New Escapologist : September 2019
Small is Beautiful
Well hello. Welcome to the September edition of the New Escapologist newsletter. Here we pluck the best of our blog content from the previous month, fine-tune it a little, and beam it directly into your inbox. The idea is to give the world something to read on its phone or at its desk without resorting to anxiety-producing social media or rolling news. Does it work?
This month, I've been slightly fixated on the logistics of Tiny Houses thanks in part to this seemingly bottomless YouTube channel. I also read Mark Boyle's latest book, The Way Home, the subject of which is adjacent to the Tiny House movement, being an account of how Mark built an off-grid cabin and went back to the land. There's more about his fine book later in the newsletter.
Such acts of retreat represent Escapology at its finest. OR DO THEY? If you're interested in the pros and cons, you might like to consider joining us on Patreon to receive a brand new essay on September 30th about Tiny House-style retreat versus city life.
Meanwhile, at the blog, there were comments galore when I asked "should I buy a record player?" It's not too late to join in if you have a hot take on this. Is a modest record collection a good way to escape loneliness and Big Tech, or is it just another commercial, anti-minimalist money pit?
Escape Well. But enjoy this newsletter first.
Robert Wringham
Artist Pods
I visited Cove Park in Scotland last week, a place for artists to escape the city and get some work done.
As much as anything, I wanted a peek at the living-and-sleeping quarters, some of which are dome-topped wooden pods while others are converted shipping containers. They all seem to have grassy green roofs.
At the time, it was not my intention to post about the visit so my pictures aren’t the best, but you can go here to see what I snapped up anyway.
The interior shots are all of the oakwood pods (I didn’t take any inside the shipping containers) except for the final picture, which is in a separate non-pod building serving as a communal workspace.
Shipping Container House
As a chaser to our pictures of the artist pods in Scotland, here’s a nice video tour of a shipping container house in Canada.
Shipping containers are a classic of Tiny Home design (see New Escapologist Issue 8 for further insight) and the chap in the video has a directly Escapological reason for taking on such an alternative dwelling:
I just decided the working life wasn’t for me. And I wanted a lifestyle change, so [I researched it] and found budget shipping container living and thought I’d give it a try.
The hours were long, working for someone else. Yes, I was trading my time for good money but at the end of the day it wasn’t really worth it. It took its toll on my body and my social life. It was not ideal.
I’ll confess to being attracted to this lifestyle and to the rewarding nature of having built your own home with your two bare hands.
Of course, anyone who knows me at all will be in stitches at the thought of my flailing around with power tools, knowing full well I’d saw those “two bare hands” off in no time at all.
But if nothing else, imagine being done with mortgage or rent so quickly and cheaply and forever. This shipping container home cost between 13,000 and 14,000 Canadian dollars, which is very little and means the owner can just live how he wants to live now, not worrying about pulling in the huge sums of money required for having the audacity to live in a conventional house in the city. Small business or romantic cottage industry (or washing your hands of money-making altogether) suddenly becomes viable.
It’s another escape. Let nobody tell you there is no way out, especially for those with willpower and imagination.
Check out the video. It’s a dream situation, planted in the wilds of Victoria, British Colombia.
Fled Shrieking
I’ve been reading an humongous tome of autobiographical essays by “Designated Bad Seed” of science fiction, Harlan Ellison. I love his alive, cantankerous writing so much, and these essays have reconnected me with a deep well of pluck I’m sorry to say I’d forgotten about. Thank you, Uncle Harlan, wherever you are.
What I’d like to tell you about today, my fellow Escapologists, is a particular essay from this book in which Ellison describes working a drudge job for Capitol Records in 1953. He describes a first day of anxiously working quickly, fearing being judged not good enough by “the Demon God of Industry”, and then being told to slow down by a co-worker because his pedal-to-the-metal processing power makes the others look bad.
He talks to a long-serving Wage Slave, “a mouse of a creature” who has been filing bills of lading for eleven years, against his dream to “just go with the wind.”
The terror that froze my soul cannot be put into words. […This man was] set irrevocably on a cubicled routine of pointless chores making money for Gods on far mountaintops… and I saw what my future would be if I left my life in the hands of those prepared only to dole out thirty-six dollars a week for another human being’s existence.
Sensing a future echo in utero, Ellison’s had enough:
I grabbed up that sack of bills, leaped out of my chair, sending it crashing to the floor, and with all my strength and lungpower flung them into the air, screaming “FUCK IT!” Amid the bills-of-lading snowstorm, I fled shrieking from that madhouse of boredom and dead dreams on West 57th Street, never to return.
As far as I know, to this day, Capitol Records has an unclaimed check for one-half day’s work, in the name of Harlan Ellison.
Hah! Great isn’t it? I really just wanted to share this inspirational moment with you–you fine people with eyes on the door–but I also recommend The Harlan Ellison Hornbook more generally to anyone with low blood pressure.
