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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Letter to the Editor: We Make Choices
To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.
Reader G writes:
Dear Robert,
I just wanted to write a quick missive to thank you for The Good Life for Wage Slaves. I had to ration myself reading time on it, as I have to with all your Escapological material! There were two stand-out things for me.
Firstly the use of Wikipedian cats as a pseudonymising tool. It just went to add that extra spoonful of ridiculousness which your situation (and had the bonus benefit of teaching me the glorious tale of Catmando – before I read his page I’d been pronouncing it like ‘commando’, which fitted the human boss persona perfectly).
Second was the idea of buying a violin with no plan/need to make what society so unreasonably deems a good noise. It reminded me that I want to take up the trumpet, having been so crap at it at school that I was moved over to the (what-the-hell-is-a) euphonium, which I hated. So I might just take the plunge. It also reminded me of my favourite Peter Cook/Dudley Moore sketch, so all the better:
My own Escapological path is long and rambling. It doesn’t even end with me quitting work altogether (yet!). But I’m now in a job that I enjoy (and has an excellent barrier between work and leisure), and which required an Escapological leap to reach. Nevertheless, your latest book will remain an essential guide to managing work to the betterment of leisure time. The journey continues!
Just before your book arrived, I was reading another one that might interest you: Affluence Without Abundance by James Suzman. I’ve long been both interested (from an idler’s point of view) and sceptical of the ‘original affluent society’ idea, but the author of this book is both insightful and balanced – he’s not trying to prove any ‘primitivist fantasy’.
The book’s portraits of different communities in an area of southern Africa contrast those who live the older hunter-gatherer lifestyle (without abundance) with those who strive as hard as possible, and are farmers (or unemployed). Apparently it was with the agricultural revolution that it all went wrong! It commits us to much more work than letting the food raise itself.
Still, Suzman shows that the difference between idling and striving can largely be one of attitude and/or choice. In the above book, people on both sides of the divide can live cheek-by-jowl. As Escapologists we know that we make choices and priorise in order to live the life we want. The book shows that, though there are pressures to earn, stash, or aspire, and there are temptations (the greatest to the subjects of the book seems to be alcohol), both lifestyles are there for the adopting, if you know how to choose.
Thanks again for publishing the manuals.
Best wishes,
G
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The Good Life for Wage Slaves is available from our online shop, along with Issue 16 and our print or digital subscription packages.
Cubed
At the newspaper I worked for in the early 2000s, I remember a moment of great excitement when we moved into new premises. It was the dawning of a new age. Instead of the usual dreary desk arrangement, with time wasted in long conferences and senior executives sequestered in status-enhancing glass boxes, a revolutionary new newsroom would channel the dynamic work-flows of the 24-hour digital future. There was excited talk of “vertical silos” and a lot of nodding.
This is from a 2014 book review of the aforementioned Cubed: A Secret History of the Office by Nikil Saval.
Saval notes, “in news stories the word ‘cubicle’ rarely appeared in dignified solitude; instead it was prefaced with some inevitable epithet: ‘windowless’ or ‘dreary’, ‘cubicle warrens’, ‘bull pens’ or ‘infernos’. People laboured in ‘cube farms’ and were stuck next to each other in six-by‑six standard sets known as six-packs. Douglas Coupland’s epoch-defining book, Generation X, coined the phrase ‘veal-fattening pen’.”
and
Saval persuasively argues that, from the rise of the clerking classes in the 19th century and early 20th century onwards, a key ideological feature of white-collar work has been that the worker is individualistic and self-directed; believing he (the exception for she, unfortunately, needs little rehearsal) might be a clerk now, but with patience and application there’s nothing to stop him one day sitting where the boss sits. That idea, much more often than not, has turned out to be pure vapour: you fall asleep dreaming the American Dream and you wake up as Dilbert.
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Issue 17 has sold out! But never fear, it’s still available in digital formats singly or bundled. There’s also a few copies of Issue 16 — perhaps our best work to date — still gettable in print.
The Tapping of Keys
My good friend Tim recently read Shift Happens, a book about computer keyboards.
I mentioned this to some other friends, bracing myself for a comment along the lines of “blimey, that’s a bit niche,” but one of them said, thoughtfullly, “I should really read a book about keyboards.”
So who knows what’s going on out there? Or maybe this is just what my friends are like.
Anyway, Chumrad Tim shares a quote from said book with us. It invites us to consider the differences between pre- and post-War offices:
…the conspicuous silence hovering over the partitions, interupted only by the tapping of keys, comes from the enforcement of surveillance.
The full quote, really, doesn’t come from Shift Happens but from another book called Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace by Nikil Saval.
Computers and automation had brought the blues to the white-collar workplace.
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Issue 17 has sold out! But never fear, it’s still available in digital formats singly or bundled. There’s also a few copies of Issue 16 — perhaps our best work to date — still gettable in print.
