New Escapologist : February 2023
Some mildly dysfunctional Wild Thornberrys
Hello again. This is New Escapologist, a newsletter from the famously cheerful magazine and blog for people with escaaaape! on the brain.
A hearty “thank you” the 164 of you who replied to our reader survey. The questionnaire (now closed) had a space for comments, which led to some good questions and suggestions. Since the survey was anonymous I can’t respond to anyone individually, so I’ve collated my responses in the part of this newsletter (at the bottom) normally reserved for Letters to the Editor.
The point of the survey was to help shape New Escapologist’s return to print. I’m aiming for June for our first new issue and work is already underway. I’ve written some original content myself and we have a truly amazing roster of columnists lined up. Maybe I’ll wait til you can pre-order the mag before I wow you with who’s in, but rest assured it’s the A-Team. Not that one. I just mean it’s the A-Team of Editorial. But I still hope to be the Howlin’ Mad Murdoch one.
Your friend and neighbour,
Robert Wringham
New Escapologist
Dad Made an Announcement
I recently read Birdgirl by 19-year-old Mya-Rose Craig. As a birdwatcher, she became the youngest person, at 17, to have seen half the world’s bird species. Her book is a memoir of how she and her parents travelled the world in search of so many birds.
The book’s a goodie, though Mya has a strangely careerist, even managerial, way of speaking that I find a bit disturbing. She routinely uses phrases like “I was keen to take part” and “a solution-led manifesto” (examples taken from the same random page), so that the book sometimes reads like a workplace email. Maybe, against a background of economic and political urgency, young people have to speak officiously now. Perhaps a performance in management speak, the only language our leaders will hear, is the rain dance required to tackle the climate crisis. I’m not sure.
Anyway, the happy passage I want to share with you is this one:
Dad […] made an announcement. From now on, we would change the way we lived. There would be no more unnecessary spending; if travelling was what kept our family together then everything we had or made would go toward such trips […] Dad was choosing experience over possessions; it was to become his mantra.
And thus the Craigs decide to travel the world in search of feathered friends like some mildly dysfunctional Wild Thornberrys.
I love a moment like that: the moment when the decision to change everything, to escape, is made. Do you remember yours?
Rage Apply?
From the stable of talent that brought you “the Great Resignation,” the “rage quit“, “quiet quitting” and “the Sunday scaries” (i.e. an obsolete media seizing on Gen-Z chit-chat and magnifying it to rile their readership of tutting dads) comes the “Rage Apply.”
Forbes says:
Feeling overlooked, unappreciated, passed over for a promotion and unfairly compensated has inspired a new career trend on TikTok. “Rage applying” to jobs is being touted on the social media platform as a great way to get even with your mean boss
And as Urban Dictionary puts it:
Applying to new jobs at different companies when you are fed up at your current job.
[e.g.] I’m rage applying to new jobs because I’m angry at my boss or coworker.
So… applying for a new job when you don’t like your current one? Isn’t that just basic self determination?
If you don’t like your job, you can try and find a new one. It’s probably the least radical, least critical, least boat-rocking thing a person can do, aside from just suffering through it like a schmuck.
Leave the kids alone, Forbes. In this case, young workers aren’t even questioning the work ethic or trying to smash the system. Being able to leave is a basic freedom and a worker’s readiest magic bullet (especially when the possibility of industrial action is under threat).
It’s not about “getting even” with a “mean boss.” It’s basic mobility. It’s barely even Escapology.
Rage apply? Rage apply? It isn’t anything. Get lost, Forbes.
Small Niches in Which to Live
Bestselling novel machine, Haruki Murakami explains that the conventional path for “a young guy” in Japan is to graduate from college, find a job, and “when things have leveled off,” get married.
And then, presumably, the longer term plan is to continue working into old age and/or death, much as in the West.
Murakami didn’t do it that way. He got married first (“it’s a very long story so I won’t go into details,” he says) and then he got creative.
hating the prospect of working for a company (those details would also take a long time to explain so I’ll omit them too), I decided that I wanted to open a jazz café. […] I was totally absorbed by jazz back then, […] so I was drawn to the idea of listening to the music I loved from morning to night.
That’s the stuff! Murakami and his wife took temporary jobs, saved money, and opened their jazz café. Murakami fans will know it was called Peter Cat. They ran it together for three years, working hard at changing beer barrels and granting an ear every half-cut customer. Towards the end of this time, Murakami wrote his first novel. It won a prize and he decided to sell the jazz café to write novels full-time.
There are two things I want to say about this. Well, it’s three things really if you want to count yet another example of how doing things unconventionally, even backwards in this case, can work out well in the end.
The first is that his motivation to listen to jazz all day long is an admirably pure and innocent one. We should all be motivated by such humble desires (being careful, of course, not to confuse a love of cake for a desire to run a bakery).
The second is that, as you can see, Murakami and his wife worked very hard. Isn’t hard work anathema to Escapologists? Wouldn’t it have been easier to become a salaryman? Well, yes and no. Remember when we talked about Tove Jansson last month? We reflected that a certain kind of work, even one requiring atypical devotion, is no bad thing. Employment might be bad with its lack of adventure and its grinding obedience in service of someone else’s ambition, but happy effort in support of a personal mission is another thing altogether.
As you might be able to tell from the repeat of this motif, it’s been on my mind lately. I’ve been working quite hard on my books and on the pending return of New Escapologist as a print publication. I enjoy every last moment of this but I sometimes catch my reflection, metaphorically speaking, and think “some idler, huh?”
It was this very thought that brought me to read the Murakami book from which these quotes are taken: Novelist as a Vocation.
Though he says at first that he won’t go into details about not wanting to work for a corporation, he soon writes:
Many of us detested corporations and the idea of selling out to “the system,” which meant that enterprises like [our jazz café] were opening right and left: coffee shops, restaurants, variety stores, bookstores. A number were close by, all run by people about our age. There were also young radicals, wannabe members of the student movement, hanging around the neighborhood. All over the world, there were small niches in which to live. If you could find one you could fit into, you could get by somehow. Things could get wild at times, but it was still an interesting era.
He’s speaking as if this is all in the past and he might be correct; things are getting worse in terms of Escapological opportunity. But there is still hope. Move away from capital cities. Move, perhaps, to the countryside. Go abroad if necessary or desirable. Let adventure and resourcefulness be your watchwords. I maintain that, for all the difficulties the world is currently facing, escape is still possible.
And by the way, I love that sticking it to the man might involve something as charming as opening a bookshop or a jazz café! I often think this about myself: some of my friends see me as a wastrel or rebel. But it’s not like I dropped out to become a Hell’s Angel. I want to listen to jazz and to write books like Murakami did. I’m a real goody-two-shoes. But go against the grain and see what happens; the nay-sayers will appear, with your best interests apparently at heart, and then you have to work hard, hard, hard to show ’em how its done. Hey, it’s no bad life. As Murakami puts it:
People tell me I must have a strong will [but] it’s much more physically trying for ordinary company employees who ride in crowded commuter trains every day.
Meanwhile… In Kabul
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 recently seized 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 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 (a) it’s the Taliban and (b) Westerners are used to the idea of gawping into computer screens and dreaming about escape. But these chaps have lived vigorous rural lives in service of something they (incorrectly) see as valuable.
So 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, feel free to buy them a copy of The Good Life for Wage Slaves or I’m Out.
The Escape of Henri Rochefort
While slouching around the art museums of Belgium recently, I photographed the painting above and sent it to friend Landis with the subject heading, “#HairGoals.”
We’re both proud of our vertical hair, you see. Here’s a picture of me and Landis with our hairs. I’m on record somewhere saying that my hair ideal is to look like “an exploded cigar”.
Anyway, when Lando asked who the fellow in the picture actually was, I had no idea. I’m a bit of a clot when all’s said and done.
But I decided to find out. The subject of the painting is one Henri Rochefort, a French writer. There are many paintings (and drawings and daguerreotypes and sculptures) of him online and he has spectacularly electrocuted hair in all of them.
