Do You Want to Break Free?
There are two articles in Issue 17 (help to finance a reprint here) about domestic labour, a type of work often overlooked when discussing the post-work future.
One piece — a review of Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time — looks into the possibilities of freeing us from home-based servitude forever.
The other — an essay by self-described housewife Matilda Bennett — suggests it might be possible to escape into domestic labour, freeing yourself of the horrors of professional toil.
Which do you most relate to? Read Issue 17 to see the two positions write large.
Escape from Manus
Here’s a radio documentary about Jaivet Ealom’s thrilling 2017 escape from Manus Regional Processing Centre.
Just as Jaivet is about to board his airplane to freedom, the passenger in front of him turns around. It’s a nurse from the base:
The nurse would have known him as EML19 because you didn’t have names where he’d been living. Manus Regional Processing Centre [was] an immigration processing facility inside a military base on an island in Papua New Guinea, patrolled by the Australian Federal Police and the ships of the Australian Navy. … No one detained there had ever escaped.
Eep!
No spoilers.
The escape, he says, was inspired by Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning and an “encyclopaedic knowledge” of TV’s Prison Break.
I enjoyed the detail that his smuggled cellphone hides behind a poster, not of Rita Hayworth, but of a biryani.
His story (of multiple escapes, it turns out) is further documented in his book, Escape From Manus.
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New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
Letter to the Editor: My Impending Departure
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 Rob,
I finished The Good Life for Wage Slaves last night and wanted to say how much I enjoyed it. It’s so full of good ideas, funny moments, and a thorough debunking of the idea that what you are is what you do for work. There were many parts and passages I enjoyed, and the afterword was a very nice touch.
Back in my 30s, I so disliked getting the question, “What do you do?” — especially when it was always the second or third question anyone ever asked — that I would usually make up responses. My favourite was always to say I was a fluffer in the porn industry. My second favourite was to answer “rocket scientist.” Both answers always stopped people in their tracks.
I’m not entirely sure that a wage slave can really have a good life, but a lot of the book’s value is just opening up people’s minds to the possibility that there’s a different (I’d say better) way. It seems hard for many people to do anything other than take incremental steps, especially when it comes to questioning the validity of their reality. And that’s what your book can do for people who haven’t already undertaken the path to saying no to a very dreary paradigm.
On a final note, I made my official announcement [at work] last week about my impending departure. I still have four and a half months of wage slavery ahead of me, but I’m determined to make it as rewarding as possible. And simply announcing my intentions was a pretty grand way to begin a new year.
Yours,
A
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Be like Reader A and quit while you’re ahead! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
Stay on Your Mat and Do As You’re Told
There’s a chapter in Butts — a splendid history of the arse by Heather Radke — about the 1980s boom in home fitness videos.
I remember that! My mum had the Cher one. We’d be watching TV in the living room and we’d hear her leaping about upstairs in time to the music. At least, I think that’s what she was doing.
Radke writes that
booms in American fitness culture usually correspond to rises in white-collar labor.
As more people are employed in desk jobs–in the 1920s and 1950s, for example–the people who work those jobs become less active than those who have more physically demanding jobs, a fact that often causes a lot of societal angst.
Anxiety about fitness (and its corollary–fatness) permeates middle-class culture in these eras because fitness isn’t ever only about having a body that is useful or a body that is healthy. Having a fit body seems to almost always mean something more.
Yes indeed. Everything has a symbolic value indexed against a constantly-shifting body of social meaning.
Later, Radke writes that
neoliberalism wasn’t just an economic philosophy; its tentacles would extend into nearly every part of [Western] life. It conflated the free market with individual agency, had no use for collective modes of expression or action, and judged the worth of people primarily in terms of market value–ideas that if taken seriously, would alter how people thought of themselves on nearly every level, including how they perceived their bodies. … A fit body become a symbol of a hearty work ethic.
So as well as being a response to the sedentariness promoted by desk jobs, those fitness tapes evolved out of the hyperindividuality of the time and also hardworkingness as a badge of pride.
The tapes were sold as fantasies of personal transformation and self-betterment but:
they don’t offer techniques that will ultimately lead to artistic interpretation or self-expression. Instead, when you do the moves, you are following someone else’s lead, mimicking them beat by beat in order to become more like them. Aerobics is, by and large, a submissive practice: you stay on your mat, inside your little rectangle, and do as you are told.
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Loaf! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
An Escapologist’s Diary : Part 80. A Doss Time
Dear Diary,
I’ve been taking it very, very easy for 11 days.
I’ve been playing video games for the first time since 1996, reading unedifying literature, gently strolling along, sleeping late.
Today I took a very cheap bus to Edinburgh to mooch around some free art galleries, and then to stay up late watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer on a friend’s comfortable sofa. It’s like the the 1990s are back.
This is all according to plan. As I announced in the Idler this week:
For the next six months, I’ll be doing practically nothing. I’ve been telling others it’s a “sabbatical” because that’s a word people seem to recognise and broadly approve of, but really I’ve just had enough and I want a proper skive.
2024 was a busy year. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed most of my 2024 activity and I’ll benefit from the fruits of it all, hopefully, for years to come. But having something scheduled every day – somewhere to be, something to achieve, something to cross off a list – is no idler’s design for life. It’s not mine, it’s not yours, and if it ever seems we’ve veered off course, drastic action should be taken.
Hence the next six months. Corrective action. Or, as the case may be, inaction.
I hope you enjoy that blog in which I explain myself. If you do, by all means come along to my episode of “A Drink with the Idler” live Zoom thing on January 16th, the only thing on my to-do list for the next six months. Or, you know, don’t.
