An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 72. The Right Kind of Work
We’re going on holiday tomorrow. A proper one! We will retreat to our Montreal volcano lair, where we will eat and drink and be merry for two weeks. The sun promises to shine and I plan to do very little work indeed. Reader, I will be wearing shorts.
Most trips my partner and I undertake can’t very well be described as holidays. They’re usually pilgrimages of some sort or research missions or to meet someone connected to my writing business. All pleasant and desirable and wilful but hardly holidays. This time, I really mean it. We’re going to climb the volcano and eat poutine and marvel at the locals and chill the heck out.
The truth is I’ve been quite busy lately. My life has been filled with what Moomin Mamma Tove Jansson called the right kind of work. I’m not complaining, nor is it my intention to humblebrag. I’m reporting to this diary what my low-income, outsiderish life has been like of late.
Between production work on my novel, the writing of a secret project with friend Landis, and managing the return of New Escapologist (as well as the usual uphill attempts to sell my other books), I’ve barely had a proper day off in months.
I’ve loved every moment of it though. Our single-bedroom flat has been buzzing with pleasant activity as in the early days of the Hogarth Press. Well, maybe that’s a bit much. Mucking about with the design programme has been fun though, as has remembering the tricks of typography I learned from New Escapologist the first time round. Commissioning cover artwork, emailing with people all over the world, solving minor technical and logistical problems, conspiring with my allies, imagining, imagining, imagining.
While typesetting my novel (a skill in which I was trained some years ago by a very clever man) I was overcome with the notion that this is what I should be doing. All was right with the world in that moment. That’s a nice feeling to have and probably a rare one. It’s certainly not a feeling I ever noticed while working in offices or even libraries: in those days I felt constant separation anxiety from my real work of cultural production. I suppose you could argue that, if I had found a proper publisher for this book I wouldn’t need to typeset it myself, but I didn’t find a proper publisher for it. I don’t have the resource to find a proper publisher for it ultimately because I’m of the social class of expected to work for a living: I don’t have the connections, I don’t have the time, I need the money and the satisfaction now because I don’t have secret hoards of either. I already worked for two years trying to find a proper publisher for this novel and that’s enough already: most of the publishers I approached haven’t even rejected it so, by their terms, I should still be patiently waiting. Yes, I’m doing what I should be doing.
“Over and over again I have asked myself,” wrote William Morris in a letter to a friend, “why should not my lot be the common lot […] I have been ashamed when I have thought of the contrast between my happy working hours and the unpraised, unrewarded, monotonous drudgery that most [people] are condemned to.” That sounds a bit arrogant, doesn’t it? But I think it comes from the right place. We should all experience the happy buzz of the right kind of work and the knowledge (okay, the feeling) that you’re doing what you should be doing, but it is not generally possible. I don’t wish it for other people where they’re already perfectly content but I certainly wish I could go back in time and give this life somehow to my bored and humiliated past self.
I’d recommend it to anyone: fill your days with the right kind of work and you’ll not remain in The Trap for another day of your life. But for crying out loud, don’t forget to have some real days off too.
So that’s what we’re doing. Well, there will be one work-adjacent thing to do: I’ll write to you (via the newsletter) from New Escapologist’s second home: Montreal. Catch you on the flipside!
Working With the Public
At the grocery store I worked at I had to explain to a woman why we couldn’t take back the apple core she had clearly eaten as a return.
and
I’ve had to explain to people why we can’t extend their hotel stay because the hotel is fully booked out. They threw a fit because we “Sold the room out from under them,” as if the concept of booking a room for X days meant we hold the room for additional days just in case they wanted to extend.
and
I work IT support. I had to explain to a 23 year old what a capital letter was when helping them set up their password. Twice. I’ve also had to explain the concept of using a word to help distinguish letters, i.e. “A as in Apple”.
and
I had to explain to a guy how the older fish would go out of date sooner than the brand new ones.
At first, I wasn’t sure about posting this because I don’t believe the public are stupid. But some of them (us) are!
If you’ve ever worked with the public in a service capacity, this Tumblr thread (you have to open the comments under the video post) will be… cathartic to you.
