Hanging Out by Sheila Liming

Author:Sheila Liming [Liming, Sheila]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2023-01-24T00:00:00+00:00

U. has a deep desire to be hailed as a conference hero. This is because his experience has yielded the opposite: he has recently given a presentation that was “met with silence, then, when my audience realized that I’d finished, a smattering of polite clapping. No one approached me to discuss it afterwards.”[3] In fact, when he meets a fellow conference attendee later on that evening, in the hotel sauna, he is denied recognition and, even, eye contact. His colleague pretends not to notice him.

Sensing his designation, then, as a real-life persona non grata, U. dreams of becoming the inverse, of seeing his colleagues hail him as the conference’s indisputable star. He conjures visions in which, rather than being met with silence, his presentation results in “cheering so clamorous” that he is “forced to come back time and again, to take another bow.” U. imagines “delegates…surging forwards, address books open, business cards stretched out towards me, their numbers overwhelming the security personnel who tried to hold them back.”[4] His vision is a compensatory one, of course, meant to alleviate the humiliation he has been forced to suffer in reality. But it’s also, I think, a relatable kind of fantasy, one that taps into the secret desires of many a professional conference-goer.

Despite what I’ve been saying about them with regard to rowdiness and hanging out, professional conferences tend to be pretty decorous, straight-laced events. Often, a speaker’s presentation is, just as McCarthy describes, met with silence, followed maybe by a trickle of polite applause. Often, though, it is much worse than that: there is nobody there to hear it in the first place, and the panel participants present only to each other. I count myself lucky to have been spared the embarrassment of delivering a conference paper to no one, or to a mere audience of other panelists. But I’ve heard about it happening, have come close to having it happen, and have nearly witnessed it happening to others. Once, at a conference, while I was enjoying some complimentary coffee in the hotel lobby, an organizer rushed in to tell me that a panel was beginning that featured all graduate students. Could I please attend, she begged, and maybe grab a few others and wrangle them into coming with me? I did exactly that, grabbing a couple of nearby conference-goers and explaining the situation. Together, we made up a supportive little audience of four, which was just enough to outweigh the three terrified panel participants, who looked to be first-time presenters.

McCarthy, though, channels a very sympathetic set of fears when he has protagonist in Satin Island indulge in wistful dreams of what could have been. For a conference is always an exercise in fantasy, an exercise in subjecting oneself to the caprices of what could be, when what could be can, in fact, be disastrous. McCarthy’s U. is nervous and high-strung, at points convinced by his own genius and the value of his “racket,” as he deprecatingly labels his work

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