On Tuesday, June 03, 2003, at 01:55PM, Glenn A. Steinberg <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
>> I too have struggled with this. As Jon Quitslund says, the problem with
>> "cool," good though it is, is class: Gladys Brooks has a devastating little
>> first ironic and then tragic poem about ghetto kids that starts "We real
>> cool"--not what Castiglione had in mind, of course, even if one eliminates
>> Brooks's irony....
>
>On the other hand, in the white, suburban high schools of my youth, "cool" did
>have class associations (if not quite Castiglione's). The "cool kids" weren't
>the poor or the minority students. They were the children of "the beautiful
>people" -- perhaps the closest thing we have in the U.S. to aristocrats. Being
>"cool" back then meant being in a position not to have to care about anything
>(since popularity, money, college admission, and future employment were all
>secure) -- hence the sense of "careless ease" that characterized those who were
>"cool."
Glenn, I suspect that even the "cool kids" didn't always feel that they were so but were probably imitating those they perceived as cooler than themselves. And that reminds me of Norbert Elias's model of the civilizing process and how manners and mores tend to migrate downward on the social scale; if the nobility start eating with forks, then before long the gentry will too, and so on.
With that in mind, "cool" and "sprezzatura" may be alike not so much as identifiers of static social attitudes or registers (and various folks have mentioned how such a comparison could be misleading) but rather as tropes that describe social movement and imitation. The practitioners of both are acting as though they are better than they know themselves to be, and the humanist court and the high school hallway are both places of cascading perceptions where the successful imitators of this behavior are themselves imitated in turn. Pretty soon everyone's cool (I was going to add "or trying to be" but that would be redundant).
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