New Escapologist : March 2023
Singing Songs of his Own Composition
Guten tag, one and all.
Welcome to New Escapologist, the electronic epistle for those who entertain the escape reflex. For ten years there existed a print magazine of the same name: it came to an end in 2017 but now we’re building up to a comeback.
I write to you this month from continental Europe, where I’m basically on vacation but where I’m also conducting research for the magazine. In Freiburg, I visited Jonathan Simons and his team at Analog Sea, a publisher and cultural institute whose work I’ve admired for the past four years. An early subscriber to New Escapologist, Jonathan is the real deal and his small team do everything the right way. As well as promoting real culture and philosophy, they’re deeply committed to staying offline: they have almost no web presence and Jonathan talked to me about the challenge of resisting Amaz*n who can apparently devour the data of those who make a special effort to avoid the tax-evading corporate monstrosity. As well as exchanging ideas and information about independently publishing a small press magazine, we recorded an interview for publication in a future New Escapologist. As we talked, my partner, Samara, sat quietly by and drew our portraits. It tickled! But it also felt like the sort of convivial creative moment that might lead to even bigger and lovelier things.
In Weimar, Samara and I visited the original Bauhaus University. We were expecting to join a walking tour but either it wasn’t running or we’d misunderstood the rendezvous point. We were ready to leave, thinking, “well, at least we came to the spot where it all happened,” but then I decided to just enter the main building anyway. I worked at Glasgow University for a while and it always amused me that, while the campus and many of its buildings were open to the public, few people ever ventured into the cloistered space. So we went inside to see frescoes and statues dating back to Bauhaus’s pre-War era and even a bust of founder Gropius himself. Our covert explorations stopped, however, at the door of the Director’s Office which was, perhaps sensibly, locked. Less covertly, we were able to visit the nearby Bauhaus Museum where, among other things, we saw independently-published books and artwork and pamphlets that may yet inform the future look of our magazine. Rest assured, it won’t be too fancy and we’ll keep it cheerfully cheap. In fact, that was a point of inspiration: talent and resourcefulness can make up for modest funding.
In Basel, our EasyJet Hotel room felt ominously like a prison cell, bewilderingly small, with no window and with a toilet in the room. Avoid it, mein kinder! It was considerably worse than any hostel dorm or €9-a-night Turkish pension I have stayed in. It was almost worth the not-particularly-low price to see the spectacle of it. I have asked for a refund, which, if successful, will go into our printing fund for the magazine.
But! You didn’t subscribe to this newsletter to read some guy’s what-I-did-on-my-holidays personal essay. I just wanted to tell you that work is deeply underway. Content is accumulating, along with ideas and designs. June 2023 will see a brand new New Escapologist to bring you the very latest in Scarpernautics.
Your starry-eyed friend,
Robert Wringham
New Escapologist
The Escape of Henry “Box” Brown
In the late 1840s, the brilliant Henry Brown found a novel way to escape slavery.
Sensing, perhaps correctly, that travel by conventional means would result in recapture, he decided to seal himself into a box and be express-mailed to freedom.
After twenty-six hours of rough handling by deliverymen, he was pried from his [box] and — being a deeply religious man — sung a song of thanksgiving he had written, based on Psalm 40.
As we often like to say in New Escapologist, an escape is best affected with a sense of showmanship and aplomb.
Additionally, there is no more satisfying way to make a living than by turning one’s entrapment or escape story into something lucrative. You can ironically use the machine’s burdensome weight against itself. “Indeed,” says Public Domain Review,
in the months directly following his escape, Brown took “Box” as his middle name; published The Narrative of Henry Box Brown, who Escaped from Slavery Enclosed in a Box 3 Feet Long and 2 Wide, Written From a Statement of Facts Made By Himself; and went on tour in New England, telling his story and singing songs of his own composition.
Superb.
Here’s a little more from Humanities journal:
Brown attained a form of nineteenth-century celebrity on the strength of his astonishing tale and flair for showmanship. He rode between speaking engagements inside a box identical to the one that had carried him from Virginia, accompanied by marching bands and American flags, before emerging onstage from the cramped conveyance and presenting scenes from his “Mirror of Slavery,” a painted canvas of one hundred scenes mounted on two enormous spools. Various iterations of the act, which evolved into a kind of vaudeville routine following the end of slavery, were performed in the United States, England, and Canada for decades.
Fifty years before Houdini first escaped a box, Henry Brown escaped in a box.
Observational Comedy of the Interior
Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.
Thus spake Halle Burton’s “Millie,” the temp worker protagonist of The New Me.
This novel is a tale of feeling awkward and not fitting in anywhere, best of all at work, which Millie finds alienating and a precarious nightmare.
I like this part:
I make $12 an hour, the best-paying job I’ve had in more than a year. If I’m paid twelve, they’re paying the agency at least fifteen, up to twenty, so in the middle let’s say eighteen, times thirty-five is $630 a week, times two weeks is $1,260, times two is more than $2,500 a month to have me, the idiot, sit in a chair, doing about four hours of work a week, sixteen hours of work a month, which puts the rate for my actual services at around $150 an hour.
It’s a strange paragraph to like in a novel, let alone to want to share. It’s all just numbers! But I remember those trains of thought while working as a temp myself. It’s well-observed. It’s observational comedy of the interior.
I don’t recall calculating my de facto hourly rate like that but I see what Butler means. Sometimes, I’d have so little to do that I’d almost feel guilty for making the money I needed to stay alive. Almost. Because I didn’t ask for that job. Except I did by applying for it. But I had to do that because I wanted to stay alive. Work isn’t consensual in the way most people like to describe it.
Back to those numbers. I remember learning that the agency was paid the same hourly rate as my own. My boss was paying double what I was actually getting, for secretively scrolling through Facebook and reading the Guardian and going slowly bananas. The agency was getting paid the same as me for doing nothing, but their share was for openly doing nothing.
The saddest financial calculation I remember making was on my very first morning when I mental-arithmeticed my way to the conclusion that, while I was already sick of it, I hadn’t yet made back the money I’d spent on a new shirt and bus fare. Urgh. Never forget!
The Return Journey From an Escape
This Guardian article isn’t up to much (and rather looks like someone pulling strings to promote their crime novel) but it illustrates the point than an escape, even one that fails or is temporary by design, is never a waste.
The writer and his partner left London for an eco-village in Spain. They subsisted on harvested fruit and solar energy, drank cheap wine, wrote books, and basked in the sun. After six years, they returned to London to pursue journalism work. Fair enough.
I often think about the return journey from an escape. Maybe your decision to become the new Yeti isn’t sustainable, or wasn’t meant to be, or you end up slouching back to society for company or medical care. Maybe you get tired of paradise and want to come back to the hustle and bustle. My own Great Escapes have not been from cities but from jobs. Occasionally I’ve taken jobs again, either from necessity (fail!) or by choice (freedom).
When you come back, you might think about the chorus of nay-sayers, real or imaginary, who said you could never do it, that you could never survive on dumpster-dived fried chicken alone.
But whether they were right or wrong, at least you tried. At least you had an adventure, lived up to your ideals for a while, will have fewer deathbed regrets. Importantly, you’ll have collected new skills that will always be useful, spiritually and practically:
While living in Los Molinos, we learned how to make cheap, nutritious vegetarian dishes. We coped without central heating, and survived the harsh winter nights […] When the sun didn’t shine we had so little electricity that sometimes we’d have to read by candlelight. As the cost of living continues to rise, I’ll be able to draw on these experiences. I like to think we brought a little bit of Spain back with us.
The Third Place
I always enjoy this guy’s videos about urban planning. Yes, they’re boring but that’s partly why I like them. And, ever self-aware, he makes fun of the boringness sometimes, like when he celebrated the success of a video about garbage day. Garbage is interesting, clearly!
Anyway, he has a recent episode about third places. Third places are places that aren’t your home or your workplace (or, I would possibly add, a commuter train or a supermarket). We’re talking about cafes, pubs, libraries, places of worship, parks, maybe gyms. Generally speaking, they’re free or low-cost and everyone is welcome.
There’s much to be said about third places Escapologically. For example, their apparent “thirdness” demonstrates mainstream social priorities, don’t you think?
But, importantly, they’re simply the kind of place adored by Escapologists. One of the things I don’t like about Christmas is that the libraries and museums and cafes all close. It’s no hardship just to stay indoors for a few days but, y’know, it’s a sad and spooky and a reminder that you’re out of step with the rest of the world.
Apparently third places are under threat, probably because they don’t directly make enough money. So use your library, take walks in the park, support your favourite local cafe or pub. Third places! Not boring at all but the stuff of life.
The Vast Grey Sleep
I’ve really fallen for James Baldwin. Yes, yes, you already know all about him. Revisiting his work has been popular since 2016, but I’m always a few years behind.
Here’s a nicely Escapological passage from one of his novels, Another Country:
There were no standards for him except for those he could make for himself. There were no standards for him because he could not accept the definitions, the hideously mechanical jargon of the age. He saw no one around him worth his envy, did not believe in the vast grey sleep which was called security, did not believe in the cures, panaceas, and slogans which afflicted the world he knew; and this meant that he had to create his standards and make up his definitions as he went along.
Who among us has not known that “vast grey sleep” when sitting at an office desk or in a traffic jam or while traipsing around a shopping mall in search of some annoying gizmo destined to become kipple? Who here has not questioned those “cures, panaceas and slogans”? Improvisation (the character described here is a jazz musician) and wit and reference to our own standards are no bad alternative. Perfect, perfect.
Dreamer Baldwin:
Oh wondrous art, whose mastery I seek / The art of Escapology, wild and free
I suppose I should have something positive to say about “AI” given some of the utopian ideas I’ve parped out in the past about full automation.
The thing is, I find the current conversation about AI utterly dull and boring. First of all, it’s not really AI. Robot chefs are just a variation on the teasmade. The chatbot things creating weird images and unconvincing conversational scripts are just algorithms. There’s no artificial intelligence involved from what I can see. The chat bots might give an illusion of artificial intelligence, but only inasmuch as a paper plate with a smiley face drawn on it gives the illusion of being your friend.
Secondly, the idea that it will “replace artists” is the sort of conversation that puts me to sleep. It’s like how people used to talk about music piracy. Computer “art” will replace some freelance gig work where magazine editors can be bothered to use it. Ultimately, though, it won’t “replace artists” because there’s no point. The point of art is to convey something human. The point of robot art, so far as I can see, is to cheat people out of make money.
I don’t hate or fear these AI things. I’m bored by them. You won’t see AI artwork in forthcoming print editions of New Escapologist: it will be made by my illustrator and artist friends because that’s the whole point. Not to keep them in work but to communicate something from one human brain to another. Psychonautics does not concern itself with illusory AI.
Even so, friend Sukanya sends me two examples of AI poetry about Escapology this morning. They’re quite funny.
But!
Many years ago, when I was starting out as a comedian, I did a thing called computer poetry. Working in the university library day, bored, I would ask the catalogue computer to “write poetry” by putting in a prompt to generate a list of books. I’d then read the results on stage at night.
The best poems were the ones with simple but oddly human prompts like “why” or “how”. Why do the heathens vainly rage? is a strange and evocative line that my wife and I still mention at home sometimes. Of course, it’s not really a line at all. It’s the title of a book. I believe this is how the new AI bots work too: by mashing up existing content.
