Hugo
My tastes are aristocratic, my actions democratic.
Thus spake Victor Hugo, writer of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame and many, many other beautiful novels.
He reminds us that we can enjoy rarefied art and culture without being assholes about it.
Dreamer Hugo:
Novel(s)
It’s about time I told you — the readers of New Escapologist — about my novel(s).
My first novel was released this year. It’s called Rub-A-Dub-Dub. I’ve been promoting it here and there but I’m not sure I’ve mentioned it properly to you yet.
It wasn’t supposed to be “an Escapological novel” but it sort-of is. It’s certainly about the indignities of wage labour.
I was keen to avoid this being about office life, so our hero’s job ended up being on trains. He cleans seat-back trays and collects rubbish and unblocks toilets on long-distance trains from Edinburgh to London. He doesn’t live in either of those cities though, so his commute to work also involves trains and, as such, he spends a sizable part of his life on them. He’s not even sure sometimes if he’s working or commuting (a feeling familiar to many since even the longest commute is not typically remunerated: vast swathes of human life being spent in lurching transit is just a cost of doing business).
A colleague eventually tells our man that his problems might stem from his odour problem! He’s smelly, in large part because of his exertions. And so he embarks on a voyage of self-improvement (“Getting Better” he calls it), which starts with luxurious soaks in the tub. It’s not just about being smelly or unsmelly: it’s about taking care of yourself more generally, slowing down, taking the time to think.
Our man’s problem isn’t really his smelliness at all in fact. He’s the victim of a hundred years of decision-making for which he wasn’t present. Choices made in the Industrial Revolution dictate how he must spend his days now. He doesn’t want to believe in Fatalism but the more he mulls over his problems, the better he comes to understand that his place in history is as much to blame for his predicament as anything he’s done wrong himself.
This is the Escapological crux of it all. I didn’t know I was writing Escapology but I was. Or at least I was writing about the problem for which Escapology is a personal solution.
It seems that the indignity and unfairness of work is one of my obsessions and I wonder now if it will make an appearance in any future novels I write too.
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Rub-A-Dub-Dub is available in paperback and digital formats from P&H Books.
Letter to the Editor: Backwards, Away From the Sunlight
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader L writes:
I just read the magCulture interview. Why do you put so many of your books in your bookshelves spine-in? Are those the ones you’ve read and the spine-out group is fresh reading fodder?
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Hi L. Yes, that’s correct. But it’s only temporary. I saw a YouTuber doing it and I thought it would be cool to get the live visualisation of read versus unread. I’ll put it back to normal soon though because it’s hardly practical for finding a specific book.
The same YouTuber described it as “playing with my library.” I thought, “hmm, I never play with my library. Maybe I’ll play with my library.”
It’s also fun to see the different colours of book paper: some of them aged and others new, some of them bright white and others burnt umber or practically orange.
The room is very sunny so I’m always aware that the spines of my books are becoming gradually bleached. Some yellow spines like that of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which I’ve owned for 20 years, is as good as white now. This gradual bleaching is always on my mind like how Foster, a librarian in Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion is troubled by his surplus collection being housed in a drippy cave. So it’s nice to have a break from that worry while they’re all turned backwards, away from the sunlight.
I realise this has very little do with Escapology. Unless of course… it does?
Feeling bookish now? How about buying one?
Woes Wanted
We have a column in New Escapologist called Workplace Woes. It’s an opportunity for readers to anonymously blow off steam about their jobs, past or present.
In Issue 14 there was the story of an office Halloween Party that went from embarrassing to worse. There was also the tale of workplace racism out of the clear blue sky. Oh! And the story of animals escaping from a pet shop.
If you’d like to vent your spleen, please send me your Workplace Woes by email. All stories will be treated with utmost confidence. That’s the whole point.
Please keep them under 200 words (no need for elaborate scene setting: just cut right to the chase). Stories can be funny or anger-inducing or a little of both. It’s all good.
It would be particularly nice to hear some woes from the worlds of retail or hospitality and also some outdoorsy woes (e.g. construction industry), but if your story is simply office-based then that’s good too!
