Sally Olds

With both drollness and acuity, Sally Olds takes us into worlds we may not have ever visited before. In these sometimes alien spaces she explores and reports on everyday intimacies and vulnerabilities. This book is about working and not working, hating work and needing to work, intimacy and technology, money and love, labour and pleasure. Across a series of essays, Sally Olds probes the ambivalent utopias of polyamory, cryptocurrency, clubbing, communes, a secret fraternity, and the essay form itself. Curiosity drives each of these adventures into projected worlds, where Olds explores how living with precariousness changes expectations of how a life can be lived in this thrilling appraisal of the state of things.

Essays on work, leisure and loose living

People Who Lunch

Karolina

And if labour becomes a private negotiation between individuals—not my problem—then the conditions for class-based solidarity are destroyed. Class is an outcome of a system of production, of a system of labour under capitalism, not a possession or an identity. Class is when work is everyone's problem.

To be outside of time is to temporarily suspend the reproduction of capitalist time. To have a good time is to feel as though we are consuming time: gorging on it, luxuriating in its wastage.

In content, writing is overdetermined by its conditions of production; it actively seeks to close the gap between writing and value production by by writing to these conditions. Meanwhile, literary writing is often viewed as a kind of unproductive labour-a pleasurable waste of time, a conscientious objection to the furore of overproduction, a non- alienated way of making art. Literariness is determined precisely by its resistance to the instrumentalisation of language of everything that content represents.

Grace McCarter

In its loosest definition, what I call post-work polyamory is a relationship form premised on and committed to anti-capitalism. It is, or would be, a romantic, caring, and/or sexual relationship between any number of people working against privatising and unequally distributing care, resources, property, love, sex, intimacy, and work within a couple or other closed unit. It would be a form against the nuclear family as an atomised site of consumption and production. It does not see the couple form as inherently bad, but as a symptom of mononormativity: a state in which everything in society is calibrated for the monogamous pair.

Whatever the angle, polyamory is rarely discussed beyond the confines of empowerment for individuals, couples, and-at most- small units. As long as polyamory remains sequestered in hero's journey narratives of personal triumphs over jealousy, insecurity, and possessiveness, over the limitations of monogamy to sexual and emotional freedom-as long as this remains the end-point of the poly unit-its political potential remains obscured. 

What is it to have a good time? What is a 'good time' in the club? It's not exactly being in the moment, but a sense of being outside of time. When we work a job, we produce time along with commodities; time is not a neutral measure of productivity but is determined by productivity in the first place, the global standard of hours calibrated by waged labour. To be outside of time is to temporarily suspend the reproduction of capitalist time. To have a good time is to feel as though we are consuming time: gorging on it, luxuriating in its wastage,

People Who Lunch quotes

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