Letter to the Editor: As Into a Quicksand

To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.

Friend McKinley writes:

The “vast grey sleep” reminds me of a line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars, when he catches the bus to the airfield for his first ever mail run as a pilot (which was very risky and glamorous at the time).

Finally I saw the old-fashioned vehicle come round the corner and heard its tinny rattle. Like those who had gone before me, I squeezed in between a sleepy customs guard and a few glum government clerks. The bus smelled musty, smelled of the dust of government offices into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand.

I see now that I had misremembered it. He’s comparing the office dust to quicksand. I had the phrase remembered as “one of those government jobs into which the life of a man sinks as into a quicksand,” which certainly feels like the people I know who got a job in the public service with every intention of getting out in a year or two. He’s saying the exact same thing, just sticking closer to his metaphor.

I now have this sudden fear that I first came across the line in Escape Everything! and it’s what prompted me to read Wind, Sand and Stars in the first place, the timing is about right. Regardless!

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Wringham Wresponds:

That’s a nice quote and it’s not one from Escape Everything!. The closest thing I remember quoting is this moment from a J. M. Coetzee memoir.

Something I failed to note about that quote is that, as well as being an early example of using a computer to skive, it’s an early example of computer programmers working devotedly for no extra money into the night.

This End Up

Further to yesterday’s post, the idea of packing oneself into a crate and travelling covertly to another land is not without appeal.

Even I, a tall man, quite like the idea and I don’t even have much to escape at the moment. I just like an adventure and good deal. Besides, can’t be much worse than Ryanair.

All of this has, of course, reminded me of the Welsh teenager Brian Robson, who mailed himself home in a crate from Australia in 1965. He described the experience as “quite horrific,” taking four days and frequently being stored upside down. Robson’s box was redirected to the US, where he was found and then grilled by the FBI before being repatriated to London (so it sort-of worked).

And then Wikipedia has a list of others who have achieved (or failed) similar feats:

[Athlete and smuggler] Reg Spiers mailed himself from Heathrow Airport, London, to Perth Airport, Western Australia, in 1964. His 63-hour journey was spent in a box made by fellow British javelin thrower John McSorley. Spiers spent some time outside his container in the cargo hold of the plane and suffered from dehydration [by the time] he was offloaded onto the tarmac of Bombay Airport. He arrived in Perth undetected and returned home to Adelaide.

Charles McKinley (age 25) shipped himself from New York City to Dallas, Texas in a box in 2003. He was attempting to visit his parents and wanted to save on the air fare by charging the shipping fees to his former employer. However, he was discovered during the final leg of his journey having successfully travelled by plane.

Did you catch that part? McKinley “saved on the air fare by charging the shipping fees to his former employer.” What a legend.

An inmate (age 42) serving a seven-year drug conviction sentence in Germany escaped from a prison by climbing into a box in the mail room which was picked up by a courier in 2008.

Hooray!

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For arguably more practical ways to escape, try my book I’m Out. Also still available are bundles of New Escapologist in print (1-7 and 8-13) or PDF (1-7 and 8-13).

The Escape of Henry “Box” Brown

In the late 1840s, the brilliant Henry Brown found a way to escape slavery.

Sensing, probably correctly, that travel by conventional means would result in recapture, he decided to seal himself into a box and be express-mailed to freedom.

After twenty-six hours of rough handling by deliverymen, he was pried from his [box] and — being a deeply religious man — sung a song of thanksgiving he had written, based on Psalm 40.

As we often like to say in New Escapologist, an escape is best affected with a sense of showmanship and aplomb.

Additionally, there is no more satisfying way to make a living than by turning one’s entrapment (or escape story) into something lucrative. It’s all about the irony of using the machine’s burdensome weight against itself. “Indeed,” says The Public Domain Review,

in the months directly following his escape, Brown took “Box” as his middle name; published The Narrative of Henry Box Brown, who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide, Written From a Statement of Facts Made By Himself; and went on tour in New England, telling his story and singing songs of his own composition.

Superb.

Here’s a little more from Humanities journal:

Appearing in cities across New England and, later, Britain, Brown attained a form of nineteenth-century celebrity on the strength of his astonishing tale and flair for showmanship. He rode between speaking engagements inside a box identical to the one that had carried him from Virginia, accompanied by marching bands and American flags, before emerging onstage from the cramped conveyance and presenting scenes from his “Mirror of Slavery,” a painted canvas of one hundred scenes mounted on two enormous spools. Various iterations of the act, which evolved into a kind of vaudeville routine following the end of slavery, were performed in the United States, England, and Canada for decades.