The deadline for Issue 15 is September 20th but any latecomers can be saved for future editions.
Thanks everyone. Over to you.
Visualise an Alternative, Save Your Money, Do a Runner.
I’ve arranged my life around the principle of living and working in the same couple of rooms. You might have heard of the fifteen-minute city? Well, I live in the one-minute city.
We’re proud to announce that New Escapologist is now stocked by magCulture, London’s premier destination for printy-printy mag-mags.
It’s a real candy shop of top-drawer paper productions so it’s flattering that they’ve agreed to put us on their shelves.
To draw their customers’ attention to our magazine over the long-established others, I did a little interview with proprietor Jeremy. It’s worth a read: Jeremy asks the right questions.
If you don’t like your boring job or the people around you or the town you live in, you can knuckle down and enact a plan of escape. Visualise an alternative, save up your money, do a runner. It’s different to escapism, which is about temporarily fleeing the mundane by watching films or reading novels or whatever.
We’re interested in people who have turned their life upside-down by escaping the inadequacy they’ve drifted into through the bullying of capitalism or the demands of society, and into a more creative life of their own design. You know, Escapology!
You can also subscribe to the magazine at our very own online shop.
Outsiders
The “final” issue of New Escapologist in 2017, before our triumphant return earlier this month, was subtitled “Outliers.”
The idea was to celebrate outsiders. By definition, outsiders are successful Escapologists. They’re on the outside. They’ve escaped.
Reader Tom draws my attention to Rolf Dobelli’s book The Art of the Good Life in which Dobelli writes:
Outsiders enjoy a tactical advantage. They don’t have to adhere to establishment protocols which could slow them down. They don’t have to dumb down their ideas with visually snazzy [and] ridiculous PowerPoint slides.
They can happily ignore convention and are under no pressure to accept invitations or take part in events simply to “show face”. […]
What’s more, their position off the intellectual track sharpens their perception of the contradictions and shortcomings of the prevailing system, to which members of the club are blind.
I think that’s correct, which is why in Issue 14, I interviewed the Iceman.
The Iceman is probably the ultimate outsider and I love him so much that I wrote a whole book about him last year. Thankfully this wise prodigy had a little more to say and I was glad to speak to him again.
Reader Tom writes: “Look to the outsiders. The groups of people on the fringes or dabbling in areas which aren’t mainstream. They have aces up their sleeve which they might be willing to share.”
I’d go one better. Learn from outsiders. But also, be an outsider.
Witnessing the lives of outsiders is what turned me into an Escapologist in the first place. I had a day job in an office while spending my evenings doing stand-up comedy and reading about performance history (including the history of magic, which switched me onto Houdini). On the evenings I’d meet people who truly didn’t give a shit: they didn’t care about making enough money, they had no lofty goals, they just entertained and intrigued and worked on their act. Unlike the people in the office and unlike half of myself, they had integrity.
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Inner Weirdo
I’d been looking forward to reading a book called Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World. Life is too crowded, too busy, too loud. And I wondered if the book might contain some solutions for Escapologists.
In the end, I didn’t enjoy the book at all. It barely feels like a real book; almost like one of those prop books you might see in Ikea to make a bookcase look nice on the display.
The biggest problem is the author’s fixation on technology. He deploys it usefully enough in the first couple of chapters to illustrate the problem of the crowded world through tech-enabled connectedness, which is fine as it goes, though even at that early stage I was thinking “but that’s only one of the problems, what else have you got?”
He returns to it time and time again, boringly explaining the basics of Twitter Analytics, emoji, and Rotten Tomatoes as if we’d never heard of them. I assumed the book must be old, perhaps from 2006, but the copyright page shows a publication date of 2017. It’s very odd.
I cheered up a bit when Quentin Crisp made an appearance in Chapter 5. The author seems to find Crisp’s wit and defiance personally important and some of his passion is on the page. But then we’re back to moaning about the Internet after four short pages of circling some rather basic ideas about conformity and individualism.
Anyway, there is the occasional nugget of something. For example, I like this moment, which is buried in the middle of the book at the end of a boring digression about whether “smart” thermostats can have beliefs and tastes (they can’t: it’s just anthropomorphism, though the author never says this):
today we need to safeguard our inner weirdo, seal it off and protect it from being buffeted. Learn an old torch song that nobody knows; read a musty, out-of-print detective novel; photograph a honey-perfect sunset and show it to no one. We may need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves. Beyond the sharing, the commenting, the constant thumbs-upping, beyond all that distracting gilt, there are stranger things waiting to be loved.
(I didn’t know what an “old torch song” was; I thought maybe the author was into a defunct indie rock band called Torch whose name should be styled with a lower-case “t”, but apparently it’s a genre of love song. Cool.)
I agree with what he’s saying here but only up to a point. Escapologists should avoid the strong force of common opinion by way of protecting our minds and nurturing our own insights. Reading books or watching films properly or restfully playing the violin instead of gawping at the television, for example, is indeed something we’ve talked about before.
It’s better for you (because who wants to be a zombie, merely reacting to whatever comes along?) and better for the world (because society needs individual thinkers and contrariains and, if nothing else, a control group). But we don’t need to “safeguard our inner weirdo” for its own sake exactly. Instead, courting internal uniqueness happens naturally, emerging almost as a by-product of our bigger projects.
When you’re working on an escape plan to say goodbye to the office or if you’re trying to build the creative muscles to write your first novel, the inner weirdo will thrive of its own volition.
Don’t worry about the claptrap of the digital or workaday worlds. Just ignore them and do your own beautiful thing.
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Epub Blues
Some of our digital editions (in the epub format) don’t read very well on certain devices. Sigh.
You might have seen an error screen like the image above instead of a nice cover page. You might also get problems with some of the line breaks.
To this I say: Grr.
For much of our original run, people would ask after digital editions. For a long time I said “NO! There will be no digital edition under any circumstances! New Escapologist stands against screens and electronic gizmos.”
To which some people would say: “But what about minimalism?”
To which I would say: “I see what you mean but even minimalists own some books. Have our periodicals among your treasured possessions. Or pass them on once you’ve read them. Ebooks are the devil’s dinner.”
But then others would say: “For me it’s about access. I can’t read the printed page. I need to be able to zoom in on the text.”
To which I would mumble: “mm, okay, fair enough.”
I don’t want to exclude anyone from our blistering wit and wisdom. So I made our future editions and back issues available in PDF. For minimalism and for access.
But even then, some people said they wanted epub since this is apparently the best format for embiggening text and hopping between items in a table of contents. Honestly, Gutenberg didn’t have to contend with any of this.
This time around, in advance of Issue 14, I tried to get the epub format nailed down, despite not really understanding or liking or believing in it. This is why there are errors. I’m not entirely sure what to do now.
I’m tempted to offer PDF as the only digital format from now on. They work on every device so far as I know and they have the happy bonus of displaying the work as it’s supposed to look. A lot of thought goes into the design of the print editions, you know, and the epub format strips all of that thought and craft and beauty away.
On the other hand, I don’t know if PDF meets the accessibility requirements of most people who need it or if it can have the metadata useful to digital library platforms.
What do the digital media preferers among you think? Here’s a quick survey, open for the next month.
The Escape of Ariel Anderssen
This one’s a bit NSFW (though the idea that anything on this site might be “safe for work” is obviously hilarious) so by all means skip this one if you can’t be doing with sauce. The story was fit to print in the Guardian though, so we’re not talking about anything red hot. And there are no pics in this post, only text.
Ariel Anderssen escaped the Jehovah’s Witnesses as a teen. And then grew up to become a BDSM model.
The piece doesn’t go into detail about how she escaped (I think her family might have just left) but the world of the JW’s sounds pretty restrictive:
Dressing modestly was important. I learned that masturbation was wrong many years before I found out what it actually was. Men were the heads of our households, and women weren’t allowed to pray out loud, address the congregation, or even handle the microphones we used at our meetings.
At nine years old, I knew that oral sex, gay sex and extramarital sex were all just as sinful as blood transfusions. My future stretched ahead of me, into eternity, hemmed in on all sides by rules.
I knew a Jehovah’s Witness once. As teenagers, we worked together in a video store. She was engaged to be married, which meant she’d soon have to quit the job and become a stay-at-home wife. Given my famous aversion to work, you might be surprised to hear I found this a tad depressing. She was a driven, energetic, social person and I couldn’t imagine her nursing babies at home all day not by choice but because a fringe denomination of Christianity demanded it of her. No amount of hinting at the alternatives (okay, lurid and imaginative flirting) on my part could change her mind. She seemed happy enough in her church.
Ariel, evidently, was not. And the world she escaped into was thrilling but confusing:
my new world spun with giddy freedoms. Skateboarding on Sunday mornings, my first pair of jeans, trying out swearing like my school friends. But with the freedom came uncertainty. If the JWs had been wrong, how could I trust anyone to tell me how to live?
One day, on seeing an exhibition of erotic art at a gallery, she moved into BDSM modelling. Ironically, through a creative practice that involved being tied up, she found freedom, personal agency, and even love.
Ariel has written a book. I’m certain there will be a movie version eventually. I mean, there’s got to be, right? From restrictive orthodoxy to liberating creative practice via literal bondage, if this is not a tale of Escapological victory, I’m not sure what is.
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A Treat for Future You
I used to listen to a comedy podcast called The Parapod. It was about the paranormal and presented by two comedians: one a believer in any old rubbish and the other a rational sceptic. The believer, Barry Dodds, was generally ridiculed as a gullible thicko even aside from his belief in El Chupacabra.
It was always very funny and Barry was a good sport. But, baseless belief in vampires aside, I was often left thinking “but, Barry’s got a point there. It was just a bit strangely articulated.”
On one memorable occasion, he described making tea before bedtime and putting it in a Thermos for the morning. He described it as “a treat for future me.”
This was good ammunition for his opponent who ridiculed him for thinking in those terms. Most people would, for example, fold their laundry without thinking of it as “a treat for future me.”
But getting things done sort of.. is a treat for future you. Isn’t it?
Getting things done today improves your life (or the lives of others) tomorrow.
Celebrated wise man and New Escapologist columnist David Cain picks up the subject at his blog today. He does not use the phrase “a treat for future me” because he’s more articulate than poor Barry. Instead, he writes:
Imagine you’re having a hard day, and you get home to find that someone has left dinner for you. It’s exactly what you wanted. Lasagne! Or maybe green curry, or tacos. […] Of course, this thoughtful benefactor could be you, just earlier.
He goes on to give more significant examples than lasagne or a Thermos of tea. Perhaps you past self wrote a book or got a degree or invested some money. They did something difficult for you. If you’ll pardon my weak pun, it’s a present for the future.
Anyway, David also says:
This sort of inheritance represents real wealth — consisting of personal freedom, money, resources, skills, relationships, and overall well-being — and you can pass it on to yourself.
The whole post is interesting and worth reading. He explains the “catch” of having to do things now in order to benefit from them later. And how to actually do the difficult thing of doing. But what interests me as an Escapologist is his definition of freedom.
He’s right. It’s real freedom. The only reason my days aren’t a living Hell today is that I put in the legwork yesterday and the day before and ten years ago. Rarely does a day at Escape Towers see an act of manic brinkmanship: I take everything in my stride and, largely, do what I want went I want to do it. I am the inheritor of many, many treats for future me.
Compare and contrast this idea of freedom with what Joan Didion once observed about the American idea of freedom (in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968) via their then-idolisation of multimillionaire Howard Hughes:
That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves […] that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.
I think it’s possible in 2023 to get those wires crossed. I think people today idolise the Kardashians (who whoever it is now) because, on some level, they’re hungry for Didion’s “absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy” but getting caught up on the material wealth they see on the screen or how their bodies look compared to theirs. I could be wrong. But it’s what I suspect.
So be like David Cain and Barry Dodds: send presents to the future — treats to future you — in order to maximise your freedom, not the material things or the power that money can buy. Those are dubious treats for future you.
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For further meditations on freedom versus The Trap, subscribe today to New Escapologist magazine.
