People Who Lunch
On Work, Leisure, and Loose Living
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A riveting investigation of the utopian experiments attempting to resist the unrelenting demands of late-stage capitalism—only to end up living comfortably alongside it
What do post‑work politics, the cult of crypto, clubbing, and polyamory have in common? All have spawned thriving subcultures united in their rejection of the patriarchal capitalist order: from wage labor, to the reign of the shareholder class over capital markets, to romantic relationships that feel like contractual arrangements to be negotiated, and more.
People Who Lunch is about hating work and needing to work, intimacy and technology, labor and leisure, and the challenge of living our ideals in a less than ideal world. In it, Sally Olds brings her “unsparing scrutiny to bear…as she grapples with the sense of entrapment in the machinery of capitalism and remorseless logic of commodification” (ABC Arts).
In one essay, Olds’s brief flirtation with post-monogamy forces her to confront the emotional prison of the “open relationship”; in another, a multi-hour viewing of a critically acclaimed performance art piece highlights how even the highest forms of culture exist to convert pleasure into capital.
In the end, her forays into these colorful worlds betray a deep irony: escaping a system built on the exchange of wage labor is, quite simply, a lot of work.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Australian essayist Olds debuts with a striking collection loosely focused on how people respond to economic precarity and dream up better futures. In "For Discussion and Resolution," Olds weaves the history of utopian, polyamorous experiments into an account of her own polyamorous relationship. She explains that free love communes stretching back to 19th-century French philosopher Charles Fourier, who envisioned communities with rotating partners and jobs, believed that sex, like other forms of labor, should be distributed equitably among members. Just as those experiments struggled to live up to their founding principles, Olds notes that her own commitment to polyamory was challenged after her partner fell in love with another woman, but she maintains that "it's always possible, of course, that both monogamy and polyamory are deeply unnatural." Olds has a talent for probing the ironies of late capitalism, exploring in "Crypto Forever" how digital currencies appeal both to those who feel marginalized by traditional markets (such as the sex worker and the money-strapped PhD student she profiles) and those who think crypto is capitalism's "next leap forward." Elsewhere, Olds reflects on clubbing as a type of labor and argues that the hybrid essay is "a form that preserves and reproduces tradition... while pretending to annul it." Olds's idiosyncratic perspective consistently surprises, and she elegantly blends cultural, historical, and class analysis into an easy to digest whole. This is a pleasure.