Poverty With Complete Liberty
This past few weeks (it’s a very large book) I’ve been reading Carrington’s Letters, edited by Anne Chisholm. It’s a huge wealth of letters sent by the artist Dora Carrington (pictured, 1893-1932) who had one foot in and one foot out of the Bloomsbury Group. It’s wonderful. At times it’s naively funny in a Diary of a Nobody sort of way. At other times it’s tremendously revealing of the way artists think (then as now) as well as of the foibles of this particular time and place. A brilliant book.
Anyway, all I wanted to share with you here at our Escapology blog is this funny passage written just after Carrington’s husband, Ralph Partridge, was fired from Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press for being the worst. Carrington writes haughtily:
The Tidmarsh Press will be better because Ralph will have free hand to do what he wants. He will work for himself at his own hours. He can hardly make less money than he did with the Woolfs […] and after all, poverty with complete liberty is worth more than a safe income of £300 a year (not that he got that with the Woolfs) in a business in London, with the dreary prospect of 2 or 3 months freedom every year…
A footnote from editor Chisholm then clarifies that “This notion of setting up another Press came to nothing.”
Hah! There’s so much to say, isn’t there? I mean, she’s right about threadbare freedom beating a stiff day job, but her imaginings are a bit dreamy.
One has to begin somewhere though and it’s a shame when dreams come to nought, so I’m tempted to rename my own up-and-coming small press “the Tidmarsh Press” to avenge Carrington belatedly. Then again, it would be avenging Ralph really, which I don’t particularly want to do since he was such a boorish and proprietorial twerp.
But also, hang on, “2 or 3 months freedom every year”? In a London business? I’m not sure if such long periods of leave were standard practice in clerical jobs of the time (surely not) or if the Woolfs were excellent bosses or if Carrington just doesn’t know what normal leave from a pen-pushing job might be. I expect the latter but I honestly don’t know. If two or three months could be standard vacation today, I’m not sure I’d bother with Escapology anymore!
*
Alas, we’re not there yet. If you want to escape a “safe income” and contemplate the prospect of “poverty with complete liberty,” please read my books I’m Out and The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
The Monster in the Pit
I listened to this week’s This American Life from under the bedsheets, wide awake, at about 2am. I listen to podcasts to fall asleep but this one didn’t have the desired effect. I found it riveting.
It was delicious to me because:
1. It’s a classic story of workplace woe taken to an absurd degree;
2. It’s a real example of a “Groundhog Day,” which is something I always enjoy;
3. It reflects badly on Andrew Lloyd Webber, who I hate;
4. It confirms my feelings about Phantom of the Opera, which I dislike;
5. I remember being moved by Gary Wilmot singing “Music of the Night” on TV when I was a kid, so maybe my relationship with Phantom isn’t as simple as merely disliking it.
The story begins with the profile of a trumpet player, Nick Jemo, in New York City circa 1987. He doesn’t get much work. His life is spent sitting by the phone, waiting for gigs. When he’s given a job on the all-new Phantom of the Opera on Broadway, he’s overjoyed. Surely it will pay the bills for a year or more. He celebrates by buying coconut water, which would normally feel profligate.
Phantom ends up running for 35 years: career-length financial security for one trumpet player, and also for the other musicians he sits with each night in the orchestra pit. Unfortunately, it’s a living hell.
It’s dark, cold, and cramped in the pit. Worse, the job is mind-numbingly repetitive. The musicians–creative people with good hands and brains, all of whom trained at the world’s best music schools like Juilliard–have to play the same abysmal score in precisely the same way every single night. They hear the same lines coming from the stage. The same audience reactions. The same chandelier come crashing down at the end of Act I.
He’d never been in a situation like this where everyone seemed so locked into routine. His colleagues would sit down in their chairs at the exact same minute every day. There is a cellist who would say, “Marvelous,” every time Nick asked him how he was doing. There was the first horn player who would pull out a stopwatch every single night to time how long the second horn player held a note in one of the songs. Some days it would be 17 seconds, other days 16.2.
As in many jobs, the colleagues got on each other’s nerves. But in this environment, people became absurdly sensitive:
In the pit, you notice everything. The way your neighbor blows out a spit valve, the way someone brags about their kids, the smell of someone’s perfume. Every little annoyance, every perceived slight, accumulates.
At the end of 30 years sitting just inches away from your coworkers, you lose all sense of proportion. Your enemies turn into monsters. For [oboist] Melanie, the monster in the pit* was always a trumpet player named Francis Bonny. Everything he did drove Melanie nuts, from the black biking shorts he wore in the pit, to always eating his dinner in the locker room with his back turned to her.
(*I was hoping “The Monster in the Pit” would be the name of this segment, but it’s actually “Music of the Night after Night after Night,” which is also excellent).
I can’t help thinking that this is all deliberate torture, that Andrew Lloyd Webber is the ultimate sadistic boss:
Andrew Lloyd Webber wanted the best of the best for Phantom, which means the pit will always sound good, though it also creates some creative and spiritual problems for the players, who have to get through the score night after night after night.
Personally, I find it highly likely that Lloyd Webber’s dream was to lure and trap some beautiful people in a pit.
And they really were trapped. Like many people with rarefied talents, the musicians felt that they couldn’t leave. To leave would have meant sitting at the phone again, waiting for the next gig. And the next lifesaver might just be another Phantom anyway.
It felt unending and precarious. Because of the way successful Broadway shows are extended, season after season, the musicians never really knew when it would end. Or if it would ever end for them, since so many of them were dying of old age, one by one.
Finally, after 35 years, Phantom of the Opera has closed on Broadway. Nick Jemo and his colleagues (apart from the ones who died) are free at last.
*
Trapped in a pit? The Good Life for Wage Slaves is the survival guide (and shoulder to cry on) you never knew you were waiting for.
Space Man
This quote comes from an episode of This American Life. It’s a work-related story I’m about to discuss in more detail here at the blog, but this moment (as devastating as it is) isn’t quite on-theme for the main post. Here goes:
Most of our lives are spent finding parking for the job we don’t want to do. […] And after any number of years, those routines accumulate, and that’s more or less your life.
What the heck? That’s one of the grimmest things I ever heard. A life spent finding parking. Maybe it’s not typical. Not everyone drives. Not everyone lives in New York City, as this correspondent does. But even if just one human life is spent this way, it’s a tragedy.
I’ve said before (in The Good Life, perhaps) that the times I’ve felt the most desperately unhappy are the moments when I’ve been preparing to do something I don’t want to do. Walking up the hill to college, for example. I could handle the actual “college” even if I didn’t want to do it. But the walk up the hill was an insult. The quote tracks.
The Acquired Inability to Escape
This is “The Acquired Inability to Escape,” a sculpture by Damien Hirst currently held by the Tate.
The descriptions at the Tate’s website and at Art UK focus on the materials and, especially, the cigarettes. The elements of office furniture don’t get much of a mention.
The work is obviously crap but I like the word “acquired” in the title. It’s the idea that one learns that escape is impossible, overriding a more naïve set of beliefs, which may in fact be more useful. I think this is right: most people learn (from parents, teachers, social cues, television) that escape is not an option. But if you’re lucky enough never to learn that, you’re laughing.
Hirst says, “I like escape formally, as an idea. There’s a religious element to [this work]… A spiritual, not physical escape, if you decide to choose it…”
*
I’m Out is available from all good bookshops (and some lousy ones too). The Good Life for Wage Slaves is available directly from its teeny-weeny publisher.
Skive Like an Egyptian
Well, this is delightful.
It’s an ancient Egyptian tablet (called an Ostracon) detailing the reasons cited by workers for getting time off.
Examples include “stung by a scorpion,” “wife menstruating,” “pain in the eye,” and, the best one by far, “brewing beer.”
Try them yourself. They’re time-honored at least.
For some arguably more practical ways to call in sick, try my book The Good Life for Wage Slaves.
The Escape of Wolf Tivy
People miss that escaping this meaningless servitude to our own capital was Thoreau’s main point in Walden. You don’t actually need the money; in reality, the money needs you to give it a worthy purpose, but everyone gets this backward.
You’ve all got to check this out. It’s a classic escape story, well articulated, along with the philosophy (of one man) behind it. Thanks to friend Marcus for sending it our way.
There’s some God stuff in it, but you can read this as Nature if God’s not your jam. It veers into the “libertarian tech bro” perspective too (I think the guy knows Grimes) but I promise there’s some widsom in here and that the story is good.
