Stay on Your Mat and Do As You’re Told

There’s a chapter in Butts — a splendid history of the arse by Heather Radke — about the 1980s boom in home fitness videos.

I remember that! My mum had the Cher one. We’d be watching TV in the living room and we’d hear her leaping about upstairs in time to the music. At least, I think that’s what she was doing.

Radke writes that

booms in American fitness culture usually correspond to rises in white-collar labor.

As more people are employed in desk jobs–in the 1920s and 1950s, for example–the people who work those jobs become less active than those who have more physically demanding jobs, a fact that often causes a lot of societal angst.

Anxiety about fitness (and its corollary–fatness) permeates middle-class culture in these eras because fitness isn’t ever only about having a body that is useful or a body that is healthy. Having a fit body seems to almost always mean something more.

Yes indeed. Everything has a symbolic value indexed against a constantly-shifting body of social meaning.

Later, Radke writes that

neoliberalism wasn’t just an economic philosophy; its tentacles would extend into nearly every part of [Western] life. It conflated the free market with individual agency, had no use for collective modes of expression or action, and judged the worth of people primarily in terms of market value–ideas that if taken seriously, would alter how people thought of themselves on nearly every level, including how they perceived their bodies. … A fit body become a symbol of a hearty work ethic.

So as well as being a response to the sedentariness promoted by desk jobs, those fitness tapes evolved out of the hyperindividuality of the time and also hardworkingness as a badge of pride.

The tapes were sold as fantasies of personal transformation and self-betterment but:

they don’t offer techniques that will ultimately lead to artistic interpretation or self-expression. Instead, when you do the moves, you are following someone else’s lead, mimicking them beat by beat in order to become more like them. Aerobics is, by and large, a submissive practice: you stay on your mat, inside your little rectangle, and do as you are told.

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Loaf! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.

An Escapologist’s Diary : Part 80. A Doss Time

Dear Diary,

I’ve been taking it very, very easy for 11 days.

I’ve been playing video games for the first time since 1996, reading unedifying literature, gently strolling along, sleeping late.

Today I took a very cheap bus to Edinburgh to mooch around some free art galleries, and then to stay up late watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a friend’s comfortable sofa. It’s like the the 1990s are back.

This is all according to plan. As I announced in the Idler this week:

For the next six months, I’ll be doing practically nothing. I’ve been telling others it’s a “sabbatical” because that’s a word people seem to recognise and broadly approve of, but really I’ve just had enough and I want a proper skive.

2024 was a busy year. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed most of my 2024 activity and I’ll benefit from the fruits of it all, hopefully, for years to come. But having something scheduled every day – somewhere to be, something to achieve, something to cross off a list – is no idler’s design for life. It’s not mine, it’s not yours, and if it ever seems we’ve veered off course, drastic action should be taken.

Hence the next six months. Corrective action. Or, as the case may be, inaction.

I hope you enjoy that blog in which I explain myself. If you do, by all means come along to my episode of “A Drink with the Idler” live Zoom thing on January 16th, the only thing on my to-do list for the next six months. Or, you know, don’t.

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Loaf! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.

Off the North Coast of Sardinia

Mauro Morandi, the custodean of Budelli Island near Sardinia, has died, aged 85.

“I was quite fed up,” he once said, “with many things about our society. Consumerism and the political situation […] I decided to move to a deserted island […] far from all civilization. I wanted to start a new life close to nature.”

It sounds like he had a terrific life on the island:

Food is delivered to him by boat from the main island of Maddalena, and a homemade solar system powers his lights, fridge and internet connection.

During winter, when there are no visitors, he spends his days collecting firewood, reading and sleeping.

It was idyllic until almost the end:

His home on Budelli was a former second world war shelter until 2021, when he was evicted after a lengthy tussle with La Maddalena national park authorities, who had planned to transform the island into a hub for environmental education.

Morandi moved into a one-bedroom apartment on La Maddalena, the largest of the archipelago of seven islands off the north coast of Sardinia.

He spent some time in a care home in Sassari last summer after a fall, and is reported to have died at the weekend in Modena, northern Italy, where he was originally from, after his health deteriorated.

Morandi said he was struggling to adapt to life after Budelli. “I became so used to the silence. Now it’s continuous noise,” he said.

Why can’t people just be allowed to live (and die) how they want to? What is it about a simple live like Morandi’s that is so offensive to modernity? How could the development — which never even happened — have been inconvenienced by an elderly man living roughly in a war shelter?

When he resisted eviction, the authorities complained that “the property has been developed without permission.” Developed! The property! Look at it (above)! It’s an improvised wooden lean-to, hundreds of miles from the nearest pair of human eyes.

“I hope to die here and be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the wind,” he said at 81.

“I’m so used to living in the middle of nature,” he told the Guardian by phone. “What would I do back in Modena? Play cards and go to bars like other people in their 80s? Give over!”

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Resist! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.

Issue 17 Reprint?

I wasn’t going to do this, but there’s been a lot of email from people disappointed not to get an Issue 17 before it sold out.

So. Let’s do a reprint. Just a small one.

To minimise the risk of waste (and because there’s no budget for a reprint), I’m inviting you to pre-order your copy by the end of January.

When they arrive at Escape Towers around February 12th, I’ll ship all pre-orders immediately. Any copies left over will be made available in the shop, but please don’t wait for that! You’d risk being disapointed again, which would be silly.

If you have Issues 14-16 already, your stack will soon look like this.

Phwoar.

To make this micro-project a bit more creative, I’m thinking of doing a variant cover for the reprint. Would that be desirable? Or would you prefer your copy to be indistinguishable from the original print run? Feel free to comment below or to send me an email.

Thanks everyone. Here’s that link again.

Issue 16, meanwhile, is still in print and currently shipping.

Zweig on Stuff

I don’t want any posessions. Posessions make a man heavy, old, fat and sluggish. I want to be on the way somewhere, travelling light.”

This quote from Stefan Zweig might not exist anywhere else on the Internet. I got it from Escape to Life (1933) by Erika and Klauss Mann, reviewed, incidentally, in Issue 17.