Hanging out, p.1
Hanging Out, page 1
HANGING OUT: THE RADICAL POWER OF KILLING TIME
First published in 2023 by Melville House
Copyright © Sheila Liming, 2022
All rights reserved.
First Melville House Printing: November 2022
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
Melville House UK
Suite 2000
16/18 Woodford Road
London E7 0HA
mhpbooks.com
@melvillehouse
ISBN 9781685890056
Ebook ISBN 9781685890063
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946367
Book design by Beste M. Doğan, adapted for ebook
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
a_prh_6.0_142264357_c0_r0
For Dave,
my favorite person to hang out with.
INTRODUCTION
1. HANGING OUT AT PARTIES
2. HANGING OUT WITH STRANGERS
3. JAMMING AS HANGING OUT
4. HANGING OUT ON TV
5. HANGING OUT ON THE JOB
6. DINNER PARTIES AS HANGING OUT
7. HANGING OUT ON THE INTERNET
CONCLUSION: HOW TO HANG OUT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
I was looking at a field of sunflowers. They were dead—black, desiccated, their honeycombed faces having been pecked or otherwise stripped of their former multitudes of seeds. They looked stranded to me, caught between the season of their flourishing and the next one, the one that would see them all plowed under.
“Nothing gold can stay,” I commented with a quick nudge to my partner, Dave, who was beside me in the passenger seat.
We were on our way to Sherry and Virgil’s house and taking our chances with detours because we had extra time. A strip of dirt road divided the field of dead sunflowers from Old Crossing and Treaty Park, which is a sort of wayside stopping point along the Red Lake River, in eastern Minnesota. Every time we saw Sherry and Virgil, they would tell us to visit the park and read about the oxcarts that, back in the mid-1800s, used to cross there on their four-hundred-plus-mile journeys from Winnipeg to St. Paul. The spot was one of the only of its kind along the river, shallow and wide enough to allow the oxen to get across. This made it an important place in an otherwise unimportant landscape: nearby Red Lake Falls, the town where Sherry and Virgil lived, had recently been named the “worst place to live in America” by a Washington Post reporter who used data, apparently, to justify that ranking.[1]
Dave and I had driven over that morning from our home in Grand Forks, which sits about thirty miles west, right where the Minnesota border cozies up to its neighbor, North Dakota. It was Sherry who had invited us, luring us with promises of late-season produce—squash and potatoes and pumpkins from the fields that she and Virgil tended together on their land, apples from their trees, late-season raspberries that could still be found clinging to their bushes. We had to stop off on the way to pick up a piece of used furniture, an oak cabinet we had bought off of Craigslist. We had it behind us in the back, swaddled in wool blankets that were moth-pocked and no good to us anymore, when we paused at the park and stepped out of the car.
Winter had done its thing already and blanched our surroundings, though it was only October. As we examined the plaques that explained about the oxcarts (and also about the treaty that had forced the Red Lake band of Chippewa to cede the fertile farmlands of Red River Valley to the U.S. government), a few flakes of snow slipped down, let loose from a sky that was as gray as the grass. Across the road, all those charred-looking sunflowers clicked and creaked in the wind.
We didn’t stay long; it was too cold. But it gave us a chance to pause and issue some advanced warning to our hosts.
Dave made the call and it was Virgil who answered. “We’ll be there in about twenty minutes,” he said, explaining the part about the stop in Crookston and the oak cabinet.
“Twenty minutes? Great! I’ll get lunch started.”
I could hear Virgil’s voice loud and clear through the phone. He had a habit of shouting because, now in his seventies, he was getting to be hard of hearing. Virgil and Sherry always had lunch to offer, no matter what time of day it was, and it was always a good lunch: venison stew, baked squash with wild rice, hot raspberries poured over vanilla ice cream for dessert. Their life on the farm always struck me as being one of plenty, no matter what the guy from The Washington Post had to say about it. They had sheep and alpacas and an old donkey, who was partial to being fed carrots and receiving pets on the nose, plus chickens and cats, and dogs running circles around the chickens and cats. Though my partner and I saw them every day in the halls at the university where we worked, we were always happy to haul out to Minnesota on the weekends to hang out with Sherry and Virgil at their home.
“Okay, see you soon,” said Dave, and he was in the process of hanging up when we both heard Virgil’s voice again.
“Hang on—” Dave put the phone back up to his ear.
“What’s that, Virgil?”
“I’m sorry…what did you say your name was?”
Virgil had missed the part at the beginning of the call when Dave had identified himself. “It’s Dave…as in Dave and Sheila? We work together?”
“Oh, oh, great!” Virgil seemed even more excited now that he knew who it was that he was making lunch for. Dave hung up the phone and we sat there for a second and watched the flakes land and grow runny there on the windshield.
“We could have been strangers off the street and he would still be making us lunch,” Dave said. He shook his head and smiled in charmed disbelief.
Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others. The concept of hanging out covers a broad spectrum of activities—some of them accidental and improvisational, some of them rather structured and planned (as in the kind of hanging out that happens at a formal gathering like a wedding, say). Regardless of the specific occasion, though, or of the amount of planning that has gone into creating it, the objective is the same: it’s about blocking out time and dedicating it to the work of interacting with other people, whoever they might be.
In the case of my old colleague, Virgil, it didn’t matter who we were. Dave was right: we could have been strangers—anybody with access to his phone number—and he would have been just as interested in our story about procuring the oak cabinet and in the prospect of hanging out with us over lunch. But what impressed me most in this instance was how quickly and easily that response took shape in him, like it wasn’t a choice so much as a reflex or a built-in feature. Virgil was down to hang out; what’s more, his inclination and willingness to do so superseded, even, his interest in finding out who it was that he was supposed to be hanging out with. Sherry must have forgotten to tell him that we were coming, or else he forgot that she had told him, and yet the news of receiving unexpected company didn’t appear to bother him in the slightest.
As bemused as I was by Virgil’s enthusiasm, I found my own reaction to it even more perplexing. Why, I wondered, did this not feel normal? Why, and through what means, had my expectations been engineered to prepare me for a different kind of scenario, one in which having strangers show up at your house for lunch might be viewed as an unwelcome incursion, as an inconvenience? Why did hanging out feel so hard at times if, in reality, it could be that easy? What forces prevented it from feeling that way all the time?
The story I’ve been telling about visiting Sherry and Virgil at their home took place several years ago and, since then, a lot has changed. For instance, I don’t live in North Dakota anymore. When I hang out with Sherry and Virgil now, I’m forced to do it via email or video chat or phone, or else through the occasional letter or Christmas card. This is not the same as having lunch with them, in the little, three-room house that they built themselves and installed on the land that Virgil inherited from his parents, around the low table made from a single, crosscut slab of polished wood. It’s not the same, but it is, in its own way, more customary, since it bears resemblance to the methods that govern much of the hanging out I do these days. Digital devices and technologies make that other kind of hanging out easier, but they also strip it of the experiences and particularities of place. What gets lost, along with those particularities, are deeper shades of connection, intimacy, and meaning.
I’m interested in what it means to forge those very things—connection, intimacy, and meaning—in a world that feels increasingly hostile to all three. This is a world, by the way, that started to take shape long before the average person ever learned the word “coronavirus.” Indeed, the conditions of this world have been forming for decades in response to an intricate combination of pressures: the expansion of digital technologies and our increasing reliance on them; the growth of the private sector and accompanying diminishment of the public sphere; policies and social practices that champion individualism and make social connection more difficult; and an ethos of do-it-yourself ruggedness that has taken the place of shared support structures. The coronavirus pandemic made all of these things worse and perhaps more visible to the naked eye, but it did not invent them. We were having a hard time hanging out well before COVID-19 came alon g and made hanging out hard.
For the past few decades, we humans have been adjusting and varying our approaches to hanging out in light of the growth of technologies that make doing so in person, if not unnecessary, more or less optional. Much of that hanging out has been happening on the internet, even while some of it has continued to take place in person. But COVID tipped the balance, marking the moment that hanging out went from being primarily about in-person activity to being primarily about internet-based activity. Where we once turned to digital devices to supplement whatever we did in person while hanging out, now it’s the reverse: hanging out, for an increasing majority of us, begins with those digital devices and only occasionally occurs without their aid. For some people, especially young people, this was likely already true, back before the pandemic; now, though, it’s a truth that seeps forth with the potency of an oil spill, covering over everything and everyone.
There are good reasons to question, to interrogate, and to resist the shift toward a life lived online. One of them involves preserving the separation between work and leisure, since hanging out online looks a lot like hanging out at work. Writer Amelia Horgan observes, “As work extends over more and more of human social life…, possible countervailing forms of recognition—from friendship, from our hobbies, from shared social practices—dissolve.”[2] Along with that dissolution comes the mutation of basic social interactions, which start to resemble the kind we are forced to perform at work. In both cases, relational connections get distilled and reduced to the raw functionality of information exchange. We send text messages back and forth, gleaning basic knowledge from them, but we do not hear the other person’s breath, clock the fluctuations in their vocal register, or notice the way that emotions tug at the edges of an otherwise composed facial expression. We are not there next to them in order to do any of this, nor are we there to offer physical reassurance when all those emotions start to pile up, to feel a little too heavy and burdensome. We can send an emoji, which is a virtual substitute for the physical expression of emotion, but we cannot offer the other person the simple gift of our physical attention, awareness, or touch. We cannot embrace them.
The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci spent more than ten years in prison, from 1926 until his death in April of 1937. His crime was protesting against fascism through his activism and writing, deeds that, under emergency legislation following the attempted assassination of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, were made illegal in Italy. Gramsci died in prison and, about a decade afterward, became posthumously famous through the publication of his celebrated Prison Notebooks, which combine essays on political theory with historical analysis and criticism of the carceral state. He wrote the Prison Notebooks while he was being held captive, and during that time, he also wrote letters. The majority of those letters were written to a woman named Tania, who was his wife’s sister and something of a familial ambassador to him in prison. In his letters to Tania, Gramsci describes his longing to be near his family members, including his two young sons, about whom he hungered for details. And in most of them, he employs a version of a standard sign-off: “I embrace you.” He uses this language of physical embrasure even when the correspondent is a friend, a fellow intellectual, or a political ally, adopting it to say things like, “I embrace you fraternally, together with all our friends.”[3]
It was one of my own friends, Carleton, who first alerted me to this rhetorical flourish of Gramsci’s. The phrase “I embrace you,” in my friend’s view, seems to symbolize Gramsci’s appetite for physical closeness and proximity. It gestures toward a spectrum of wished-for tenderness. Gramsci’s hypothetical embraces range from familial to intimate (as when addressing a letter to his wife) to genial to warmly professional. At the time when my friend pointed this out to me, I had recently moved to North Dakota and he and I were sending physical letters back and forth. We both ended up adopting Gramsci’s “I embrace you” as a way of bridging the space between us, of shrinking it down into something that felt more manageable—a mere arm’s length, maybe. At the same time, the means that we were using to communicate, by which I mean physical letters sent through the mail, served to remind us of the realities of that distance. It forced us to feel what text messages and FaceTime could not: the fact of our separation, which had been wrought by our commitments to certain, physical places.
One reason to fight for the right to hang out, then, begins with an awareness of the potential that digital technologies and devices possess to obscure the realities of place. This is an idea that the artist and writer Jenny Odell develops in her book How to Do Nothing. In it, Odell investigates the merits of what she calls “placefulness,” which stands opposed to “the placelessness of an optimized life spent online.”[4] Through an extension of Odell’s observations, it becomes possible to see placelessness as a primary means by which digital technology seeks to convert all time into work time. Rebecca Solnit was observing that very conversion more than twenty years ago, back in 2000, when she wrote, “The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured traveled time in between.” In her book Wanderlust, Solnit links the erosion of time spent doing one of the most basic of human activities, walking, to conditions of “false urgency” that preach that “travel is less important than arrival.”[5] The same, I think, is true of hanging out, which, like walking, is so basic a pursuit that it is liable to get taken for granted. But what gets taken for granted also becomes an easy candidate for eradication. An insistence on hanging out, and especially on hanging out in person, serves to enforce divisions between work and leisure; it marks the boundaries of a sanctuary space that exists at a remove from the pressures of market-driven competition.
It also helps to combat what has been deemed an epidemic of loneliness. This is the phrase that Vivek H. Murthy, a former U.S. surgeon general, uses to describe one of the most pernicious and yet neglected health issues facing the modern world. Citing research conducted within the field of neuroscience, Murthy explains that the human body, bred to function as a social animal, “read[s] isolation, and often even the threat of isolation, as emergency.”[6] What results is a state of “hypervigilance” that is designed to operate with one goal in mind: self-preservation. Murthy documents how our humanoid ancestors used such hypervigilance to their advantage when faced with the threat of isolation, which, to them, meant danger: “The whole body was engaged in self-preservation, narrowing attention to immediate signals, ignoring more leisurely thoughts, such as desire or wonder or reflection, and keeping sleep shallow and fragmented, lest a predator attack in the night.”[7] That is to say, the type of nervous hypervigilance inspired by isolation, or even by the mere prospect of isolation, has historically resulted in antisocial responses and tendencies in humans, including the inability to experience or share feelings of desire or delight.
My own intellectual training has taught me to look askance at these kinds of studies, the kind that rely on essential claims about what all humans beings do or are like—the kind that inspire the sort of lazy causality to be found in statements like “since the dawn of time.” Insisting that “our ancestors,” itself a specious phrase, did x or y is, too often, an invitation to dangerous and highly generalized thinking. But I’m also drawn to some of Murthy’s findings about how the human body responds to social stimuli or, in this case, to the absence of it. A student of mine, an absolute powerhouse of a writer named Amy, once wrote about the experience of falling asleep during a party. She explained in her essay that she doesn’t usually sleep well but that, upon taking a two-hour nap in a friend’s attic while a party was happening downstairs, she experienced the best sleep of her life. Over the past year or so since I read this, I’ve continued to think about what it means to rest feeling enfolded in social activity, even if one does not find themselves at the center of it. This thought brings to mind some of Murthy’s points about how the human nervous system careens into overdrive when faced with isolating circumstances. Amy’s story, meanwhile, illustrates the reverse and shows how a person can come to know the serenity of effortless inclusion when given mere proximity to certain, affirming forms of social experience.