EDIT: Since posting this earlier today, reader emeritus Radhika found that the magazine founded by Wolf after his escape is financed by Peter Thiel. Gross! Thiel is a billionaire venture capitalist and an exacerbator of many of the world’s problems, not least via the very existence of Facebook. Friend Tom’s classic essay, With Friends Like These, tells you most of what you need to know about him. I won’t take this post down or discourage you from reading Wolf’s essay but please go into it knowing what world you’re on the edge of when doing so.
We’re talking about one Wolf Tivy here. He quit his job with with clear and quite modest goals:
I quit my engineering job in 2014. I was good at it and it was good to me, but it wasn’t the future. I was still working out my plans, so I hit the gym, pursued the most interesting and important ideas I could find, and started looking for a wife.
Quitting your job to find meaning is already unorthodox, an act of good faith and personal strength. But once he’d taken the leap something really interesting happened:
When I wasn’t lifting and courting, I was building a network of intellectuals interested in problems of governance from beyond the established liberal democratic paradigm. I didn’t know why it was interesting. In fact, I thought it was a vice. “This is bad for your career,” said the little wage-slave voice in my head, “you should be focusing on more lucrative projects.”
The little voice was wrong. It was through those intellectual networks that I got my next job and built the social capital which allows me and my friends the freedom to pursue the important problems we have been tasked with.
He set up a magazine, which looks succesful. Isn’t this an example of what I always say will happen? Give up the prescribed life of drudgery, live a little, and the ideas will start to come. Not just £hey that would be cool” ideas but also how it would function, how it would reach people, a sense of the staying power that would be necessary to run with it.
Almost exactly four years after I quit my last real job, we launched Palladium Magazine as the discourse center and beacon by which we would develop our intellectual project and attract more talented collaborators.
“Beacon” has long been one of my key words. I finally talked about it in The Good Life for Wage Slaves. Intead of looking for “a gap in the market” like a dreary businessman or forcing a product nobody needs onto an unsuspecting public like capitalism (or marketing?) wants, create “beacons” that broadcast a signal on a particular frequency to attract the people you want to talk to and the people you want to know. Even if that frequency is strange and niche, it’s big world and you’ll find your people. Or rather, they’ll find you.
A lot of what Tivy writes here is centred around the luxury of free time or, as he points out, what the Romans called ottium.
There are investments you can’t make from a structured, nine-to-five, narrowly teleological environment. You have to let your life go fallow sometimes, like a crop rotation giving the land time to bring forth new fertility. […] The world is full of ideas and opportunities to explore, but it takes time outside of structure to even adjust your eyes to the landscape of possibility. You are cramped by your job, unable to make the class of investments that is necessary for a life beyond the existing tracks.
Once again, this is classic Escapological wisdsom. Take a break, let the mind wonder, figure things out. Work out what you want, how you want to spend your hours, what your priorities are, what would be good for your community and for the world.
It’s hard to think about things like that when you’re stuck behind a computer screen in someone else’s office or digging holes in the street for a gas company. You need time. You need to be able to watch the clouds form into animal shapes in the sky and then fall apart again. You need to dream.
I won’t quote any more because I’d be running the risk of copy-pasting the whole essay wholesale, which would be pointless. Give it a read.
Books! Old and New! (But Mostly New)
I used a Saturday morning (and Saturday afternoon) hangover to set up a Bookshop.org page for New Escapologist.
It’s basically a curated list of book reccomendations where, if you buy anything from it, 10% of the sale comes to New Escapologist and another 10% goes to help indie bookshops. Assuming this all actually works, it’s a good idea.
Many of the books from the Missing Bibliography are on it, as well as some books mentioned here in the blog recently. There are some great ones from the Verso antiwork list as well.
It’s not perfect. Many of the books I read and recommend here at the blog are “old” and seem not to be available on Bookshop.org. And when I say “old,” some are less than ten years old and were always perfectly mainstream, so shopping on Bookshop.org is hardly a deep dive. Worst of all, almost none of my own admittedly niche books are available there, with the honorable exception I’m Out.
In any event, I managed to build a strong list of reccomended titles (covering our usual pet subjects of, for example, minimalism, Bohemia, small business, walking and travel, etc) that I can certainly add to.
Let me know of any woeful omissions you’d like to see added, dear reader, and which list you’d like to see it added to.
Moreover, if someone is in the mood to buy a book, please go ahead so we can see if this thing works.
The Good Life for Wage Slaves is sadly not available there (I’m not sure why: it’s registered with Ingram and Neilson, the big book databases) but it can still be bought, as ever, direct from the publisher with 100% of the takings now coming to us.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 71. Germany und Switzerland.
Dear Diary, I write to you from continental Europe, where I’m basically on vacation but where I’m also conducting research for the magazine. It feels good to be footloose, blasting through the deep green countryside on Swiss and German trains.
In Freiburg, I visited Jonathan at Analog Sea, a publisher and cultural institute whose work I’ve admired for the past four years.
An early subscriber to New Escapologist, Jonathan is the real deal and his little team do everything the right way. As well as promoting real culture and philosophy, they’re deeply committed to staying offline: they have almost no web presence and Jonathan talked to me about the challenge of resisting Amaz*n who can still apparently devour the data and labour of those who make special efforts to avoid them.
As well as exchanging ideas and information about independently publishing a small press magazine, we recorded an interview for publication in a future New Escapologist. As we talked, my partner, Samara, sat quietly by and drew our portraits. It tickled! But it also felt like the sort of convivial creative moment that might lead to even bigger and lovelier things.
In Weimar, Samara and I visited the original Bauhaus University. We were expecting to join a walking tour but either it wasn’t running or we’d misunderstood the rendezvous point. We were ready to leave, thinking, “well, at least we came to the spot where it all happened,” but then I decided we should just enter the main building anyway.
I worked at Glasgow University for a while and it always amused me that, while the beautiful campus and many of its buildings were open to the public, few people ever ventured into the cloistered space. So, in Weimar, we burst inside uninvited to see frescoes and statues dating back to Bauhaus’s pre-War era and even a bust of founder Gropius himself.
Our covert explorations stopped, however, at the door of the Director’s Office which was, perhaps sensibly, locked. We hung around for awhile in case the scheduled tour group should appear and the guide unlock the door to afford us an undeserved peek, but it never turned up. The only other people we saw were a couple of hurried lecturers retrieving paperwork from their own, presumably less pretty, offices.
Less covertly, we visited the nearby Bauhaus Museum where, among other things, we saw independently-published books, artwork and pamphlets that may yet inform the future look of our magazine. Rest assured, it won’t be too fancy and we’ll keep it cheerfully cheap. In fact, that was a point of inspiration: talent and resourcefulness (and the use of technology unavailable to Gropius and his friends) can make up for modest funding.
In Basel, our EasyJet Hotel room felt ominously like a prison cell, bewilderingly small, with no window and with a toilet in the room. Avoid it, mein kinder! It was considerably worse than any hostel dorm or €9-a-night Turkish flop I have stayed in. It was almost worth the not-particularly-low price to see the spectacle of it. I have asked for a refund, which, if successful, will go into our printing fund for the magazine.
*
A confession, oh secret diary. There’s a vacancy at a library in Edinburgh. It’s a very dignified and well-paid job and, before our trip, I was tempted to apply for it.
Were I to get through the interview, the job would have salted my mild but persistent money anxieties once and for all and my days would have been filled with fairly pleasant and bookish work. On the other hand, it would have scuppered the New Escapologist comeback and probably also any future books I might write. I would have accepted the offer with a heavy heart.
Fortunately, the trip put paid to this rare temptation to grapple with a job application. My desire to create and to be on the front line of cultural production instead of merely toiling in support of it has been redoubled. I have Jonathan and Elena at Analogue Sea–and Bauhaus’s Kandinsky, Schlemmer and Klee speaking to me through the years–to thank for that. Another narrow escape, perhaps.
*
If you enjoy this blog and would like to see the return of a real New Escapologist magazine, you can help by buying my book The Good Life for Wage Slaves. Also still available are bundles of New Escapologist in print (1-7 and 8-13) or PDF (1-7 and 8-13). Anything you buy will help me to further this tiny non-profit enterprise.
