use it again. Most sites just have you do one of those stupid security question song-and-dance routines, but Sprint decided to do the stupid security question one better: instead of having you remember the color of your third grade teacher’s hair, they have you type in a bunch of stuff that you’re even less likely to remember. Since I didn’t happen to know what my account number, passcode, my wife’s social security number, or the exact amount of my current bill, I didn’t get all the numbers right on the first try. Or on many, many subsequent tries. Adding insult to injury, it turns out if you type in any of the numbers wrong, all the fields on the form get erased and you have to type all of them in again.

Oh, and did they mention that your account number is not the same as your telephone number, that your pass-word is totally different from your pass-code, that the social security number in question isn’t necessarily the same as the account owner’s, or that the amount of the current bill need not be the same as the amount of the bill you most recently received? No, they did not.

Now, wireless providers are notorious for providing lousy customer service, so I don’t really expect them to give me a nice customer service website. But bad customer service web apps are so common that they seem normal. Take the ill-conceived account security gimmicks that seem to be popping up everywhere, like the "site-key" thing that Bank of America (et al) makes users go through to log into their accounts. Besides being annoying, these things don’t even do much to protect users. This study, for example shows Bank of America’s site key did almost nothing to protect users from site forgery attacks.

Web apps are just the tip of the iceberg. For example, the other day I realized that the most senior, and nearly omnipotent, member of the administrative staff in the major standardized test development company where I work prints out every single email that she receives and files them in a giant cabinet in her office, apparently because this is more effective and efficient than trying to cope with the inadequate facilities for searching and archiving email that Outlook provides. And outlook is way better than the custom software we use—a baffling tangle of Word macros and Lotus 1-2-3 database interfaces, the software equivalent of baling wire and duct tape—software absolutely essential to the daily operation of the company. (Typical administrative message from IT received this week: upgrading the QuickTime installation on your machine will break the custom software, so don’t). Not to mention the jobs that software should handle, but doesn’t—there was a nasty little scandal in our department recently when a major client noticed that there was a significant (but eminently machine-catchable) typo in a test that we produced for them.

But so what? Bad software is just a part of life, or used to seem that way. But that was before I was contemplating a career in software, and now bad software takes on an entirely different aspect. Most software is bad, and it the situation is worse when the software in question fulfills some secondary business role — say providing customer service, or double checking to see that the test developers don’t accidentally write a question with multiple-choice options A, B, C, E and E.

The troubling thing isn’t that most software is bad (which, in itself, is encouraging: the bar for success is set pretty low), but that A) most software jobs involve producing and maintaining this stuff, and B) there doesn’t seem to be much interest in improving it. I started my CS degree because I love making stuff; I love it so much that it seems like the best possible thing I could be doing with my time, so much so that I get up most mornings when I don’t have to work or go to class, sit down at my desk, and write code until bed time. When I was a kid I used to think it was weird that my dad would read these gigantic technical manuals with boring titles (sometimes even on vacation!), but now it seems like a totally obvious sort of thing to do—how else are you supposed to learn how to make cool stuff?

It’s extraordinarily fortunate that I happen to like making software instead of furniture or car parts or clothing or something. Unlike those commodities, software is still pretty much all made by hand, so there’s lots of jobs available for people with modest amounts of skill and aptitude. Given that software is quite possibly the last really big career field where an individual’s commitment to craft, to building something the right way, actually matters, it’s upsetting to see that so few makers of software seem to care about making good software, and even more upsetting to think that there are probably rational economic explanations for why this is so. Here, for example, is what Joel Spolsky has to say about why jobs writing "in house" software suck:

Number one. You never get to do things the right way. You always have to do things the expedient way. It costs so much money to hire these programmers—typically a company like Accenture or IBM would charge $300 an hour for the services of some recent Yale PoliSci grad who took a 6 week course in dot net programming, and who is earning $47,000 a year and hoping that it’ll provide enough experience to get into business school—anyway, it costs so much to hire these programmers that you’re not going to allowed to build things with Ruby on Rails no matter how cool Ruby is and no matter how spiffy the Ajax is going to be. You’re going into Visual Studio, you’re going to click on the wizard, you’re going to drag the little Grid control onto the page, you’re going to hook it up to the database, and presto, you’re done. It’s good enough. Get out of there and onto the next thing. That’s the second reason these jobs suck: as soon as your program gets good enough, you have to stop working on it. Once the core functionality is there, the main problem is solved, there is absolutely no return-on-investment, no business reason to make the software any better. So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice. Forget any pride in workmanship or craftsmanship you learned in CS323. You’re going to churn out embarrassing junk, and then, you’re going to rush off to patch up last year’s embarrassing junk which is starting to break down because it wasn’t done right in the first place …

This shockingly benosed fellow is John Locke. Here is a little tidbit from one of my very favorite passages in English letters, the “Epistle to the Reader” printed at the beginning of Locke’s Treatise on Human understanding, a work that is both as delightful in little pieces as it is astoundingly dull in its entirety.

The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton, with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge;–which certainly had been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred company and polite conversation. Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard and misapplied words, with little or no meaning, have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge. To break in upon the sanctuary of vanity and ignorance will be, I suppose, some service to human understanding; though so few are apt to think they deceive or are deceived in the use of words; or that the language of the sect they are of has any faults in it which ought to be examined or corrected, that I hope I shall be pardoned if I have in the Third Book dwelt long on this subject, and endeavoured to make it so plain, that neither the inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalency of the fashion, shall be any excuse for those who will not take care about the meaning of their own words, and will not suffer the significancy of their expressions to be inquired into.

Aside from the comically prescient critique of jargon–I only wish he had called the “abuse of language” the province of those particularly “ingenious and industrious” citizens of the republic of letters rather than an encumbrance upon them–what I like best about this is the little turn from under-laborer to world-maker, so suave that you hardly notice it’s happening. One minute he’s the polite guy in blue coveralls, emptying the wastepaper baskets in the temple of learning; the next minute he’s burning the place down.

Frontispiece to the 2nd volume of The Mother’s Encyclopedia, rev. ed., 1942. We are not at all sure what relationship exists between the image below and its original caption.

Last weekend I was out with S. looking at antique stores. Or, at least, that was the plan; we hit “Aardvark & Sons”, a dusty place filled with expensive, sometimes interesting, and vaguely historical clutter, where S bought some stuff and was complemented on her (conspicuously large and new) tattoo by the shop’s owner, one Lamar.

Anyway, so we drove to a self-consciously quaint suburb of New Jersey about 15 minutes north of where we live, where we failed to locate any functioning antique shops, but did spend the better part of an hour attending to an impromptu lecture from a grade-A eccentric, the owner of a building purporting to be an “art and antique gallery,” which is to say a crumbling 19th century firehouse, not currently open for business. The place was down a side-street; the wooden “Antiques” sign, hanging from a post in front of the building, had split, leaving only the top half of the letters dangling from rusted chains, and there was our Eccentric, contemplating the broken sign. Our Eccentric: a loquacious local historian about 60 years old, possessed of a fine-featured, uneasy, intelligent-looking face. He had the way of the crank who keeps the evil forces of modernity at bay only by a habitual and sustained rides upon his hobby-horse. The evil forces of modernity, in fact, were his grand, unifying theme, a sort of curmudgeonly resistance to certain highly specific forms of social change, the sorts that could only be glimpsed if one troubled to learn about historical methods of trash disposal, the trade-offs of disposable diapers, the relative merits of milk- and lead-based paints, notable design elements in local brickwork, the preservative powers of dirt, the horrors wrought on old buildings by unenlightened renovators, construction techniques that rendered old buildings portable, the properties of cement. The persistence of this theme was not the less surprising because punctuated with digressions of an equally various sort: the disconcertingly pointed, and only probably rhetorical, question (”Do you think firemen are different than everyone else?”); the odd bit of personal history (my life as house husband); the occasional opinion (why Montpellier is a better university town than Nice), the abruptly curtailed anecdote (”… different place, different story, another time”).

This all sounds, and in fact was, delightful. It was not, however, the most comfortable experience; though his subjects were all deeply harmless, he had a bit of that crackpot intensity you see in opinion-mongers of the more disagreeable sort (conspiracy theorists, militant vegans), which was compounded by his odd physiognomy—he appeared to be hairless below the neck, had his jean cutoffs hoisted by suspenders which curved oddly around an incongruous paunch, and had an unfortunately located pantsbulge which was truly alarming.

The following is a transcript of a broadside printed in London, 1654.

---

A LIST of some of the Grand Blasphemies,
Which was given in to
The Committee for R E L I G I O N.
Very fit to be taken notice of,
Upon the occasion of the day of Publick Fasting and Humiliation.

