Hanging Out

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.

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

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Ch. 1: Parties
Parties constitute, arguably, the preeminent instance of hanging out. But I think our collective contemporary feeling towards them is a bit mixed and complicated, actually. For instance, I once lived in a town where every single party I attended was an homage to a vision of elsewhere—a place where the party hosts had once lived, where they wished they still lived.

Ch. 2: Jamming
I once played in a band that broke up once a year, every year, on March 18th. Our band played traditional Celtic music and the routinized mayhem of St. Patrick’s Day—our annual high point, from a financial perspective, as we once played 22 gigs in a single week—would regularly drive us to the brink of sanity.

Ch. 3: Hanging Out on TV
Reality television presents a curated, fantasy vision of hanging out. For this reason, many of us count on it to keep us company, to provide a simulated social backdrop to our (somewhat socially deprived) daily lives. 

Ch. 4: Hanging Out on the Job
As an academic and writer, my yearly professional calendar is organized by conferences in a way that compares to how those of nineteenth-century New York Social Register-style elites were organized by parties and balls. Or, at least, my calendar used to be organized in this way.  

Ch. 5: Hanging Out on the Internet
I’d rather have friends on the internet than have none at all. This was my thought back in 2015, when I joined Twitter, the first and only social media platform I’ve ever used. At the time, I had just moved to North Dakota, where I found myself pressed for friends and social outlets. Hanging out on the internet, I want to argue, is far from ideal but it works, in a pinch.

Ch. 6: Hanging Out with Strangers
In some ways, there is no greater test of one’s ability to get along and simply “hang out” than when is required to do so in the company of strangers. Hanging out with friends is supposed to be

Sheila Liming

A Longreads Best of 2023 'Number 1 Story Picks of the Year'
A Reader's Digest Most Anticipated 2023 Read
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated 2023 Read
The Millions Most Anticipated 2023 Read

"The book conceives of hanging out as a way to reclaim time as something other than a raw ingredient to be converted into productivity." The New York Times

"Hide your phone, stop hustling for a second, and read this passionate argument for the importance of unstructured pre-digital hang."  People Magazine

"Hanging Out is rich with illuminating stories...I passionately believ[ed] that her book was right." Slate, Dan Kois

"[Hanging Out] is exploring this downstream consequence of isolation, of loneliness, of atomization, which I think is pretty underexplored..." Ezra Klein

"We could all use more of that blissfully unstructured social time, posits Sheila Liming in the well-considered series of arguments found in Hanging Out." Reader's Digest

"[Hanging Out] opens with a simple and expansive account of what hanging out is...Liming dedicates much of the book to stories from her past. She has lived an interesting life, and she tells these stories well..." Washington Post

"Sharp and vivid writing...her [Limings] chapter on parties is so richly drawn. It s a layered exploration of social dynamics and contains some textured literary criticism..." Bookforum

"More books about hanging out, less about productivity please. Sheila Liming sees the gap in our thinking about time, and the true worth in spending it in an unstructured fashion with members of our community..." Literary Hub

"[Hanging Out] encourages readers to do more of it in real life...Liming s observational and storytelling skills shine."  Publishers Weekly

"From sharing a cuppa to lazing in the park, is the key to happiness doing everyday activities