Fifty years before Houdini first escaped a box, Henry Brown escaped in a box.

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For some arguably more practical ways to escape, try my book I’m Out.

Also still available are bundles of New Escapologist in print (1-7 and 8-13) or PDF (1-7 and 8-13).

Observational Comedy of the Interior

Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.

Thus spake Halle Burton’s “Millie,” the protagonist of The New Me.

The book is a millennial tale of feeling awkward and not fitting in anywhere, best of all at work, which is an alienating and precarious nightmare.

I like this bit:

I make $12 an hour, the best-paying job I’ve had in more than a year. If I’m paying twelve, they’re paying the agency at least fifteen, up to twenty, so in the middle let’s say eighteen, times thirty-five is $630 a week, times two weeks is $1,260, times two is more than $2,500 a month to have me, the idiot, sit in a chair, doing about four hours of work a week, sixteen hours of work a month, which puts the rate for my actual services at around $150 an hour.

It’s a strange paragraph to like in a novel, let alone to want to share. It’s all just numbers! But I remember those trains of thought while working as a temp. It’s well-observed. It’s observational comedy of the interior.

I don’t remember working out my actual hourly rate like that but I see what Butler means. Sometimes, I’d have so little to do that I’d almost feel guilty for making the money I needed to stay alive. Almost. Because I didn’t ask for that job. Except I did by applying for it. But I had to do that because I wanted to stay alive. Work isn’t consensual in the way most people seem to describe it.

Back to those numbers. I remember finding out that the agency was paid the same hourly rate as my own. My boss was paying double what I was actually getting, for secretively scrolling through Facebook and reading the Guardian and going slowly bananas. The agency was getting paid the same as me for doing nothing, but their share was for openly doing nothing. We were supposed to be at the cutting edge of Quaternary industry in that job, but it was little more than an iron rice bowl.

The saddest financial calculation I can remember making was on my very first morning when I mental-arithmeticed my way to the conclusion that, while I’d already had enough, I hadn’t yet made back the money I’d spent on a new shirt for the job plus bus fare. Urgh. Never forget!

In that weird paragraph of numbers Halle Burton tells us how boring office work can be, how alienating it can be, how the arrangement is primarily economic, how the power imbalance rots minds.

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Escape! Escape! is all I can say. Read I’m Out to help with your escape plan and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for a shoulder to cry on in the meantime.

The Vast Grey Sleep

I’ve really fallen for James Baldwin. Yes, yes, you already know all about him. Revisiting his work has been popular since 2016, but I’m always a few years behind.

Here’s a passage from one of his novels, Another Country, that is nicely Escapological:

There were no standards for him except for those he could make for himself. There were no standards for him because he could not accept the definitions, the hideously mechanical jargon of the age. He saw no one around him worth his envy, did not believe in the vast grey sleep which was called security, did not believe in the cures, panaceas, and slogans which afflicted the world he knew; and this meant that he had to create his standards and make up his definitions as he went along.

Who among us has not known that “vast grey sleep” when sitting at an office desk or in a traffic jam or while traipsing around a shopping mall in search of some annoying future kipple like replacement paper clips or a new travel adapter? Who here has not questioned those “cures, panaceas and slogans”? Improvisation (and the character being described is a jazz musician) and wit and referring only to our own standards are no bad alternative. Perfect, perfect.

Iconoclast Baldwin:

Seeking alternatives to the vast grey sleep of security? Try my books, I’m Out and The Good Life for Wage Slaves.

Oh Wondrous Art, Whose Mastery I Seek / the Art of Escapology, Wild and Free

I suppose I should have something positive to say about “AI” given some of the utopian ideas I’ve parped out in the past about full automation.

The thing is, I find the current conversation about AI utterly dull and boring. First of all, it’s not really AI. Robot chefs are just a variation on the teasmade. The chatbot things creating weird images and unconvincing conversational scripts are just algorithms. There is no artificial intelligence involved from what I can see. The chat bot things might give an illusion of artificial intelligence, but only inasmuch as a paper plate with a smiley face drawn on it gives the illusion of being your friend.

Secondly, the idea that it will “replace artists” is the sort of conversation that puts me to sleep. It’s like how people used to talk about music piracy or something. Computer “art” will replace some freelance gig work if magazine editors can be bothered to use it. Ultimately, though, it won’t “replace artists” because there’s no point. The point of art is to convey something human. The point of robot art, so far as I can see, is to cheat people out of make money.

The whole thing can get lost as far as I’m concerned. I don’t hate or fear these AI things. I’m bored by them. You’re unlikely to see AI artwork in forthcoming print editions of New Escapologist: it will be made by my illustrator and artist friends because that’s the whole point. Not to keep them in work but to communicate something from one human brain to another. Psychonautics does not concern itself with illusory AI.

Even so, friend Sukanya sent me two examples AI poetry about Escapology this morning. They’re quite funny.

But!

Many years ago, when I was starting out as a comedian, I did a thing called computer poetry. I worked in a library by day and, bored, I would get the catalogue computer to “write poetry” by putting in a prompt to generate a list of books. I’d then read the results on stage at night.

The best poems were the ones with simply but oddly human prompts like “why” or “how”. Why do the heathens vainly rage? is a strange and evocative line that my wife and I still mention at home sometimes. Of course, it’s not really a line at all. It’s the title of a book. I believe this is how the new AI bots work too: by mashing up existing content, albeit it in a more sophisticated way.

All I’m saying is: I was ahead of the curve of this twaddle by about 15 years. And I didn’t do it because I thought it was clever; I did it because I was bored. Suck it, nerds. Your so-called genius is my thumb-twiddling.

Even so, here are Sukanya’s outputs.

Her first suggestion: Write an acrostic on Escapology.

AI response:

Eager to escape the mundane and the dull,
Clinging to the hope of adventure, oh so full,
Adept in the art of unlocking the impossible,
Prepared to face danger, with nerves of steel, unbreakable.
Soaring through the air, free as a bird,
Ascending to new heights, undeterred,
Longing for the thrill, to be absurd,
Overcoming obstacles, with movements, blurred.
Going beyond the limits, never to be confined,
Opening new horizons, leaving the old behind,
Living life on the edge, with a peace of mind,
Yearning for freedom, in escape to find.

Sukanya’s second suggestion: Please write a Shakespearean sonnet on Escapology.

(I like how she said “please” this time, like Ensign Sonya Gomez. Clearly she has already been convinced!)

AI response:

Oh wondrous art, whose mastery I seek,
The art of escapology, wild and free,
To break the chains that bind us, oh so meek,
And soar above the bonds of gravity.
With skillful hands and courage strong and true,
The Escapologist defies the laws of fate,
And like a bird takes flight, with naught to rue,
A master of the stage, so bold and great.
Yet still, within the heart of every man,
There lies a fear of being trapped and bound,
A fear that only freedom can withstand,
And in escapology, true freedom’s found.
So let us praise this art, this noble craft,
And let our spirits soar, unfettered, and laugh.

Yeah, okay, they’e quite good actually. I have changed my mind. We’re doomed. I for one welcome our new sonnet-writing computer overlords.

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“Don’t let the robots get you down” say my friends at Analog Sea whose fourth Review, a beautifully-presented hardback “celebration of offline culture,” is available globally from indie bookshops now.

And why stop there? Get yourself a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves or I’m Out, both of which were written by a human called Me.

“Grafter” Wringham Slandered in Unprovoked Media Attack!

I’ve been promoting my new book, Melt It! The Book of the Iceman. It’s an extended interview with comedian and performance artist Anthony Irvine.

I’ve come to love Anthony. He’s a brilliant, funny, humble person. Together we’re like Ed Wood and Bella Lugosi: a hopeless young fool and a hopeless older fool united by optimism (or perhaps delusion).

Anyway, we did an interview with our friend John Fleming for his blog. It was all clicking along rather nicely and I was explaining how the book happened:

We spent a day together at Battersea Arts Centre and we ended up with a 15,000 word interview with no waffle […] I approached some publishers and they all told me to get fucked. But then Chris from Go Faster Stripe saved the day. He’s got the right audience for it. Thousands of people with an interest in niche or fringe comedy and a lot of them know of The Iceman and want answers.

And then, suddenly, the Iceman says:

Rob was very good at glueing it all – freezing it all – together. He is hard-working; he’s a grafter; he works fast.

Naturally, I was appalled. Why was my new creative partner suddenly insulting me?

I think I said, “don’t tell people that! It took ages to establish my idler-wastrel persona!” but that didn’t make the cut.

Alas, I can see how Anthony came to this conclusion. I did work unusually hard on this book. Quickly too. The vision for it was so powerful in my mind that I just had to get it all out before something got in the way. (See my thoughts on “the right kind of work” re: Tove Janson).

I’m very proud of this unlikely project. As I say in the interview:

There’s not a single regret in it […] When I look at my other books, there’s always some weird phrasing or something I wish I’d done differently. This is just a perfect book.

