I have given up on Brexit, though I was amused by one of the Guardian’s semi-regular vox populi features on the weirdos who voted leave:
The 73-year-old former builder and engineer said he had been lied to by the leave campaign. “They didn’t tell us the true facts. They kept us in the dark like mushrooms and fed us bullshit,” he said. “We voted because of immigration and we didn’t realise how poor we would be. It will be terrible but I still want it, because of immigration.”
I suppose that is what it all comes down to.
I read a couple of interesting articles in the past few days:
- K-pop in the age of cultural appropriation, on how an implication of US cultural hegemony is that you can’t be accused of cultural appropriation, even from groups who are weaker within the US, because culturally they are still part of the US behemoth.
- The desire to unlearn, a personal narrative by a Nigerian student in Cyprus wishing he could unlearn what he had learned.
I also read Elie Wiesel’s Night which caught me by the throat and didn’t let go till I finished. What a work, and worth a reread as the Shoah recedes from living memory and the fascists are on the rise again.
The infuriation was with work, as I got an email last night after dinner that they had sent a report I had worked on to an external editor who had done a good job, certainly, but didn’t bother checking the word counts which now exceeded the system limits, and were the reason for the tight and occasionally inelegant language and phrasing. So I had to go through it carefully and undo just enough of the changes whilst keeping her good changes. Then I learned that a senior person was planning to read through the report and comment on it before submission, which is great, but the planned submission was over a month ago. I waited for the feedback till a quarter to midnight and then, as I finished Night I sent an email to say I was going to bed, and did so.