New Escapologist : March 2024
He wasn’t afraid to cry “bullshit!”
Hello everyone,
Welcome to New Escapologist, the friendly newsletter from the magazine of the same name.
Before we dive into our stories for March, may I tell you about my sudden business need? The annual hosting bill for our website is due. An independent (and ad-free) website is vitally important to this project but I always feel the burn when the invoice drops. If you enjoy reading this newsletter and/or the blog, would you consider chipping in via Ko-Fi or PayPal? A couple of bucks/quid from a handful of readers would really help defray this boring but important expense. Alternatively, if you prefer something extra in return for a contribution, you could treat yourself to an epub and PDF of our latest issue for £8. Thank you!
And now… on with the show.
Frank Hank
Thanks to Reader S for sharing this amazing artefact. It’s a letter from poet-novellist Charles Bukowski to the man who freed him from his day job.
Publisher John Martin agreed to pay Bukowski a monthly stipend if only he’d agree to quit his time-wasting job as a mail clerk. In the letter, Bukowski shows his gratitude and follows it with an almighty complaint about the indignity of employment:
They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work.
Say what you like about Bukowski, but he was great at blowing the whistle. I think that’s one of the things people like about him. He wasn’t afraid to cry “bullshit!”
In Post Office he calls out the world of work. In its prequel, Factotum, he does the same for the world of art, expressing his frustrations with publishers, of not being allowed in for so long as a working-class man.
See how he describes his onetime fellow rat racers, with scorn but not without sympathy:
what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don’t want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.
As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can’t believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?
Beautiful, furious stuff. The whole letter is worth a read.
Are You Addicted to Workahol?
The Guardian has published some pretty tragic examples of workaholism:
When Marion’s workaholism caused her to lose the sight in one eye…
You don’t really need to finish that sentence for it to be a shocker. And yet:
…her response was to work even harder to prove she was healthy and fit enough to do her job.
And then:
John was hospitalised and off work for six months when he finally burned out after more than 20 years of workaholism. When he was eventually able to get up off the sofa on his own, his 21-year-old son had to physically struggle with him to prevent him from getting to his computer.
“I’ll always be ashamed of that,” John said.
I don’t want to make light of workaholism… but yikes.
The difficulty one might have in taking workaholism seriously is that “I’m addicted to work” sounds like (and often is) a humblebrag. It’s like saying “if I have one flaw it’s that I’m too perfect.”
So I’ll say this: we should take workaholism seriously because the very fact that we don’t exposes our messed-up values as a society. Hard work is considered a virtue. When it isn’t.
If there’s a fire and the firefighters “work hard” to extinguish the blaze then, yes, working hard is good. But that’s an extreme and short-lived example. Working hard at a PR agency? Working hard to stack cans of cat food? Working hard to become yet another influencer? Meh.
Treatment for workaholism is a welcome short term solution that picks up after a much bigger social problem. The long term solution is to change the way society thinks of work. Start with yourself perhaps.
A helpful phrase when you see people working hard is: “do you want a medal for shovelling shit uphill?”
Sagittarius
I saw a YouTube video today where someone was asked “what they do.”
She said “I’m a Sagittarius.”
Whatever you think about astrology, that’s a great way to escape that stupid question.
Two cheers to the Sagittarius.
Going Bankrupt
I just read Jess Walters’ novel, The Financial Lives of the Poets.
It’s a bit like Breaking Bad, though I don’t think anyone copied. The author must be pretty tired of hearing the comparison too, especially as his real name is a combination of Breaking Bad’s main characters.
In this version of the story, the respectable family man who becomes a drug dealer is not motivated by cancer but by debt.
The plan to sell drugs (pot in this case, not meth) to his respectable middle-aged friends comes to nothing in the end and he just ends up filing for bankruptcy.
The final scenes involve sending his two kids to the cinema without him (because he can only afford two tickets) and splitting a single ice-cream cone with his wife. This newfound hardship is portrayed as relatively noble, the detox our guy needs if he’s to turn over a new leaf.
As it’s portrayed, the simple life of the bankrupted maker of bad decisions is remarkably similar to my own. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment. He doesn’t have money to squander on cinema tickets. Etc.
I chose this life so I can get on with poorly-recompensed cultural production. It’s more important to me to be a writer than to live materially well. It’s the old starving artist model. I never feel like I’m starving though and our small apartment is enough. I’m not complaining.
But unlike me, the guy in this novel enjoyed a decades-long joyride through material wealth and debt generation before coming to accept less. I didn’t have the fun of that! What’s more, the consequences of his joyride were minimal. Bankruptcy didn’t lead to homelessness. He just had to liquidate and downsize. So what?