I. John Robin said, That he was God Almighty;he was committed to New Prison at Clerkenwel, 1651.

II. Thomas Tidford said, That John Robins was God the Father, and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ; he was committed to the Gate-house, 1651.

III. Richard King said, His Wife was with childe of him that should be the Saviour of all those that shall be saved, was committed to New-Prison, 1651.

IV. Thomas Kerby said, That Cain (who murderedhis Brother Abel) was the third Person in the Trinity; he was committed to the Gate-house, 1651.

V. Elizabeth Sorrel said, That those of herSociety had power to raise the dead; she was committed to the Gate-house,1651.

VI. Joshua Garment, clapping with his hands, and filliping with his fingers, said, That was Preaching of the Gospel. Committed to New-Prison, 1651.

VII. Elizabeth Haygood, being uncivil, and playing the fool, said, That that was Preaching the Gospel, which was foolishness;she was committed to New-Prison, 1651.

VIII. Joan Robins said, She was with childe, and the childe in her Womb was the Lord Jesus Christ; she was committed to New-Prison, 1651.

IX. Joan Garment said, He that she followed was God, her great Deliverer. Committed to New-Prison, 1651.

X. Margaret Hollis, singing antiquely, and in rude postures, said, That was Religion. Committed to New Prison, 1651.

XI. Anne Burrel, being with the Ranters, said, That was the right way of Preaching the Gospel. Committed to the Gate-house, 1651.

XII. Mary Vanlop said, She had served a false God, and had now found the true god to serve, who was a man whom she followed. Committed to the Gate-House, 1651.

XIII. Thomas Kerby said, That he must be damned in Hell, for serving the God we serve, so long as he done; but if should be but for a time, for he now served the true god, which is a man; who after he hath been tormented for a time, will deliver him. Committed to the Gate-house, 1651.

XIV. John Rogers, a Carpenter in Listethiel, being at work on the Lords-day, and reproved for it, said, That if he wasordained to be saived, he should be saved, how wickedly soever he led his life;and if he was ordained to be damned, he should be damned, though he lived never so godly a life. And on that very day, as he was hewing a piece of Timber, his Ax glanced and cut his Leg, and then stabbed himself with his Knife, and died on the place, 1653.

XV. Robert Clerk, living about Rippon in Yorkshire, ejecting one of his Tenants, said, That he had rather make a Den for Devils of his house, than they should dwell in it. And the same day his Horse threw him, and so bruised him, that hebled at his mouth, and died, crying out, That his sins were greater thancould be forgiven.

XVI. Mary Adams, living about Tillingham in Essex, said about 1652. That she was conceived with childe by the Holy Ghost, and that all the Gospel that had been taught heretofore, was false; and that which was within her, was the true Messiah: was imprisoned and delivered (after sore travail, eight days together) of an ugly dead Monster; and her self after she had lain some time rotting and stinking, with filthy Botches and Boyls, took a Knife when she was alone, and ripped up her own Bowels, and so died, 1652.

XVII. Mr. Jinkins of Grayes-Inn, holding it enough to be at hearing a Sermin; neglecting private duties, afterward on a Lords-day, so soon as he had been at a Sermon, hanged himself in his own Chamber, 1652.

XVIII. Alice Turner, of St. Katherines Parish, near the Tower, said, Drink was that must comfort her: and whilest one was going for some drink for her, she hanged her self.

XIX. A Goldsmith that did live in the Strand, and after in the City, and then at Eliham, who called his name Theau au John Tany, the High Priest, &c. Published in Print, That all Religion is a lie, a deceit, and a cheat, 1651.

XX. One came in to the Parliament House, about 1651. and sate down among the Members; but when he was asked by the Speaker, who he was, he said, He was Joshua the High Priest; King of Kings, and Lord of Lords.

XXI. Nicholas Smith Shoomaker, living at Tillington in Sussex , saith in a book printed in 1652. That the manner of thec oming of the Spirit of the Lord Jesus upon him, was by touching lightly the haire of his head, so soaking down into his head, it made all his neck and shoulders to rise, after two hours it entered into his soul. And that we shew God, that we would have him make Horses without Tayles, and some without Ears, our own Toes all of a length, just strait, and square, some Feet a little forked, our Heads and Knees bigger, our Arms as big at the hands, as they are at the shoulders.

