New Escapologist : June 2025 + THE KICKSTARTER CONTINUES

The Nasty Secretary Liberation Front

Hello everyone,

The big ole’ Kickstarter continues. It did extremely well in the first couple of days, making target almost immediately. This is excellent news and means there will definitely be four more print editions of New Escapologist, taking our project into 2027. *party horn noise*

You can, of course, still pledge. I’d be glad if you did. What we have now is enough money to print and ship four new issues over two years, but there’s not currently enough money to pay myself or any other contributor. So here’s that link again. Tell your wealthiest, laziest, most flight-risky friends. And if you’d like to subscribe or to purchase Issue 18 without using Kickstarter, you can do so at our online shop.

Bless you, my escaped parakeets,

Robert Wringham
Editor, New Escapologist
www.newescapologist.co.uk

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The Arbitrary Whim of Some Jerk Manager

Stomach hurt? Headaches? Nervous twitches appearing in odd places? Regular nightmares about work? You’ve caught it! STRESS!! The effects of stress can be quite far-reaching. Among the more fearsome results are heart disease, nervous system disorders, assorted inexplicable physical malfunctions, sometimes even dramatic pain.

This is from a zine-like pamphlet circulated in the 1980s by a group called the “Nasty Secretaries Liberation Front” (and naturally, I want to find out far, far more about them).

Everything about it is remarkable, correct, and ahead of its time:

When you “get” stress, have you caught something? Or is it more accurate to say that we are all caught by situations which force us to put up with ridiculous and humiliating demands, as often as not simply to fulfil the arbitrary whim of some jerk manager?

Stress is not a result of individual failings. It is the result of an irrational and inhumane society. The solution to stress will not be found in any special seminar, or in any special meditation or exercise techniques (though it is true that some such techniques help some people temporarily cope with some results of stress). Stress is such a fundamental part of contemporary society that it will take a deliberate restructuring of the social order to reduce it in any real sense.

Listen to the Nasty Secretaries, y’all.

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Refusal

Bartleby (1853):

I would prefer not to.

Anthropologist Carole McGranahan on refusal (2016):

To refuse is to say no, but, no, it is not just that. To refuse can be generative and strategic. A deliberate move toward one thing, belief, practice, or community and away from another. Refusal illuminates limits and possibilities, especially but not only of the state and other institutions.

Jenny Odell in Saving Time (2023):

Refusal may start in you but cannot end in you. It must be spoken, in messages, in magazines, in forums, and off-hours, in an ongoing “rehearsal.” In summoning a world, it is the most creative thing you could possibly do.

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Zombie Sighting

Gabriel Josipovici’s pandemic-era diary and essay collection, 100 Days, is full of wisdom, wit, and rage. But look at this:

F, many years ago [asks me] ‘why do you lay the table for breakfast the evening before? You might want quite different food or no breakfast at all.’ I try to explain that when I come downstairs to make breakfast, I don’t really want to have to think, just to make it automatically, since I don’t feel properly awake til I’ve had my cup of tea.

I am vindicated! He harnesses the zombie!

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Ennui

By “the problem of leisure,” Stuart Whatley in the New Statesman (a generally left-wing periodical) refers to the idea that most people wouldn’t know how to spend their time if they no longer had to work. Or, worse, that they would spend it deleteriously. It’s the “lotus-eater” theory in which we all become the obese layabouts of WALL-E.

I’ve long found this a patronising right-wing position. My position is that, after a period of idling, most people will want to act, to help themselves and the world in some way. But what if I’m wrong?

Over a decade of writing and thinking about modern work and its opportunity costs, I have generally mentioned the “problem of leisure” only in passing, largely because I would like to believe that it is soluble. Yet the political situation in the United States (and some other industrialised democracies) demands a reckoning, and it cannot be understood without reference to misspent leisure.

Whatley worries that the nihilistic politics that led to Trump and Vance in the US (and to Starmer and, perhaps inevitably, a PM Farage in the UK) and to an inward-looking rejection of optimistic internationalism, was caused by an ennui inherent to increased and misspent leisure time coupled with an increase in boring and/or bullshitty work.

I’d argue that leisure time isn’t increasing, not in recent years anyway. It increased over the 20th Century thanks to well-organised labour movements, but we’re in the gig economy now, where, for many, every hour would appear to have some small cash value and must be hungrily seized upon as a matter of survival. I can’t deny, however, the sort of alienation from work he describes seems to be increasing (it’s certainly why I wanted to escape) and the likelihood that some people fall into a Leisure Trap of “an endless stream of video content or chocolate cake or edibles or any other indulgence cannot deliver lasting satisfaction. Everything gets old eventually, leaving one to grope around for the next fix.”

And yet he does not give up on my sort of optimism:

Yet solutions to the problem of leisure exist throughout our own wisdom tradition, which stresses the value of friendship (Epicurus), contemplation (Aristotle), and “other-regarding” public service (Cicero). These basic human goods have been severely eroded, producing an age of loneliness, inattention, and ginned-up tribalism; but each could be reclaimed with sufficient free time and a proper command over it. While there will always be demagogues, conspiracists, and cult leaders, they would have no purchase over a people who can find fulfilment in themselves.

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The Unthinking Steps

There are seven flights of steps up to our flat: six main ones plus the one that takes you up to the main staircase from the ground level. I call that first flight “the unthinking steps.”

Basically, I find the ascent of the stairs really boring. There are small things I can do to alleviate the boredom, such as fishing the door keys out of my pocket, but there aren’t enough of these small things to occupy my mind all the way to the top.

So instead of squandering my “entertainment” on that very first flight, I try to empty my head of thoughts completely. It’s a little exercise in mindlessness.

