Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time is a considerate manifesto on the inherently subversive and joyous act of socializing. In seven chapters about differing types of hanging out (“Dinner Parties as Hanging Out,” “Hanging Out on the Job,” and so forth.), Liming explores the fading artwork of leisure and its cultural roots.
Liming defines hanging out as a aware act of refusal in a production-obsessed society. “Hanging out is about daring to do nothing much,” she writes, “and, even more than that, about daring to do it in the company of others.” She acknowledges that it’s a peculiar time—amid the COVID-19 pandemic—to name for a return to the in-person dangle, however this context is exactly why we’re realizing the significance of spending idle time in bodily communities. We can’t let company capitalism snatch away what’s left of our free time, Liming argues. “Time is being stolen from us—not for the first time . . . but at newly unprecedented rates.”
Hanging Out reads as a chattier, barely extra treasured model of How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. The e-book embraces its name for intentional meandering with wide-ranging references and a free narrative construction. An English professor, Liming is unsurprisingly probably the most compelling when she incorporates literary criticism into her treatise. While the private tales drag, the fiction references crackle. This is especially true in her evaluation of “party literature” within the chapter “Hanging Out at Parties,” by which Liming appears to be like at a number of Twentieth-century novels and examines the alternative ways events have functioned as social mechanisms.
What is shortly revealed in Liming’s contemplative writing is that hanging out—and all of its doable ramifications, limitations and results—is just too huge a topic to comprehensively focus on. Instead, Liming makes use of her time to argue for the significance of mingling with others and discovering time, even in an more and more digital world, to benefit from the dangle.
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