XXII. Richard Faulkner at Petersfield in Sussex, kneeling down upon his knees in the middle of the Town, Drunk a health to theDevil, and at another time he said, That our Savior Christ was a Bastard, and that his Father was a poor Carpenter, and that he carried his Fathers Tools after him in a Basket, and sware to a man, God dam him, he would bugger his soul into hell. For which he was committed Prisoner.

XXIII. Mr. Smalbone said in the Vestry at White-hall Chappel, That all things, good and bad, are in God, and that Devils and Hell are in the Essence and being of God.

XXIV. An Officer to a Re-baptized Church, said, That salvation by Jesus Christ is no miracle, and that it was nothing but what was comprehended in nature, that he dyed, and became the Savior of his people.

XXV. Paul Best affirmed That Jesus Christ is not God, equal with God the Father. Committed by the Parliament.

XXVI. An Officer dismist the Army, said, That the Scripture is no more to be believed but as the Turks Alchoron, or other books of other mens writings, so far as it is the truth, and that there are many things in it contradictory one place to another.

XXVII. Mrs. Gay at Knightsbridge said, That she could serve God as well in her bed, or at work in her Garden on the Lordsdayes, as at any Ordinances at any meeting place. About 1651. she was grievously afflicted without the use of her limbs, bed-ridden about a year, under a sad dispaire, and horrible torment of Devils, and so dyed.

XXVIII. Mrs. Clerk the Butchers wife affirmed, that she hath her Tribe as well as Christ, and is the Savior of those of her Tribe as Christ is of his. And that there are ten Tribes more.

XXIX. One pretended to be a Jew in Northumberland. Was Rebapized, proved a great blasphemer, and an Imposter.

XXX. Ranters, Quakers, Seekers, and Blasphemers do daily broach sad and fearfull Blasphemies.

A friend of mine once wrote that “It’s normal to be bored … Anyone who thinks otherwise has been reading too much uplifting literature, which, like Baudelaire, is for the feeble minded and pretentious only.”

What he hadn’t had as much occasion as I to note is that literature is such a reliably effective way of becoming bored. Just now, I’m on a forced march through Scott’s Waverley (1814), a novel of not inconsiderable length whose main selling point, according to the promotional copy on the back, is its “highly readable story.” Trust Scott, the old killjoy, to take adventuresome gallantry as his subject matter and render it in chapters titled:

• “An Incident Gives Rise to Reflection”
• “Rather Unimportant”
• “More Explanation.”

And what modern writer would start a chapter this way?

Shall this be a long or a short chapter? — This is a question in which you, gentle reader, have no vote, however much you may be interested in the consequences; just as you may (like myself) probably have nothing to do with the imposing a new tax, excepting the trifling circumstance of being obliged to pay it.

Do to weather-related delays, I spent ten hours yesterday in the frigid bowels of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. On the bright side, I learned that airport bookstores can be interesting. Amid the usual horrors (The Five People you Meet In Heaven) and the Special New Embarrassments to American Letters (I Am Charlotte Simmons), I saw, of all things, four copies of Finnegan’s Wake.

With so many unexpected and deliciously varied forms of literary torment available, I wound up with a copy of The End of the Affair. It occurred to me while reading the introduction that one of the nice things about being Catholic is that if you ever decide to quit, then you can refer to yourself as a lapsed Catholic, an identifier that carries with it a certain something, gravitas, maybe, that ex-Protestants just can’t have. There’s a certain mystique about the lapsed Catholic–people, I imagine, would assume that you had a bad experience with priests, or that you couldn’t stomach the theology anymore, or that you’ve suffered some harrowing existential crisis and you’d rather not talk about it. It’s romantic; sophisticates and French people are lapsed Catholics. Lapsed Catholics are allowed to get a little drunk at office parties and make awkward disclosures about their thwarted sex lives. Lapsed Catholics can allude casually to the horrors of their repressive religious upbringing, even if they grew up in cheerful suburban families. If, on the other hand, you decide to quit being an evangelical Protestant, you have none of these options: you are not a “lapsed Protestant,” you are just lame. Lapsed Catholics are suspected of being angry at God; former Protestants are suspected of owning Thomas Kinkade “paintings.” Behind the Lapsed Catholic’s appearance of strained social convention, you’d expect to find a heady broth of Byronic emotional problems; underneath the veneer of the ex-Protestant’s rebellious apostacy, you’d expect to find a mundane mixture of apathy and laziness.