Opportunity
From The West Pier, part of Patrick Hamilton’s Gorse Trilogy:
All Ryan wanted to do was escape at the earliest possible moment — to run for his life, in fact — and here was the chance.
I like this. It reminds me of Hannibal Lecter seeing the glint of the tiny pin that will allow him to pick the lock of his cage and presumably to slice off the guard’s face to make a mask.
Not that I’m saying Escapologists should aspire to be like Hannibal Lecter. Be like Ryan. Run for your life.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
There’s a Better Life and You Think About It, Don’t You?
RIP the People’s Parton.
Workin’ 9 to 5, what a way to make a livin’
Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’
They just use your mind and you never get the credit
It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you?
It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet
9 to 5, oh, what a way to make a livin’
Barely gettin’ by, it’s all takin’ and no givin’
They just use your mind and they never give you credit
It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it
9 to 5, yeah, they got you where they want you
There’s a better life and you think about it, don’t you?
It’s a rich man’s game no matter what they call it
And you spend your life puttin’ money in his wallet
9 to 5…
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
The Art of Life
The reason I post so many quotes from literature is to show that the desire to escape is neither uncommon nor certifiable.
On the contrary, it’s perfectly normal and has been with us since, oh, around the time of the industrial revolution. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.
Here are some diary entries from 1909, written when W. N. P. Barbellion was but 19 years old. He wanted to escape the career chosen for him by his father (“journalism,” which actually meant the transcribing of local council meetings) and to take up his ikigai of zoology.
June 2nd. I have been for ever cogitating, worrying, devising means of escape.
October 14th. Returned home from London. Felt horribly defeated in crossing the threshold. It was so obviously returning after an unsuccessful flight.
December 23rd. I nearly escaped into a seaside laboratory, and now suddenly to be flung back into the dirt and sweat … seems very hard, and it is very hard.
Self-absorbed? Well, it is a diary. On the other hand, H. G. Wells, writes in a preface to the published diaries:
An egotism, like an eggshell, is a thing from which to escape; the art of life is that escape.
He escaped in the end, by the way. To rockpools and countryside woods in the short term, then all the way to the British Museum.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
Honed
From a history book I’m reading:
He drew charcoal portraits for extra money, but talent didn’t save him from [unpleasant work in] the tannery. After work, he would lie down in a corner of the shirt factory where some apprentices slept. He would hide beneath a sheet and try to ignore the rats as they scurried over his face. In sleep he honed his talent for escape.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
Letter to the Editor: Scary but Thrilling in Equal Measure
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader A writes:
Hi Robert,
Firstly thanks for all you do for the escapologist movement, I’ve loved reading all your newsletters and magazines since I stumbled across a copy in a Hackney coffee shop.
It struck a chord. My girlfriend and I had been asking ourselves if this (corporate London etc etc) is really all there is. We were pondering our own escapes but we didn’t have the words to express these plans nor the knowledge that we were missing out on a whole community of escapologists that you’re smack in the centre of!
We’ve since quit our jobs, travelled for 6 months and are now trying to find work on our own terms, which is scary but thrilling in equal measure.
In our final weeks of travel I ordered Issue 19 from my hostel in Mexico to ensure I had the fresh copy waiting at home for my arrival.
Kind Regards,
A
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Wringham Wresponds:
And no matter what happens next, you have lived. You made the uncommon choice and actually lived.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
Still Possible
did it even make sense to compose an anti-technology manifesto on an internet-connected device? Would I be able to resist the pull of email, news, and “research” in a time of unbearable stress? No, I needed to write my book the old way. I needed to prove it was still possible.
The artist and writer August Lamm — who gave us a great interview in Issue 18 — lives and works without a computer or a smartphone.
That’s what her forthcoming book is about and, obviously (or perhaps not), it was written by hand.
She’s not the first to do this. Mark Boyle used to submit his Moneyless Man column to his newspaper each month, hand-written. And as August herself says, this was how all books were written prior to the 1980s, albeit not as a form of tech protest.
Doesn’t this take absolutely ages? No, so says. Because one of the advantages of writing long-hand, she says, was to rid herself of internetty distractions:
Distraction is not a new thing, of course, but I think we can all agree that there’s a difference between old-school distractions—looking out a window, flipping through a book, tidying the office, calling a friend—and modern ones.
I wouldn’t mind reading a book whose author compulsively snacked, or smoked, or paced the room after every page. I do mind reading a book whose author was inundated with the voices of a thousand other people, platforms, brands, algorithms.
It’s a good point. Let’s keep the algo out of our literature.
What Was All That in Aid Of?
I just read Black Bag by Luke Kennard. It is funny and good.
The book’s about an actor who must wear a black leather bag over his whole body (except for his feet) after precariat desperation leads him to take work as the subject of a psychological experiment.
Anyway, these quotes aren’t particularly representative of the book, but they’re nice as Escapological moments:
About a job (but not the black bag one):
I don’t want to do this forever … Too many people feel like they own a little bit of me — it’s like I accidentally sold 500 per cent of the shares in my soul. And I’m getting deeply sick of people and their bullshit. It’s not a good feeling.
And a retired man speaks:
Retirement feels rather like being expelled from a cult … Everything you measured your life by is proved to be utterly senseless and haphazard. You went along with a set of precepts because you had little choice in the matter once you’d signed up, and then it’s suddenly over and the prevailing feeling is, Well what was all that in aid of?
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
Collaborators
Well then. I’ve just updated our lists of stockists (places you might be able to buy New Escapologist in the wild) and contributors (people who write or draw for us).
This was a fiddly business and I probably made mistakes. If I’ve missed you out, misspelled your name, used the wrong link to your website, or listed you in the wrong section of the page, please grab me roughly by the collar and shout the correction into my face.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
The Escape of Moitessier
Oh, this is wonderful. Reader K writes to us:
On reading your June 19th email exploring the lives of back-to-back cruiseniks, I was reminded of these passages from “The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst”, which elegantly combines Escapological ideas with the desire to live differently.
Moitessier — a contestant in the 1968 race to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe — writes in his logbook why he’s decided to give up the contest and remain at sea:
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
Vanlife Photography
Heather Delaney of the Dirtbag Dao has a great piece about US “vanlife” in Issue 18 and a review of a classic 1982 text on the subject, Blue Highways, in Issue 19).
Check out these pics taken by Heather. They make a decent case for it.
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New Escapologist Issue 19 and the anniversary edition of Escape Everything! are both available now.