He says he has “bad credit” now and must claw back his reputation as a borrower through frugality and hard work, but in my experience “bad credit” doesn’t matter a great deal. We didn’t have good credit when shopping for our first non-rented home because, averse to borrowing, we’d never generated debt or therefore paid any off. I’d been warned about this in advance by well-meaning friends, but it turned out not to matter at all: we bought the flat we wanted. Nobody gave a hoot about our credit, “good” or otherwise. Credit turned out to be something of a bogeyman.
I sometimes wonder if my aversion to debt is too extreme. Maybe I should max out a bunch of credit cards and be happy. I could skip the acquisition-and-liquidation of a McMansion part of the story and spend the bank’s money on good food and travel instead, non-material experiences they won’t be able to reclaim to punish me. Maybe that’s what we should all do.
I sense that this is a bad idea. But after reading that novel I’m not entirely sure why.
This is an aside, but typing the word “bankrupt” just now reminded me of this entry from my diary last year:
When I ask Friend J how it’s going, he says: “I’m physically, emotionally, spiritually, morally, and financially bankrupt.”
The White Pearl
Tiny Home videos are ten a penny on YouTube now, but they’re united by the same drives to independence. “Tinies” are cheap compared to most conventional housing and to build one can be a worthwhile labour of love.
This particular example isn’t a self-build exactly but a converted van. The occupant is a wood turner and he’s done a lovely job of it.
What captures my imagination is its self-containedness. The guy has everything he needs (his craft, his independence, his transport, his mental health, his security and comfort) in a single mobile capsule. It’s eminently practical yet also romantic. Delightful.
It’s rare for me to be charmed by a vehicle-based home (other than boats of course) but this one’s fab.
On Fences and Scarecrows
I was thinking about low-tech automation this morning.
My walk to the Post Office sometimes takes me past a school. There’s a big fence around the playground but I can hear the kids running around like hellions inside.
I had a reflexive curmudgeonly thought that it’s a shame we can’t see the kids playing because there are baddies in the world who spoil it for everyone but of course the kids need to be protected, etc.
When I was that age (in the 1980s) we didn’t have tall fences around the playground and we’d regularly talk and be cheeky to passersby. There were playground supervisors to make sure we weren’t too cheeky and that we weren’t kidnapped.
The fence, it strikes me today, is a form of low-tech automation. A fence around a school playground removes the need for (or at least reduces the workload of) so many supervisors.
We generally think of digital technology when we talk about automation, about how so-called AI is dispensing with the need for copywriters or how robotic appendages reduce the need for assembly line laborers. But a fence is a sort of automation too.
So is a scarecrow. AI’s just another name for a turnip on top of an old duffel coat really. It keeps the crows off so you don’t have to.
I’m not entirely sure what to do with this thought. Seen one way it says “don’t sweat, automation has been going on for years” but you could also use it to say “AI is just the latest threat in an ongoing war against wages.”
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Personally, I’m still in favour of using automation to get rid of the sort of mindless jobs that corrode the soul, but I recognise the problem of how we can all pay for our lives when there’s no more entry-level work. The long term solutions seem to be either UBI (in which we’re paid for leisure) or bullshit jobs (in which we’re paid to waste our life). The latter destroys life and gives birth to Escapology. The effects of the former remain to be seen, but subsidising the basics sounds like a badge of civilisation to me.
Another option nobody’s talking about is that we just set up a whole new economy separate to the old one. Start again basically. When people talk about books being “written by” AI, I sometimes think “great, how about making some bots that will read the shitty things as well.” While AI’s talking to AI and while buying and selling just happens between AI systems, maybe we can all just get on with real things. Like writing and reading and talking to each other and feeling the sun our faces.
Go!
Issues 14 and 15 are now both SOLD OUT in our online shop.
Sorry. I’ll order more copies next time. (And you can pre-order the June issue now to help me gauge the number we’ll need).
But don’t despair. Try the digital editions (14, 15) and you can join our mailing list for news of future issues.
There’s also still physical stock in the world at these locations. Now please recreate It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World to ensure that you get one of the last few copies. Go!
Thank you for reading once again, my flapping flamingos. There was a very pleasing uptick in newsletter followers this month. Someone must be talking about me somewhere. If you’re one of the newbies: welcome! This is a broadly positive newsletter, spinning off from a real-world magazine I started in 2007 and (which continues today). We stand against hard drudgery and stand for happy, frugal, creative life. Life is brief, let’s love it while it’s here, you know? 💀
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Ceasefire now,
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk