Brightest Young Things

since most of our contributors spent their weekend snowed in and gorging on dips, while we recollect our content strengths we're rerunning everyone's favorite book column ever today. It is hilarious AND educational. You will love it.

For my first column here at BYT, I'm going to outline several of the bazillions of fine authors that you could use to sound like a jerk the next time you go to a cocktail party. I didn't realize that some people actually go to the kinds of parties where you're not expected to arrive wearing a pair of four-year-old chucks with shitstains on the bottom and then proceed to surreptitiously fill a plastic cup with the first bottle of hard liquor you see because you "forgot" to bring any of your own. I wouldn't know, because I don't get invited to parties.

Milan Kundera. THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

It's not a big deal that you've read this (in fact, it almost goes without saying) so don't make a big show of it. In fact, you might - as my slutty friend Jonathan does - even dismiss it: "I'm not really crazy about books that talk about love or desire in the context of destiny or chance," he says. "Chicks love this fate-fluke stuff, but for me it undermines the idea that I have any influence or control over the situation, which in turn gives it all over to her, which she can pass off as being given over to forces greater than her own self-restraint, none of which is attributed to my own charm and prettiness. Just the beautiful, insufferable, right time, right place magic of the moment bullshit. I hate that."

Depending on who you're talking to, you could either switch out "chicks" for "dudes" or you could take the exact opposite stance. But don't worry, as long as you make a point not to let anyone voice their own opinion after you say this, you will sound like a jerk.

R.D Laing - KNOTS

This book served me well in college, where I learned the art of being a jerk. Not only did the little non-rhyming Dick and Jane poems explain why I hated myself so much, but I went on to namedrop Laing as often as I could in virtually every paper I wrote. This amounted to my using it to draw analogies between Native American Literature and "Knots", Sociolinguistic theory and "knots", and Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" and "knots".

Knots! They're everywhere. Here's an example:

"There is something I don't know
that I am supposed to know.

I don't know what it is I don't know,
and yet am supposed to know,
And I feel I look stupid
if I seem both NOT to know it
and not know WHAT it is I don't know.

Therefore, I pretend I know it.

This is nerve-wracking since I don't know
what I must pretend to know.

Therefore, I pretend I know everything."

Laing eventually fell out of favor, so be sure to cluck over his demise, or at the very least make a pithy remark about how he died (playing tennis in St. Tropez). If you REALLY want to be an asshole, I would recommend finding someone quiet and non-confrontational, and then quoting them this poem as soon as they muster up the courage to speak up about anything. At all.

Judith Butler. GENDER TROUBLE

I think most people - besides postmodern poets, David Reimer (RIP), and Philosophy majors - know that Judith Butler is difficult. Chew on this:

"The redescription of intrapsychic processes in terms of the surface politics of the body implies a corollary redescription of gender as the disciplinary production of the figures of fantasy through the play of presence and absence on the body's surface, the construction of the gendered body through a series of exclusions and denials, signifying absences."

Are you still here?

So. Bring up Butler when you're pretty sure no one else has read her, and then switch words like "place" for "the territory of place" or "reference" for "citationality." More? Add the word "mis" to actions word (ie. mis/readings, mis/composed, whatever). Most people, most of the time, are going to pretend they understand too, or they'll change the subject or they'll go away in search of another cocktail/party. Goal achieved!

NEXT WEEK: AUTHORS MY SLUTTY FRIEND JONATHAN NAMEDROPS TO GET LAID