Our book is not a New Escapologist project but the Iceman has certainly lived an unusual outsiderish life. He’s certainly never been motivated by money or the other usual expectations. He was even a circus clown for a while. He’s a great case study for anyone wanting to live differently. It’s also just quite funny.* (*Afterword by Stewart Lee!)

You can acquire a copy of the book here (full-colour print for £15 or digital download for £5) if you’re interested or just read the charming (albeit slandering) interview here.

The Third Place

I enjoy this guy’s videos about urban planning. Yes, they’re boring but that’s kinda why I like them. And, ever self-aware, he makes fun of the boringness sometimes, like when he celebrated the success of a video about garbage day. Garbage is interesting, clearly!

Anyway, he has a recent episode about third places. Third places are places that aren’t your home or your workplace (or, I would possibly add, a commuter train or a supermarket). We’re talking about cafes, pubs, libraries, places of worship, parks, maybe gyms. Generally speaking, they’re free or low-cost and everyone is welcome.

There’s much to be said about third places Escapologically. For example, their “thirdness” clearly demonstrates mainstream social priorities, don’t you think?

But, importantly, they’re simply the kind of place adored by Escapologists. One of the things I don’t like about Christmas is that the libraries and museums and cafes are all closed. I mean, it’s no hardship just to stay indoors for a couple of days but, y’know, it’s kinda sad and spooky and a reminder that you’re out of step with the rest of the world.

Apparently third places are under threat, probably because they don’t directly make enough money. So use your library, take a walk in the park, support your favourite local cafe or pub.

Third places! Not boring at all but the stuff of life. Enjoy the vid.

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Next time you’re in a third place, why not take a book along? It’s good to be seen reading. You could even take one of mine: I’m Out and The Good Life for Wage Slaves.

The Return Journey From an Escape

This Guardian article isn’t up to much (and kinda looks like someone pulling strings to promote their crime novel) but it illustrates the point than an escape, even one that fails or is temporary by design, is never a waste.

The writer and his partner left London for an eco-village in Spain. They subsisted on harvested fruit and solar energy, drank cheap wine, wrote books, and basked in the sun. After six years, they returned to London to pursue journalism work. Fair enough.

I often think about the return journey from an escape. Maybe your decision to become the new Yeti isn’t sustainable, or wasn’t meant to be, or you end up needing to slouch back to society for company or medical care. Maybe you just get tired of paradise and want to come back to the hustle and bustle. My great escapes have not been from cities but from jobs. Occasionally I’ve taken jobs again though, either through necessity (fail!) or by choice (freedom).

When you come back from an escape, you might think about the chorus of nay-sayers, real or imaginary, who said you could never do it, that you could never survive on dumpster-dived fried chicken alone.

But whether they were right or wrong, at least you tried. At least you had an adventure, lived up to your ideals for a while, will have fewer deathbed regrets. And, importantly, you’ll have collected new skills that will always be useful, spiritually and practically:

While living in Los Molinos, we learned how to make cheap, nutritious vegetarian dishes. We coped without central heating, and survived the harsh winter nights […] When the sun didn’t shine we had so little electricity that sometimes we’d have to read by candlelight. As the cost of living continues to rise, I’ll be able to draw on these experiences. I like to think we brought a little bit of Spain back with us.

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Curious about escape versus the status quo? Try my books, I’m Out and The Good Life for Wage Slaves.

Spare a Thought for the Taliban

The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week, […] Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.

Thanks to regular Reader S for drawing our attention to this singular article about the Taliban, who, as consumers of NEWS will know, recently took control of the city of Kabul.

They promised to liberalise (or perhaps urbanise) their values and practices when it came to, say, the treatment of women, but they have instead behaved like a bunch of jerks as you might imagine.

A funny thing, though, is that some of the former Jihadi fighters who once spent their days doing target practice or scanning the open skies for American drones, now have to waste away at computers in order to run the city.

And they don’t like it.

Abdul Nafi, 25, a fighter now working as an executive director in the government, said he had to learn how to use a computer for his new job […] Yet there isn’t much work for him to do, and so he spends most of his time on Twitter, he told [a researcher]. “We’re connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet. Many mujaheddin, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter,” he said.

It’s easy to laugh because Westerners are quite used to gawping into computer screens and dreaming about escape. But these chaps have lived vigorous rural lives in service of something they see as valuable. (Even if that happens to be the pointless and barbarous promotion of Sharia law.)

So let’s not be without sympathy. I say “spare a thought for the Taliban” while they struggle to adapt to office life, which is apparently even worse than sleeping rough in hills of Afghanistan.

If anyone knows a Taliban, please buy them a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves or I’m Out.