Rework

Neil points me in the direction of a new book called Rework. Indeed, it looks useful to Escapologists interested in overhauling their work ethic. Plenty of free sample downloads available at the tie-in website.

Roald Dahl: submission versus creativity

I’m reading Roald Dahl’s memoirs, Boy and Going Solo. Towards the end of Boy, he writes about his first regimented job as a salesperson for the Shell Corporation, for which he must wear a suit and sell kerosine:

I enjoyed it, I really did. I began to realise how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with foxed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn’t go to his desk at all there is nobody to scald him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is pretty great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whiskey than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

To be an employee is to choose the path of least resistance. Self-motivation isn’t easy but absolute freedom is the ultimate consolation.

Are you Tricky Dick?

Sorry to bang on about the evils of mainstream media, but we can only allow so much space for it in our printed publication. Besides, it’s interesting and important, innit?

Here’s a brilliant six-and-a-half-minute documentary film by Adam Curtis, explaining how “all of us have become Richard Nixon”, that is, paranoid, anxious and terrified of elites:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxV3_bG1EHA]

Travelling Light

As an online companion to the “How to Travel” feature in our pending third issue, our travel correspondent has prepared a New Escapologist Minimalist Packing List.

Of course, the staunchest Minimalist would leave home with little more than passport, money and tickets (“PMT” – a useful mnemonic) but Tim has developed a tried-and-tested checklist that covers all bases.

"The story of broad decline is simply untrue"

Further to my last post and to Brian Dean’s New Escapologist article, I’d like to direct you to two articles from this week’s Economist:

“In homing in on the cosier parts of the Britain of yesteryear, it is easy to ignore the horrors that have gone. Straight white men are especially vulnerable to this sort of amnesia. Such forgetfulness can be partly blamed on a dominant national press that tends to report the grotesque exceptions not the blander rule. But politicians have connived in this.”Read more.

“crime overall has dropped by 45% since its peak in 1995 […] Looking more carefully, the big fall in brutality has been in domestic violence, which has dropped by a staggering 70%. This sort of upbeat, wonkish analysis enrages those who insist that, for ordinary people, Britain is a more frightening place than it once was, whatever official statistics might say.”Read more.

All being well, New Escapologist Issue 3 will be printed and shipped next week. It’s a hundred-page monster featuring our best writing to date. If you’ve not pre-ordered, you can do so here.

Brian Dean on Anxiety Culture

David Cameron (the head of the Conservative Party here in the UK) is a ghoulish, possibly evil powerfreak. His new campaign is a stern-sounding warning about a pending social recession, a phenomenon that didn’t exist until he commissioned it from some spin doctor or other. It’s a dim little fiction he brainstormed in order to rekindle those 28 Days Later anxieties we had when we first heard about the global financial crisis. It’s natural to fear a ‘worst case scenario’ but they almost never happen. Fretting constantly about them is no way to live, so ignore Cameron’s shit-stirring and that of others like him.

Instead of barricading the door and stocking up on canned goods, try turning off the telly and reading fewer newspapers so that you don’t have to swallow this torrent of damaging crap any more. Be selective about the media you consume.

Brian Dean of The Guardian, Anxiety Culture and Media Hell writes in the pending Issue Three of New Escapologist. As a special social recession gift to you, here is the properly typeset article for free.

Issue Three of New Escapologist – the Practicalities Issue – will be released in February.

An Escapologist’s Diary. Part 9.

On a train to London, a friend confides that he’s become a “light-switcher-offer”. That is, he finds himself devoutly switching off the lights in unoccupied rooms. To me, this is not a big deal: I’ve always been a light-switcher-offer. My friend, however, worries that his new habit is somehow miserly, and he interestingly describes it as ‘sexless’.

That it is sexless, I think, can be refuted. I suggested on the train that switching off unnecessary lights (and conserving power generally) contributes to a smaller carbon footprint. Being in-vogue, small carbon footprints are sexy. Therefore, so is the act of switching off lights. My friend remained unconvinced. Read the rest of this entry »

Design recognition

We had the 36th best-looking website on the whole of the Internet yesterday according to design blog, CommandShift3. We only have a simple WordPress.com site but this clearly impressed someone.

Proper post coming soon.

Houdini ephemera

Harry Houdini’s letterhead appeared this week at the brilliant new Letterheady website.

Come to think of it, the equally wonderful Letters of Note recently posted a piece of correspondance from the man himself.

Tangential to our idiom of ‘New’ Escapology, of course, but everyone should love Houdini.

Oppression by technology?

Laptops and the Internet provide unparalleled opportunities for mobility. A beautifully designed cloud computing arrangement can be the Escapologist’s friend.

There is the concern, however, that most people don’t use technology in a way that ensures the greatest benefit. Gadgetophilia and over-dependency come at a high cost and the world could so easily become a bleeping, malfunctioning, information-heavy technomess.

There’s a page in this week’s New Scientist written by Yair Amichai-Hamburger that offers a rather brilliant articulation of the problem and some simple solutions. Allow me to point you at it.