New Escapologist : February 2024

If I showed him how easy it was to walk away from things...

Welcome to the monthly companion newsletter to New Escapologist magazine.

Here we like ESCAPE. That’s what it’s all about. We salute those who run away. Not that they’d notice. They never look back.

We admire the “flight” component of “fight or flight,” and we seek to rehabilitate it as a cultural force. We deftly avoid hard work and hard knocks. We’re quitters, not hitters.

Since 2007 — the odd hiatus aside — we’ve published a beautiful print magazine on the subject of escape. Our first 13 zine-like issues are all still available through print-on-demand, but we stepped up in 2023 with a whole new look and a flotilla of new ideas. Our latest editions are Issues 16 and 17, both of which are available now from our online shop while stocks last. And for those who prefer digital formats? We have those too: all issues in PDF and all new issues (14-17) in EPub.

Issue 17 was, in fact, a re-print made possible by those who pre-ordered it through January. Those pre-orders are in the post now, winging their way to the faithful few. It’s not too late though! Get your Issue 17 today for the latest in Escapological science, art, thought, and whimsy.

Your flighty friend,

Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk

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The Escape of Jo Nemeth

Jo Nemeth lives without money in Australia. Much like our friend Henry, she was inspired by Mark Boyle, a New Escapologist favourite.

For the first three years, Nemeth lived on a friend’s farm, where she built a small shack from discarded building materials before doing some housesitting and living off-grid for a year in a “little blue wagon” in another friend’s back yard. Then, in 2018, she moved into [a friend’s] house full-time; it’s now a multigenerational [multi-family] home.

Instead of paying rent, Nemeth cooks, cleans, manages the veggie garden and makes items such as soap, washing powder and fermented foods to save the household money and reduce its environmental footprint. And she couldn’t be happier.

“I love being at home and I love the challenge of meeting our needs without money – it’s like a game.”

In an early blog post, Jo describes her big life change as “an exit strategy” and places it in the context of social action:

Every day I am thinking about my exit strategy. My fossil fuel exit plan.

Sure, fighting for system change on the streets and in parliaments must be part of our strategy, but it can’t be (won’t be) everything. After all, the system that needs changing is a destructive, violent machine of which we are all cogs. Maybe system change will come just as quickly from, or at least be aided by, many of us putting into place our household exit strategies. It will definitely play a part. It has to. We can’t go getting arrested on the streets to get emissions down then fly home, jump in our cars and go cook the evening meal on the gas stove. Who’s going to take us seriously?

Jo is now moving out of the house to get back to basics again:

she’s currently using recycled building materials to fix up a cubby in the back yard where she plans to sleep and spend her evenings reading by candlelight. “It’s very small, just big enough for a single bed and some standing room. There’s no electricity or running water.

“But I want to feel more connected to reality, to the birds and the stars and the sun and the rain. I feel really disconnected living in a big house. We just had a full moon and I almost missed it!”

I like how she describes a tiny home in the natural world as “reality.” Because of course it is! It’s the same point made by this brilliant woman, who describes “the real world” of suburbs and cities and the internet as “the madness.”

Many people who read Jo’s story probably see things the other way around: that they’re the ones living in reality (a consructed and networked world upheld by a majority) while Jo lives in a bubble of fantasy (an impractical romance).

Yet she proves, again, that escape to an outlier reality where personal values can prevail is entirely — I would say irresitably — possible.

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He Imagined Knocking the Whole Thing Down

Here’s a moment from Owlish by Dorothy Tse.

Yes, that’s right. Owlish. It’s a slightly creepy novel about an ageing university professor who falls in love with a life-sized music box ballerina.

The Professor goes AWOL from his depressing work and domestic lives to embark on what he sees as his last chance of adventure.

He moves into an old church on an uninhabited island, fills it with the beautiful art objects formerly boxed up in his study, writes bad poetry, hangs out with his doll thing, and scowls at his old workplace from a distance:

The less he went into the university, the better Professor Q felt. His mind was clearer and he felt ten years younger. He narrowed his eyes and extended his right thumb, trying to blot out the distant office building. He imagined knocking the whole thing down

He turned back to face the university and thought of himself sitting behind one of those windows, day in, day out, working like an automaton, and suddenly felt absolutely furious.

Perhaps I should say it’s amazing to find so many exportable anti-work quotations in the books I read, when all I’m doing is trying to do is kick back and relax.

But the hatred of being told what to do is all-encompassing. It’s everywhere. Maybe it’s not even taboo at all.

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Narrow Escape

This couple have lived on a narrowboat for a year. Well, it’s more like a year and half now because I was late to the vid.

Anyway, here’s their first annual report. It contains some more information about my favourite boating term, continuous cruising.

Also, look! A boat named “Narrow Escape!”

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After That Day, I Stopped Worrying

Speaking of floating on water, I’m reading Sea State by Tabitha Lasley.

It looked journalistic when I picked it up — plastered with glowing and collegial-sounding praise from the Irish Times and Financial Times and the Observer — and supposedly based on 103 interviews with offshore oil riggers.

Really though, it’s the memoir of an extramarital affair, which makes all the praise look a bit selacious.

It is good though! Inciteful and well-written. It’s another citation toward my evolving theory that the point of reading is a form of psychonautics; to travel in the experiences of others, whatever they might be.

It’s also Escapological. Lasley quit her job in journalism, dumped her crap boyfriend, and abandoned London in favour of becoming “a writer without portfolio” in chilly Aberdeen.

On her quit:

When I gave my notice in at work, my editor told me she’d miss me, then had a long conversation with another editor, over the top of my head, about the unlikelihood of attracting a decent replacement, given my simean day rate. Up until that point, I’d thought walking out of a job might be one of those decisions I’d come to regret. After that day, I stopped worrying.

On starting over:

I went to Morrison’s [supermarket] on King Street for a knife and chopping board, and had a sudden sense of what I must look like to the other customers. A whey-faced woman in her thirties, spending Saturday night alone, buying kitchen utensils cheap enough to shame a student. A battered wife. An asylum seeker. Witness to some violent crime, relocated by the govermnent, her new address designated by alghorithm.

On a darker flavour of walking away re: that affair:

Married men never leave their wives. And yet, I always knew he would. I had a sense that if I led by example, if I left my job and the city where I lived, if I showed him how easy it was to walk away from things, he would follow. I was shocked and unsurprised at the same time.

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Wyatt

Here’s art pop pioneer and soft machinist, Robert Wyatt:

I’m a real minimalist. I know some who call themselves minimalist, but they do loads of minimalism. That’s cheating. I really don’t do very much.

Thanks to reader Joe for sending this in. He says it has “Escapological resonance” and he is CORRECT.

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Bring Up Irrelevant Issues as Often as Possible

“The World War II-era Simple Sabotage Field Manual is full of steps that office workers can take to resist leadership,” writes Jason Koebler at 404.

Declassified by the CIA in 2008, it’s a handy booklet explaining how War-era workers could resist Fascism in Europe.

404’s point is that it can be used now to resist Trump and Musk in the US and, given that it’s going viral at the moment, it probably is.

What strikes me, however, is how the obfuscation techniqes are the same as ones deployed by leadership against workers who actually (perhaps insanely) want to get things done.

As a white-collar functionary who sometimes wanted to fix or improve things, I was constantly skuppered by this sort of bullshit. As such, I suppose, at least I know it works.

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Do You Want to Break Free?

There are two articles in Issue 17 about domestic labour, a type of work often overlooked when discussing post-work futures.

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 by choice, freeing yourself of the horrors of professional toil.

Which do you most relate to? Read Issue 17 to see the two positions writ large.

One of our readers, Russell, comments:

There can be a lot of joy in simple domestic tasks: cleaning the kitchen, sweeping the floors, pottering in the garage. They have a definitive end, and the tangible reward of a clean and tidy living space. I think the key to enjoying housework, for me, is a small home. In a smaller living space cleaning takes less time. Half an hour of vacuuming can be fun. Half a day, however, feels suspiciously like work.

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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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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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Well, that’s it for another month. I wasn’t sure I was going to do a newsletter this month as I’m supposed to be on sabbatical. But the ideas keep stacking up and who am I to igore them or to deny them to you?

Please treat yourself to an Issue 17, a 16, or a Good Life for Wage Slaves. You could even pre-order my forthcoming novel in expensive yellow hardback if you want a real adventure and don’t mind waiting.

Resist Tyranny! By which I mean: run away from it.

Robert Wringham x
Editor, New Escapologist