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Loaf! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
Off the North Coast of Sardinia
Mauro Morandi, the custodean of Budelli Island near Sardinia, has died, aged 85.
“I was quite fed up,” he once said, “with many things about our society. Consumerism and the political situation […] I decided to move to a deserted island […] far from all civilization. I wanted to start a new life close to nature.”
It sounds like he had a terrific life on the island:
Food is delivered to him by boat from the main island of Maddalena, and a homemade solar system powers his lights, fridge and internet connection.
During winter, when there are no visitors, he spends his days collecting firewood, reading and sleeping.
It was idyllic until almost the end:
His home on Budelli was a former second world war shelter until 2021, when he was evicted after a lengthy tussle with La Maddalena national park authorities, who had planned to transform the island into a hub for environmental education.
Morandi moved into a one-bedroom apartment on La Maddalena, the largest of the archipelago of seven islands off the north coast of Sardinia.
He spent some time in a care home in Sassari last summer after a fall, and is reported to have died at the weekend in Modena, northern Italy, where he was originally from, after his health deteriorated.
Morandi said he was struggling to adapt to life after Budelli. “I became so used to the silence. Now it’s continuous noise,” he said.
Why can’t people just be allowed to live (and die) how they want to? What is it about a simple live like Morandi’s that is so offensive to modernity? How could the development — which never even happened — have been inconvenienced by an elderly man living roughly in a war shelter?
When he resisted eviction, the authorities complained that “the property has been developed without permission.” Developed! The property! Look at it (above)! It’s an improvised wooden lean-to, hundreds of miles from the nearest pair of human eyes.
“I hope to die here and be cremated and have my ashes scattered in the wind,” he said at 81.
“I’m so used to living in the middle of nature,” he told the Guardian by phone. “What would I do back in Modena? Play cards and go to bars like other people in their 80s? Give over!”
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Resist! New Escapologist Issue 17 will be reprinted if we can get enough orders. Issue 16 and many other items are still available in our online shop.
Issue 17 Reprint?
I wasn’t going to do this, but there’s been a lot of email from people disappointed not to get an Issue 17 before it sold out.
So. Let’s do a reprint. Just a small one.
To minimise the risk of waste (and because there’s no budget for a reprint), I’m inviting you to pre-order your copy by the end of January.
When they arrive at Escape Towers around February 12th, I’ll ship all pre-orders immediately. Any copies left over will be made available in the shop, but please don’t wait for that! You’d risk being disapointed again, which would be silly.
If you have Issues 14-16 already, your stack will soon look like this.
Phwoar.
To make this micro-project a bit more creative, I’m thinking of doing a variant cover for the reprint. Would that be desirable? Or would you prefer your copy to be indistinguishable from the original print run? Feel free to comment below or to send me an email.
Thanks everyone. Here’s that link again.
Issue 16, meanwhile, is still in print and currently shipping.
Zweig on Stuff
I don’t want any posessions. Posessions make a man heavy, old, fat and sluggish. I want to be on the way somewhere, travelling light.”
This quote from Stefan Zweig might not exist anywhere else on the Internet. I got it from Escape to Life (1933) by Erika and Klauss Mann, reviewed, incidentally, in Issue 17.
An Escapologist’s Diary: Part 79. 2024 Review.
Splosh! Time for an annual report to my imaginary shareholders.
But first an excerpt from last year’s report:
2024 will not be as fruitful as 2023 was. It can’t be.
Ahem. Well, that’s not what happened.
Risks and High Jinks
I spotted a copy of The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster on my in-laws’ bookshelf. No offence to Juster, but it was the intro from Maurice Sendak — he of Where the Wild Things Are — that caught my imagination.
Sendak wrote this in 1996:
[The Phantom] Tollbooth is a product of a time and a place that fills me with fierce nostaliga. It was published in New York City in 1961. … [we] were all swept up in a publishing adventure full of risks and high jinks that has nearly faded from memory. There were no temptations except to astonish … Simply, it was easy to stay clean and fresh, and wildly ourselves — a pod of happy baby whales flipping our flukes and diving deep for gold.
We have to be careful with this kind of “fierce nostalgia,” to think that the past was necessarily better than things are today. But I know what he means. I was talking to Friend Andy the other day, who fondly remembers the indie publishing and queer and dot-com cultures around the Bay Area of the time Sendak wrote the words above.
In turn, I’m nostalgic for the Britpop years of England in 1997-2002. I woulnd’t want to go back, but I do lament the savage siphoning away of “adventure” and “risk and high jinks” from our culture that felt present in the atmosphere of that time.
A recent YouGov poll suggests most people would rather live in the past than in the future. It does seem that the 20th Century was full of life while our own is preoccupied, understandably, with extinction. That’s not how it was in Sendak’s swinging ’60s! Everybody wanted to know about the future back then, couldn’t wait to get here.
Well, I say this: never mind.
Never mind if the future looks bleak.
If a bomb drops on you, you almost certainly won’t know about it.
Insulate yourself to the news. Live as ethically as you can, but also as well as you can. From our own hererotopias, let us have, in Sendak’s terms, “adventure” and “stay clean and fresh, and wildly ourselves” no matter what.
If it’s harder to do that in the world of Musk and Deliveroo and forest fires than it was in the days of Maurice Sendak (’60s NY), Friend Andy (’90s San Francisco), and Blur (millennial UK) then there’s even fewer “temptations except to astonish.”
So. Let’s astonish.
We can do it through our art, our interactions with each other, and by how we live.
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