It doesn’t always work. Once I’m in the building, I start thinking automatically about the things I’ll do once I’m home. But I try to quash that automatic process for the few seconds that it takes to climb the unthinking stairs.

The idea is to survive the boredom of the repetitive ascent up the stairs. But it’s also to slow down, to stop planning or letting the mind fly too soon into the future.

Do you have an unthinking stairs or similar?

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Rebellion Behind the Typewriter

Well, I said I wanted to find out more about the Nasty Secretary Liberation Front.

It turns out they were a precursor to Processed World magazine, a publication so shockingly similar to New Escapologist in spirit that you’d think we’d based New Escapologist on it. We didn’t. I found the archive of Processed World about four years ago and I’ve been meaning to do some sort of deep dive project on it ever since, though I am not yet sure how that will manifest itself.

The Nasty Secretaries were also known as the Union of Concerned Commies and the people behind it went directly on to form Processed World.

The pamphlet referred to above was their first publication (1980). It was a single A4 sheet called Innvervoice #1, a pun on “invoice,” and details the costs of various things you have to do at work, almost Christie Malry-style.

There are many references to it online but it took some digging to actually find a scan. I found it via the Wayback Machine in the end, and here it is:

The cost of “transportation to and from work (unpaid)” is “your leisure time”. The cost of a raise is “1 brown nose.”

I love the “nonsense” rubberstamp. Shall I have some of those made and put them up for sale in the shop? Would you promise to use them at work?

This is the reverse:

There has been no edition of Processed World since 2005. New Escapologist began in 2007. To help us continue to carry the flame into 2027, please subscribe or otherwise back our Kickstarter campaign. Thanks!

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All of Us or None

If you’re at all interested in prison reform or abolition, want to learn more or do something about the anti-humanist and often-racist system of mass incarceration, author and interesting character Jenny Odell lists the following groups (via activist, Black Panther and prisoner Alfred Woodfox) in her recent book Saving Time*:

• All of Us or None

• Safe Alternatives to Segregation Initiative

• Stop Solitary

• Critical Resistance

• Prison Legal News

• Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

I also found a group called Vera, which is where this shocking photograph came from.

Additionally, I’d recommend (as reviewed in Issue 14) Criminal: How Our Prisons Are Failing Us All by Angela Kirwin and A Bit of a Stretch by Chris Atkins.

(*We’ll be reviewing Saving Time in Issue 18.)

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Morris Quarter

Every year, Freddie Yauner undertakes an “homage to William Morris from 1st January to 24th March (Morris’s birthday), where he attempts to ‘become’ William Morris whilst making new works.”

It’s an art project. He calls it his “Morris Quarter,” three months spent living under the guise and driven by the ethics of William Morris. That name reminds me of a moment in Nathan Barley where a trendy magazine editor is interrupted in his “Ape Hour.”

I do like the idea of trying to “become” someone else though, of living in homage so thoroughly. It offers a sort of escape. Escape the self, escape even the century, by living in a semi-delusional state for personal pleasure and for the common good.

“I begin my Morris quarter by rereading [Morris’] 1890 novel News from Nowhere,” he tells the Guardian, I read his other works, too, and try to build skill sets he had.”

I’ve had singing lessons to sing his socialist chants, made prints on his letter press in his house in Hammersmith, west London, and designed wallpaper based on the River Lea. Morris knew the river well and named one of his patterns after it. I’ve also made socialist flags in Leyton, east London, where his mum lived while Morris was at Oxford.

I have also learned embroidery from my mother and taught it to my children. Morris taught his daughter, May, to embroider, and she became one of the greatest craftspeople in Britain.

Eccentricity is good. In this case, it offers Yauner a self-made and good-humoured escape hatch into a life of collective-minded creativity.

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Letter to the Editor: tsunami after successive tsunami of mindless dross

To send a letter to the editor, simply write in. You’ll get a reply and we’ll anonymise any blogged version.

Reader A comments:

Hi, Rob. I think most people actually want to work but want their work to mean something. If there’s en-masse alienation from work, I’d like to believe it’s because the conditions are generally so gruelling and/or dehumanizing (unfortunately too often its both) that work gets assigned many negative attributes. But I think that deep in most people is the desire to contribute to society in some positive way. Unfortunately, at some point it was decided that wage slavery was the best way to harness that.

And if people engage in what one could call non-legitimized leisure, it’s got to be at least in part because the gruelling, mind-numbing, dehumanizing work saps all but the barest energy to take care of other things people prize. Not to mention the absolute tsunami after successive tsunami of mindless dross that is often the only or the only-too-accessible source of leisure pursuits that fills in the bit of time many leave themselves for perhaps higher pursuits.

This isn’t at all meant to be an apology for our current conception of work nor for the maddeningly high rate of intellectual and aesthetic complacency amongst our fellow humans. But the odds are so stacked against having a largely enlightened and self-actualized citizenry that it’s impossible to leave zero room for believing that we could be happier, healthier, and more well-adjusted individually and collectively if we just had the conditions to favour it.

Hi A. I also believe that people want to make a contribution, to do something to help solve the problems of the world as they see them. The problem is the way work is currently organised along the wage system, as well as the interlocking mechanism of consumerism that keeps us working for money. That and the Taylorist division of labour and the abolition of meaningful personal agency over how we spend our time.

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That’s all for June, my lovelies. I’m don’t believe I will assault the mailing list about the Kickstarter again, so here’s where to go if you’d like to help out and guarantee yourself four lovely instalments of New Escapologist magazine to read on the sofa, on the train, in bed, in the office lunch room, on the beach, in the bath, or when you’re supposed to be working. Enjoy! And thank you.

Your friend with bat wings, twelve legs and an eyeball at the end of a roving tentacle who is a normal man,

Robert Wringham x
www.newescapologist.co.uk
www.wringham.co.uk