What do you talk about at cocktail parties? I'm going to my first "legit" cocktail party ever tonight...

What do you talk about at cocktail parties? I'm going to my first "legit" cocktail party ever tonight. Do people really talk about books or have I been tricked by Kingsley Amis?

>anyone on Veeky Forums
>going to parties

just B confident, bro

It's all pretty inane stuff. Your fantasies of parties involving deep discussions of literature in between cocktails and canapes are likely to remain fantasies forever. I've been to dinner parties with people who were taught by Marshal McLuhan and all they could talk about was Trump and gun control. If there's one thing I can't stand about him it's that he has become pretty much the only topic of conversation available to the upper-middle class.

sports, news, the food

wear a white suit and a black sling. I hear it's quite a convo sparker

You're going to talk about your job, your interests, politics, and local events. Try to be genuinely interested in whatever the person you are speaking with is telling you. Pay attention, and try to remember names.

t. used to go to DC cocktail parties before becoming a hermit

talk about cocktails, of course

You should get drunk and call everyone a hypocrite while dropping esoteric lit references

The same shit I talk about on regular parties, except they look weird when I get smashed and there's a pretentious air to it. Any discussion about literature is shallow, any discussion on politics is affected by being a sheltered upper-middle class pseudo intellectual. Acting genuine interest in your partners so you can parrot the same thing over and over again.

If you want a Veeky Forums cocktail party, organize it yourself. Invite real litfags instead of making it a class-exclusive event.

Pretend you have an anal vote fetish and even prepare a PowerPoint to present at the party while the attendees drink and eat.

theres one at cafe milano tonight, you should come thru

Would love to but I left DC to live in a double-wide in Texas. I am living like pic related, with more books and no gf. Have fun user.

...

>"legit" cocktail party
what did he mean by this

I went to """"""cocktail parties"""""" in college, which was basically just a party where you had boilermakers instead of just beer.

"Simply observe that the financially independent individual, among other equally independent individuals, has no basis for community except for the effort to "be nice" and "make friends". Underneath even the most well-motivated social gathering is the knowledge: We don't really need each other. Contemporary parties, for example, are almost always based on consumption—of food, drink, drugs, sports, or other forms of entertainment. We recognize them as frivolous. This sort of fun really doesn't matter, and neither do the friendships based on fun. Does anybody ever become close by partying together?

Actually, I don't think that joint consumption is even fun. It only passes the time painlessly by covering up a lack, and leaves us feeling all the more empty. The significance of the superficiality of our social leisure becomes apparent when we contrast that sort of "fun" with a very different activity, play. Unlike joint consumption, play is by nature creative. Joint creativity fosters relationships that are anything but superficial. But when our fun, our entertainment, is itself the object of purchase, and is created by distant and anonymous specialists for our consumption (movies, sports contests, music), then we become consumers and not producers of fun. We are no longer play-ers.

Play is the production of fun; entertainment is the consumption of fun. When the neighbors watch the Superbowl together they are consumers; when they organize a game of touch football (alas, the parks are empty these days) they are producers. When they watch music videos together they consume; when they play in a band they produce. Only through the latter activity is there the possibility of getting to know each other's strengths and limitations, character and inner resources. In contrast, the typical cocktail party, dinner party, or Superbowl party affords little opportunity to share much of oneself, because there is nothing to do. (And have you noticed how any attempt to share oneself in such settings seems contrived, uncomfortable, awkward, inappropriate, or embarrassing?) Besides, real intimacy comes not from telling about yourself—your childhood, your relationships, your health problems, etc.—but from joint creativity, which brings out your true qualities, invites you to show that aspect of yourself needed for the task at hand. Later, when intimacy has developed, telling about oneself may come naturally—or it may not even be necessary."

"Our reservedness should not be too surprising, because there is little in our adult friendships that compels us to be together. We can get together and talk, we can get together and eat and talk, we can get together and drink and talk. We can watch a movie or a concert together and be entertained. There are many opportunities for joint consumption but few for joint creativity, or for doing things together about which we care intensely. At most we might go sailing or play sports with friends, and at least we are working together toward a common purpose, but even so we recognize it as a game, a pastime. The reason adult friendships seem so superficial is that they are superficial. The reason we can find little to do besides getting together and talking, or getting together to be entertained, is that our society's specialization has left us with little else to do. Thus the teenager's constant refrain: "There's nothing to do." He is right. As we move into adulthood, in place of play we are offered consumption, in place of joint creativity, competition, and in place of playmates, the professional colleague.[1]

The feeling "We don't really need each other" is by no means limited to leisure gatherings. What better description could there be of the loss of community in today's world? We don't really need each other. We don't need to know the person who grows, ships, and processes our food, makes our clothing, builds our house, creates our music, makes or fixes our car; we don't even need to know the person who takes care of our babies while we are at work. We are dependent on the role, but only incidentally on the person fulfilling that role. Whatever it is, we can just pay someone to do it (or pay someone else to do it) as long as we have money. And how do we get money? By performing some other specialized role that, more likely than not, amounts to other people paying us to do something for them. This is what I call the monetized life, in which nearly all aspects of existence have been either converted to commodities or assigned a financial value."

Be ready to give out your email address to people you enjoy talking to. Half the point of these parties is to make connections.

Interesting. I like parties and occasionally get into deep discussions with people I just met. Consumption can very easily lead into creativity.

If you say so

I'm glad I read this, though I almost wish I hadn't. I think about this too often and to no sufficient end. I am trying to "improve" myself lately by being more social and interacting with people. I just got back from an old friend's house who I haven't seen since highschool. He showed me his retro videogame collection and his wife cooked spaghetti. We took shots of vodka I brought with me. He told me about the youtubers he likes. We smoked cigarettes outside. Several times he mentioned how he doesn't go out or do anything anymore. He likes the stability of having a home and a wife to go home to, but it gets boring. He told me about his anxiety and how its gotten better now that his mom is taking better care of herself. I didn't care about a single thing he said. He told me how he thinks religion is stupid. I didn't tell him about how ambivalent I am about religion's role in society even though I'm an atheist, or that calling religion stupid makes you sound like a petty child, why would I do that? To open up about who I really am and what I believe? For what? So we might grow closer? As if both of our uneducated thoughts on things we're not qualified to talk about would bond us so that one day one of us could call on the other in an hour of need. No, at most we'd play videogames together. I might go to one of his wife's art show's to compliment her mediocre paintings. Maybe we'd have fun. I don't want to have fun anymore. Fun is a doughnut that leaves you feeling bloated and sugar sick. I don't want to socialize, but I hate being alone.

sauce?

>Do people really talk about books or have I been tricked by Kingsley Amis?
You weren't tricked, you're just not hanging out with post-wwii academics in provincial england.

If you want to talk about lit at a party, you have to arrange a party with literary friends. Odds are extremely low that you'll actually meet a stranger who is capable of, let alone willing to, talk about books at a party.

I actually had a surprisingly fruitful experience like that a few months ago at a friend's party, where he introduced me to his attractive roommate by mentioning that we're both big readers. We got off to a solid start, talked about recent reads (funny enough, I had just read a Kingsley Amis novel), and in general got along really well. Then I got cagey because of how many people were at the party, so I got really drunk, started rooting around bookshelves, picked up (apparently her) copy of Shakespeare, laughed at her for not annotating any of it, and got into a drunken argument with her about whether Shakespeare is meant to be watched or read. Haven't heard from her since.

>my life as a pseud: an autobiography

ok

Hypocrite arguments are pedestrian, attack their ideas not their adherence to them.

I went to this club in Tokyo, people mostly discussed art. But since people from a lot of different countries were there, the artists talked about were pretty obvious, not a lot of deep conversation.

Nice, maybe I'll get the book.

the ascent of humanity by charles eisenstein

There are plenty of ways to authentically need each other. Holiday in a truly foreign country, or start a business with your friend's investment and advice.

ok autist. be aware about where you are. forget books. the first one or two hours are all about the host, the location, the reason theres a party, and the people around you.

books could come later when everyone is drunk.

You've been tricked. The most in-depth discussion of literature you can possibly expect is "What's your Harry Potter house?"

oh, and to cope with this: go into full reactive slave mode. disable your entire personality. you a robot now. smile sometimes when introducing yourself to the people around you. everyone is amazing. you are nothing. only when asked may you even mention that you enjoy literature. probably that won't happen though.

you'll do fine.

Stranger Things

Retarded /r9k/-tier advice that will ensure that you never make a single meaningful friendship in your entire life.

>the only topic of conversation available to the upper-middle class
>implying he isn't the only topic of conversation for every other social class and the whole internet, Veeky Forums included