The Common Reader

I came upon a word the other day, and when I learned its definition, my whole being ached. What I was reading had been written long ago. Was this word even possible anymore? In a studied sense, of course. But as I wanted it to mean? The word was sprezzatura. Meaning a lightness, a nonchalance that makes whatever you say or do seem effortless. How can we drop the weight of today’s headlines and the planet’s tumult and the goddamned price of groceries?

When the Brooklyn-based Unheard-of Ensemble finished its week-long residency in St. Louis workshopping and premiering new music by new music composers, they barely played as an ensemble at all. Works in Response to Art, performed twice on August 15 at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum on the campus of Washington University, featured musical miniatures responding to individual works at the museum, composed and performed for only one or two players in the Unheard-of quartet at a time.

When I read an art critic’s cavalier description of the colored tiles in Spencer Finch’s Memory Landscape as “backsplash,” I winced for him. The work is so much more than that. Even the concept is lovely: fill seventy feet of one of the walls at the Obama Presidential Center with tiles in the colors that saturated Barack’s young life in the places that formed him: Nairobi, Chicago, Honolulu, Jakarta. Finch shrugs off such comments. “The work exists abstractly at first,” he reminds me.

When I read that not forcing kids to hug their relatives is a new trend, I have to smile. My mother never forced a hug. When my bombastic uncle insisted on a kiss on the lips, a big ol’ smackeroo, I turned my cheek. Even at age five, and all the way up to adulthood. I think she secretly applauded. The article focuses on grandparents, though, for whom the dilemma is heartbreaking.

The Collaborative Composition Initiative concluded its week in St. Louis with two sets of premieres: nine new pieces performed by the Unheard-of Ensemble at Dissonant Works on South Jefferson Friday night and nine miniatures inspired by works at the Kemper Art Museum performed by members of the ensemble at the museum on the campus of Washington University Saturday afternoon.

We want human consciousness, one of life’s last great mysteries, to be special. To be a spark of divine fire, or at the very least a set of proprietary neurons born of our brain’s majestic complexity. Descartes was so sure that only humans were conscious, he dissected bunnies and pups while they were alive, insisting that their screams were automatic reflexes that had nothing to do with suffering.

Is Charm Offensive? The pad Thai was meh, and the fortune cookies a great disappointment. One just said “Behind a successful man is always.” And my husband’s said he would “win over others with his charm.” I snorted. “That’s so not you.” Our friends were aghast, shocked by my cruelty, and they teased me hard. How could I say such a thing? But I do not trust charm, and I would never have married a charming man. Driving home, I asked Andrew if I had hurt his feelings. “Hell, no,” he said.

There is mystery in our food, which is to say ignorance. Most of us could not explain how a meal came to be on the plate in front of us, for example. Where were its ingredients grown, processed, or manufactured? What resources did they require? Who packaged them, moved them, made decisions about their combinations, or cooked them? What alchemy made them uniquely delicious? Sometimes we choose not to care.

St. Louis being one of the nation’s most dedicated baseball cities, there is widespread local consciousness about things like the date when pitchers and catchers first report to Spring Training and opening day for the St. Louis Cardinals. Though not as obvious an aspect of our civic self-consciousness, St. Louis is no less an American powerhouse for classical music.

This is our newest parlor game: talking with AI chatbots as though we are talking to another person. These conversations can be amusing, terrifying, instructive, or blandly predictable. They have addicted many of us, and the chatbots are responding in kind, using the first-person pronoun and developing whatever persona might please us.