in search of a book sure to make a jackass of me

I figure that every good English major should find some esoteric book, some lifelong gem of knowledge found in the dusty corner of a used bookstore, to quote in a most highbrow and assholish manner at cocktail parties for the rest of her life. I just feel like college is the right time for that. So in that spirit, I ordered (from Betterworldbooks.com, in a most environmentally sustainable way) the book, Any Place I Hang My Hat by Susan Isaacs. I mean, I knew that wasn't going to be my life-long cocktail banter, but I'd never heard of her, so I gave her a try. It angered me so much by page 59 that I slammed it on the ground in disgust.

Here's your snippet: "I'd heard enough Mahler, read enough Donald Barthelme, seen enough Peter Greenaway films, and inspected enough Matthew Barney art to understand that a certain understanding was missing in me."

I may be drooling snot as a freshman college columnist/wannabe intelligent person, but I know unnecessary pedantry when it smacks me in the face. Especially when the allusions, the analogies, the wisecracks smack you multiple times with varying degrees of ouch. I'll only google things in a book so many times.

Anyway, the whole experience of reading about a bunch of stuff you don't really understand but reading it anyway because one may possibly reap some unforeseen benefit somehow related to cocktail parties, kind of makes me feel guilty of the same assholish thing. I doused my last column, which outlined the artistic inclinations of collegiate party-throwers, with literary allusions. They were pretty tame- a little Hemingway love, a little Ayn Rand hate. (I admit I've never read Ayn Rand, just scrunched my face at the obnoxious behemoths that swallow shelf spaces whole. How many pages do you really need to make your point?)

What I'm trying to say, is that I'm guilty of the same thing that pisses me off the most. Hell, if I'd heard of half the things that Susan Isaacs knows, I'd want to shoot out my own sarcastic educated babble too. I guess we all have our goals when it comes to writing, but I should probably make a faux-resolution to sound as little like her as possible. Or else my readers will end up with less brain cells than they came in with. Or they'll hop onto Google midway, trying to figure out some haute allusion I made and in a true sign of the Adderall generation, end up on Text Twist.