Loitering ross gay
Loitering is traditionally considered the preserve of delinquents, teenagers, and miscreants. Generally speaking, those up to no fine. Of course, some are freer to dillydally than others. As Ross Gay reminds us in his incisive essay “Loitering Is Delightful” (which the creator has kindly permitted us to use here), “…the darker your skin, the more likely you are to be ‘loitering.’” Gay goes on to point out that for people of color, any public display of “non-productive delight” – from loitering to laughter – can be censured. This leads one to ask: at which point does lingering cross into criminal territory? What does ‘loitering’ really mean? And why is it frowned upon?
Furthermore, might the gesture of standing or sitting, with no apparent purpose, contain a seed of radical potential? Could loitering offer some respite, however temporary, from the capitalist cycle of consumption and production? In a earth consumed by digital devices and driven by productivity, what possibilities does daydreaming offer? Can fulfillment be found in staring into space? Is there pleasure in simply hanging out? What does it mean to be seen engaging in a seemingly aimless pursuit a
Loitering
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An everyday task reveals what is made and unmade in small moments. Ross Gay imagines his fingers opening and closing things, like buttons, the eyes of a dead person, relationships. In doing so, the poem asks us to simply pay attention, today, to what we’re doing with our hands — to understand them as intimate pathways into the stories of our bodies and the stories of our lives.
A interrogate to reflect on after you listen: What have you done with your hands today? What are you opening? What are you closing?
In our planet of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word “joy.” Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity’s struggles.
Ross Male lover helps illuminate this paradox and shift it into a muscle.
We are excellent at fighting, as he puts it, and not as good at holding in our imaginations what is to be adored and preserved and exalted — advocating fo
A few more thoughts on Ross Gay’s writing… waking up, waking up, waking up.
I’ve been reading Ross Gay’s“The Book of Delights”which is truly delightful, while at the same time awakening to a lot of shit… adequately, for instance, the racism of our society, which is, to say the least, the other side of delightful, which is part of why I love this book because Ross can control paradox, can investigate it in a surprisingly nuanced and calm way which allows time or is it space? like an unexpected garden space, an orchard in the city with free fruit for the taking (which he actually volunteers to labor in in Bloomington, Indiana). This is for the reader an invitation, especially if the reader is white and fully or semi- asleep to the express of the nation regarding the nation’s racism, the gentlest of invitations to take in the meaning of Ross’s words to the point they might actually meet up in a slightly explosive moment with the Rumplestiltskin-like reader’s unconscious waking up from a very long snooze, and noticing, ah yes, the snooze alarm has been going off for the last umpteen decades.
Ross is patient… and the delights he writes about are the delightsany one of us on the most mundan
The Book of Delights: Essays
Excerpt from The Book of Delights: Essays
By Ross Gay
I’M SITTING AT a café in Detroit where in the door window is the sign with the commands
NO SOLICITING
NO LOITERING
stacked like an anvil. I include a fiscal affair with this establishment, which I developed by buying a coffee, and which makes me a patron. And so even though I subtly dozed in the late afternoon sun pouring under the awning, the two bucks spent protects me, at least temporarily, from the designation of loiterer, though the dozing, if done long enough, or ostentatiously enough, or with enough delight, might transgress me over.
Loitering, as you know, means fucking off, or doing jack shit, or jacking off, and given that two of those three terms have sexual connotations, it’s no great imaginative leap to know that it is a repressed and repressive (sexual and otherwise) culture, at least, that invented and criminalized the principle. Someone reading this might very adv keel over considering loitering a notion and not a fact. Such are the gales of delight.
The Webster’s definition of loiter reads thus: “to remain or wait around idly without clear purpose,” and “to tra