In today’s Boston Globe James Parker has some tongue-in-cheek reflections on “The self-destruction of Lee Siegel, late of The New Republic.”

He concludes with some cautionary comments for those of us less gifted than the writers of TNR at displaying “artful artlessness” — what Castiglione called “sprezzatura.”

Feedback, “Talkback”: This is not the world of the Letters page
anymore. The vulnerability to being buttonholed by one’s readers-to
feeling their cyber-breath on one’s face, as it were-has made new
demands on thin-skinned journalists everywhere. Let the columnist who
never winced to find a suppurating trove of invective in his in-box
pretend to have no sympathy for Siegel. Even at their most bonkers, the
Sprezzatura postings were nothing more than the untreated splurge of
the authorial Id: I am great! You’re all fools! etc. Siegel’s crime has
been to make himself laughable, to make himself the sport of nonexperts
and noncritics, and the hasty expunging of his memory by his editors at
The New Republic suggests that it is this laughter-general, irreverent,
lapping across the Internet-that they are most afraid of.