All I’m saying is: I was ahead of the curve of this twaddle by about 15 years. And I didn’t do it because I thought it was clever; I did it because I was bored. Suck it, nerds. Your so-called genius is my thumb-twiddling.
Even so, here are Sukanya’s outputs.
Her first suggestion: Write an acrostic on Escapology.
AI response:
Eager to escape the mundane and the dull,
Clinging to the hope of adventure, oh so full,
Adept in the art of unlocking the impossible,
Prepared to face danger, with nerves of steel, unbreakable.
Soaring through the air, free as a bird,
Ascending to new heights, undeterred,
Longing for the thrill, to be absurd,
Overcoming obstacles, with movements, blurred.
Going beyond the limits, never to be confined,
Opening new horizons, leaving the old behind,
Living life on the edge, with a peace of mind,
Yearning for freedom, in escape to find.
Sukanya’s second suggestion: Please write a Shakespearean sonnet on Escapology.
(I like how she said “please” this time, like Ensign Sonya Gomez. Clearly she has already been convinced!)
AI response:
Oh wondrous art, whose mastery I seek,
The art of escapology, wild and free,
To break the chains that bind us, oh so meek,
And soar above the bonds of gravity.
With skillful hands and courage strong and true,
The Escapologist defies the laws of fate,
And like a bird takes flight, with naught to rue,
A master of the stage, so bold and great.
Yet still, within the heart of every man,
There lies a fear of being trapped and bound,
A fear that only freedom can withstand,
And in escapology, true freedom’s found.
So let us praise this art, this noble craft,
And let our spirits soar, unfettered, and laugh.
We’re doomed. I for one welcome our new sonnet-writing computer overlords. </sarcasm>
“Grafter” Wringham Slandered in Unprovoked Attack!
I’ve been promoting my new book, Melt It! The Book of the Iceman. It’s an extended interview with comedian and performance artist Anthony Irvine.
I’ve come to love Anthony. He’s a brilliant, funny, humble person. Together we’re like Ed Wood and Bella Lugosi: a hopeless young fool and a hopeless older fool united in optimism (or perhaps delusion).
Anyway, we did a promotional interview with our friend John Fleming for his blog. It was all clicking along rather nicely and I was explaining how the book happened:
We spent a day together at Battersea Arts Centre and we ended up with a 15,000 word interview with no waffle […] I approached some publishers and they all told me to get fucked. But then Chris from Go Faster Stripe saved the day. He’s got the right audience for it. Thousands of people with an interest in niche or fringe comedy and a lot of them know of The Iceman and want answers.
And then, suddenly, the Iceman says:
Rob was very good at glueing it all – freezing it all – together. He is hard-working; he’s a grafter; he works fast.
Naturally, I was appalled. Why was my new creative partner suddenly insulting me?
I think I said, “don’t tell people that! It took ages to establish my idler-wastrel persona!” but it didn’t make the cut.
Alas, I can see how Anthony came to this conclusion. I did work unusually hard on this book. Quickly too. The vision for it was so powerful in my mind that I just had to get it all out before something got in the way. (See my thoughts on “the right kind of work” re: Tove Janson).
I’m very proud of this unlikely project. As I say in the interview:
There’s not a single regret in it […] When I look at my other books, there’s always some weird phrasing or something I wish I’d done differently. This is just a perfect book.
Our book is not a New Escapologist project but the Iceman has certainly lived an unusual and outsiderish life. He’s certainly never been motivated by money or the other usual expectations. He was even a circus clown for a while. He’s a great case study for anyone wanting to live differently. It’s also just quite funny.* (*Afterword by TV’s Stewart Lee!)
Thanks for reading! This newsletter will always be free as an unfettered hummingbird, 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. Also still available are bundles of New Escapologist in print (1-7 and 8-13) or PDF (1-7 and 8-13). Anything you buy will make a direct contribution to the much-needed magazine print fund
Escape Beautifully,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk
