The Cash Machine Still Says "Enter to Exit"

• Work sucks, but the building ▲ is as photogenic as Olive.
• I hadn't followed Brexit as it doesn't matter what I think. I wish I could bring the same level of surrendered damn to this country's elections. What I gather is that Leave's victory is warning sign of a Trump victory. Also, the bad news is my pension is wiped out and I'll die before I retire, the good news is we're all gonna die sooner than we expected.
• Reminder.
• Neither Great nor British.
• Consequences.
• Doomed: Expect a lot of awful guff in the hours and days to come, as the professional explainers try to explain what just happened, with all their deep insight into the mind of some dissipating cartoon of a Brexiter. Already it's starting. Vague prognostications on Real, Ordinary Decent People squaring off against Out Of Touch Elites and Condescending Experts. Terrifyingly focused accusations that politicians didn't do enough to address that caricature's Perfectly Reasonable And Not Racist Concerns About Immigration. Both of which are true, in a way. But all these very not racist concerns about immigration and all this nebulous disdain for elites didn't come from nowhere. It's been shown, repeatedly, that migration is not actually putting people out of work or wearing down public services. Outright bigotry had its role, but people are Concerned because newspapers have been screaming at them for months and years that they have every right to be concerned and they shouldn't let anyone say they don't. Because the politicians who watched over decades of immiseration, happy to let anything halfway decent on this little island sink into fallow fields or be blotted out by shiningly inaccessible housing developments, were also happy to let the country's most precarious and unrepresented people take the blame. They let this happen. They might not have wanted it, but they let it happen.
• The view from London Review of Books: Jeremy Corbyn will get blamed for not having broken a lance, in fact barely a cocktail stick, on Remain’s behalf. But his stance made good political sense, as well as being born of sincere lack of conviction. The EU is a technocratic capitalist club. Remain had no convincing story, in fact no story at all, about how it can benefit unskilled and semi-skilled workers and the long-term unemployed, or how the structural tensions between its central institutions and democracy could be resolved. From the Labour leadership’s standpoint it made and makes good sense to lie low while the Tories slugs the daylights out of each other. Liberal Remainers’ fancy that the EU is a benign despotism friendly to worker and refugee alike has proven remarkably resilient to the facts.

• Serendipity be blessed, an Ubu song ▲ I might hear live tonight!
• The Left and the EU.
• The ideology of isolation.
• Exit Row.
• This too will pass.
• Meanwhile, Sanders and Warren go full Hillary and Warren brought donuts!
• Reyodel: the collapse, though inevitable and unstoppable, will be long and slow and gruesome. It's not my lifetime that's fucked, it's my daughter's. When she is my age it will be 2049. If there's a world, what world?
• Elena Ferrante. I've been resistant by three stupid biases: (1) The covers imply light chick fiction; (2) The reviews have implied a combination of Bildungroman and buddy story; (3) they are in vogue. I trust Ed, though, so I'll give the first one a try.
• RIP Ralph Stanley.
• HEY! I'M SEEING PERE UBU TONIGHT!

DEAR BOB

Dean Young

The mountain thinks it’s the same

without you but it’s wrong. Maybe

the same stars whisking themselves

further off, the darker the brighter,

same chamomile crushed underfoot

but the little, wiry dog we loved

has preceded us into paradise, not

that I expect to join her even though

my own crappy heart’s worse, running’s

out but I may be finally learning how

to sit in a chair. I still don’t know

what to call the good morning bird

although whatever word’d be no truer

than manzanita. I think namelessness

has a crush on me, on how clean

I keep my room, the usual stunned

ruckus of wake up. But it’s a different

moon, different woman on the hotel balcony

yet the same kinda scary, vacant stare,

caryatid foreseeing what? Before

turning back to the customary, immaculate

vacation squalor inside. The cash machine

still says “enter to exit” but there’s

more water in the creek than I’ve ever seen,

the brighter the darker, in that first dream

there was none.