Debt: Intangible
It’s been a while since we featured anything about personal finance here at New Escapologist, so here is some wisdom concerning debt from a thoughtful recent edition of The Whippet:
Debt is a mental and emotional construct, not a tangible thing. That is, I loaned you $500 and now we both have the memory of that event, we share the opinion that you now need to pay me back that $500, and we share some values that you would be a garbage friend if you didn’t pay it back (unless you couldn’t, yada yada). So debt is the word that encompasses a bunch of ideas that we both have, that creates a relationship between us.
But those beliefs can also exist in the head of a single individual. Maybe you asked for $500 as an outright gift, because you knew you’d struggle to pay it back. But I misunderstood and thought it was a loan. And now the debt exists in my head, but it doesn’t exist in yours. FRAUGHT.
It’s an excellent read. , especially the points about the difference between technical and emotional debt as a way to stay mentally serene in the face of having a negative hi-score.
Cut Loose
I just turned the final page on The Way Home: Tales from a Life Without Technology by Mark Boyle (whose experiments in living I’ve blogged about before and also mentioned in Escape Everything!).
The book chronicles his first year of living in a fairly remote and self-built cabin in Ireland from which he subsists on the land without the aid of modern technology. He writes his memoir by hand, chops firewood, grows vegetables, fishes for pike, butchers deer, and tans their hides.
It’s a fine book, a modern Walden really, and served in small morsels, which is reflective of the way he had time to write around the thousand other things he did to stay alive. It also captures his sense of time without recourse to clocks or watches and you end up sort of swimming with him in non-time aside from an awareness of the season.
Thrilling to me and germane to New Escapologist is the following passage from the beginning of the book:
I wake up this morning to two thoughts. The first is that, from this moment onwards, I haven’t got a single bill to my name. I feel free. The second is that, from this moment onwards, all of the toll bridges linking my life to modernity are gone, and that I’m going to have to live on my gumption alone. I am cut loose from the only culture I’ve ever really known.
Just think of it. That sensation of being so dramatically cut loose. One experiences it to an extent when quitting a job–or the entire world of jobs–to go it alone, but to leave modern, technology-mediated society almost completely (he makes friends in the area, communicates by post and sometimes teaches short courses at Schumacher College but he certainly never drives or flies) must be liberating to the point of complete disorientation. For madmen only perhaps.
I remain unconvinced that “to live in the city but not of it,” (see my notes about “the city recluse” in Escape Everthing!) is not the best way to live and, indeed, Mark Boyle himself offers some beautiful thoughts at the end of his book about purist cries of “hypocrisy” and having ideals greater than you can live by. But, man, what an experiment in living The Way Home turned out to be. I recommend it.
On the Box
We’ve long looked down our aquiline noses at television here at New Escapologist.
We’re relatively comfortable with latter-day “prestige television” (Breaking Bad, Glow, Russian Doll) that you can stream or download deliberately and consume relatively mindfully, but even in these cases we advise a degree of caution. Don’t be sucked into thousands of hours of vegetative slumber!
But the literally-endless stream of patronising twaddle–from game shows to lethal-to-the-sanity rolling news, from tepid comedy panel shows to spiteful documentaries about car clamping or bailiffs–is to be shunned.
It is the lowest of the low in terms of earthly experience. It is no hyperbole to say that you’d be better off staring at an unchanging ceiling tile or patch of mildew on your bathroom wall for the same amount of time: at least then your thoughts would be your own.
In our FAQ, we answer the question of “why do you dislike television so much?” with:
Because it advocates popular opinion. Escapologists should seek to build muscles of resistance instead of accepting whatever is popular, fashionable or conventional.
A decade later, we stand by that, and today we learn from Oliver Burkeman that the evidence is in our favour and that we’re no mere snobs:
What if, for example, part of the explanation for the “populist wave” of the last few years – Trump, Brexit, the rise of the European far right – is that voters watched too much crappy TV, and it rotted their brains? It feels obnoxious even to contemplate the thought, given how perfectly it plays into metropolitan prejudice about the other side being stupid.
But a rigorous, data-rich new study makes it harder to dismiss the idea on grounds of queasiness alone. Researchers studied the growth of the Italian broadcaster Mediaset, and found that those heavily exposed as children to its pabulum of cartoons, soap operas and quiz shows were almost 10% more likely to support populists, because poorer cognitive skills left them more susceptible to politicians peddling simplistic arguments.
Burkeman goes on to offer that it’s maybe the time wasted in watching mindless tellypap that leads to the poor cognition described in the study, but he’s being unnecessarily kindly because he’s writing in the Guardian.
How can it not be the case that thousands of hours of Bradley Walsh saying “hey? what about it? eh? eh? hello, missus! oo’er! middle for diddle, is it? hey? c’mon lads, lets get crackin’, oo’er,” on ITV is rotting the amygdalae of swathes?
Maybe the causal effect can be questioned and, in fact, thanks to a sort of democratic natural law of supply-and-demand, we only get the broadcasts that a nation deserves? In which case, we’re looking at the sort of dystopian programming featured in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (in which TV is dominated by a single Replicant comedian called “Mr. Smiley” or something) which is far worse than just saying, “TV makes treats you as a thicko and, as such, makes you thick.”
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Now! Escape Well,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk
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