I think we might have found an interesting person here. He wrote some silly vaudeville material, but he also became such an outspoken Socialist that he was locked up more than once and the French authorities even tried to deport him. That’s my kind of guy! Silly and radical. People think they can’t go together but they can, can, can.
He was sentenced to be dumped on New Caledonia, a remote French colony on a Pacific Island. But he escaped! He escaped deportation aboard what Wikipedia describes as “an American boat.”
His escape was painted in a rather gleeful way by Manet. I don’t know if Manet actually saw the boat on which Henri escaped, but it can’t have been a little rowboat like that one, can it? In the Pacific Ocean? If it was, then Henri was even more amazing than I currently think he is.
I like how Manet made Henri look heroic but, even in quite dire circumstances, also silly. Like Charlie Chaplin at sea. I think he probably captured his essence.
Letter to the Editor:
Wringham Responds to Your Comments
As promised above, here are my responses to some of the comments received through the survey.
I fucking love New Escapologist!
Thank you, mother.
I arrived too late to be part of the initial magazine party, one way to raise funds I think would be offer a digital (probably easier) or physical full back catalogue at a discount.
Nobody is too late! The original 13 issues were written to withstand the tests of time, precisely so new people could read them forever. Doubtless they’ve aged a bit in the five to fifteen years since they were published but not in the usual way of magazines. Think of it as patina. You can buy Issues 1-7 at discount here (or here for PDF editions) and Issues 8-13 here (here for PDF).
There needs to be more women/different/better gender balance for me. For example, your list of authors [in one of the survey questions] is nearly all men. I do enjoy your writing but a print magazine needs to reflect the readership. If it’s for men, that’s fine, but I wouldn’t be reading it so much.
I don’t want the magazine to be yet another boys’ club. As well as being morally bleak, it would be aesthetically dull. In real life I’m quite sensitive to this sort of thing and I seek pluralism in my reading. This will be reflected in the mag.
The author list you mention was admittedly a sausage fest but the object of the question was to capture people’s preferences for writing style (e.g. Orwell being straight and clean, Le Guin being vibrant and radical, Ferriss being self-helpy). That the authors best suited to serve as popular reference points were almost exclusively male is indeed a shitty thing, a consequence of decades of male privilege. I vow not to prop up that culture in the mag.
I have two female columnists in mind and a particular non-white female author for the first issue’s interview. These aren’t diversity hires though, they’re people whose work I love. Perhaps even more importantly, editorial (the voice of the mag) will never assume the reader is male.
Here are three separate comments concerning a digital edition:
If you go with print copy, please also consider a PDF version. Shipping can be more expensive than the item depending on where in the world it is going.
So, the reason I would love a digital edition is for accessibility reasons. My vision is alright now, but when your magazine was originally coming out, I was blind and PDFs are generally inaccessible. Digital will also help with worldwide readership (eg. India, Nigeria, maybe even South Korea?!).
I am a fan of Substack. Have you considered this as an option?
I hereby promise a digital edition. Almost certainly PDF and probably also an epub. I will probably avoid Kindle altogether: I’m no fan of Amaz*n and there was a clear (and commendable) pushback against that corporation in the survey.
A paid-tier Substack might be a good solution for a digital edition too, but I worry about the content being mediated by a third party; I’ll look into it.
I do like it when our stuff travels far into the world and I have always tried to be inclusive with cultural references for that reason. Shipping costs are of course a barrier so this is a strong argument for a digital edition. As a point of fact though, I have already “broken” South Korea with Escape Everything! in translation!
If published twice per year, I would love the issues to come out at the brink of holiday seasons, e.g in late June and in mid-December. This kind of reading suits the holidays well.
That’s a nice thought and I have decided to do it. Thanks for the suggestion.
Here’s where to read this item in full: there’s too much to include in the newsletter!
Thanks for reading! This newsletter will always be free as the pee of a bee, but if you’re feeling supportive you could buy my book, The Good Life for Wage Slaves, or sling me a quid through Ko-fi (thus making a de-facto contribution to the magazine print fund).
Escape Beautifully,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk