New Escapologist : January 2025
“Thank you, Jim,” says Captain Me
Ahoy Shipmates,
What have you been up to? I’ve been taking it very, very easy.
I’ve been playing video games for the first time since 1996, reading unedifying literature, gently strolling along, sleeping late. Ah, it’s the business.
This is all according to plan. As I mentioned last time and then self-importantly 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.
And so far, so good.
If you share my belief that work is EVIL and that rest is best, why not come along to my “Drink with the Idler” live Zoom thing this Thursday, January 16th?
King of the layabouts Tom Hodgkinson and I will spend an hour in conversation followed by a free-for-all Q&A. Feel free to say hello and ask a question of me and/or Tom. It should be fun. If you’re scared of Zoom (as I am, a little), you can still attend in shy mode with your screen off.
It’s the only thing on my to-do list for the next six months. Come one, come all.
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.
And 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 life 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 an old war shelter?
When he politely resisted eviction, the authorities complained that “the property has been developed without permission.” Developed! The property! Look at it! 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.
We salute you, Dreamer Morandi:
Issue 17 Reprint Anyone?
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 Feb 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 st00pid.
If you have Issues 14-16 already, your stack will soon look like this.
I know, right? Phwoar.
Please order your copy today if you don’t already have one. Last chance ever! And I really mean it this time. :)
Pirate Captain Jim
“Pirate Captain Jim” is a glorious work avoidance poem (well, it’s about the Peter Principle really) by Shel Silverstein, who rather looked like a pirate himself.
“Walk the plank,” says Pirate Jim.
“But Captain Jim, I cannot swim.”
“Then you must steer us through the gale.”
“But Captain Jim, I cannot sail.”
“Then down with the galley slaves you go.”
“But Captain Jim, I cannot row.”
“Then you must be the pirate’s clerk.”
“But Captain Jim, I cannot work.”
“Then a pirate captain you must be.”
“Thank you, Jim,” says Captain Me.
The Tapping of Keys
My good friend Tim recently read Shift Happens, a book about computer keyboards.
I mentioned this to some other friends, expecting 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.” What’s going on in the world? 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.
Cubed
The aforementioned Cubed by Nikil Saval was reviewed in the Guardian in 2014. The reviewer writes:
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.
Hah!
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.
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.
Let’s astonish through our art, our interactions with each other, and by how we live.
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 published version.
Reader G writes:
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!
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.
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.
Best wishes,
G
And that’s all for another month. Thanks for reading to the end.
Because of the sabbatical, I don’t know if I’ll do a newsletter every month until after June. Then again, I enjoy writing to you and it’s very easy to do, so maybe I will. Let’s wait and see. It is a leisure time.
Please remember to order an Issue 17 if you don’t already have one and/or would like to see a reprint.
The four-issue PDF/epub bundle is also good way to get the latest issues.
And maybe I’ll see you online on Thursday for the Idler livestream spectacuar.
In any event, stay slinky.
Your pal,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk
PS: Tarantula Caviar. A poem. By me.