tinariwen

Some big things in the past couple of days:

Bought "Aman Iman: Water is Life" by Tinariwen, a group of Touaregs who started playing together as separatist rebels in Mali in the 80s. Their music is absolutely amazing. I realize at moments like this the disadvantages of my tendency to use lots and lots of superlatives without much regard for degree. This album blows me away every time I listen to it, it deserves superlatives that are beyond my vocabulary. A video follows of them playing with Santana at Montreux.

Finished "Four Quartets," by T.S. Eliot, which Dad mailed to me last week. It is stunning. I found that reading it reminds me a little of reading Spanish, in the sense that I really had to pay attention to every word, and to how every word related to every other word, in order to really understand what he was trying to say. This in contrast with, say, A Bend in the River, which I'm also reading, and can much more easily read without devoting my full attention to it. Dad: Thank you.

Jack was home last weekend and part of this week, and I got to talk to him on Monday night, which was great. He sounded tired (he'd gotten a vaccine earlier that day for El Salvador) but so good and it was really nice to hear his voice, hear how he's doing, what his plans are shaping up to be for the summer, and everything. I got to talk to Lincoln for a long time, too, which was also really nice. He's done with his first year and back home for the summer and I hadn't caught up with him for real in a while. Monday night was a good night. On a related note, Skype is a treacherous friend. On a note related to the last one (things that drove me completely off the wall this week), the IFSA-Butler/Michigan/DOE bureaucracy finally broke me. I can't write any more about that right now because my heart rate will start going up again and I'd rather maintain my current, calm state of mind.

One of my final projects (Political Economy) got pushed back and now is not due in preliminary form until the week after next. This removes a huge amount of pressure and will allow me to focus in my Electoral Systems final, which is due the 19. Speaking of David Altman (my Elec Sys professor), today he asked me to edit a paper he'd written in English comparing Uruguay and Switzerland. It's very interesting, not just because of the subject matter (I know little about Switzerland and less about Uruguay), but because it's strange to read the writing of someone who is clearly academically knowledgeable and accomplished but who is at the same time obviously not writing in his first language. So it's a mix of really obvious grammatical mistakes and interesting direct translations (you can say "como una moneda de esos sentimientos" in Spanish, but "as a coin of those feelings" doesn't really make sense in English; what he meant was "exemplifying those feelings") and elevated and technical language. I'm enjoying it a lot, plus it appears that I'll be compensated financially for my efforts.

Other important things have happened and this was originally going to be a long post, but I got distracted first yesterday and then today, so that's all you're gonna get at the moment. Oh, I saw Zodiac. Good movie.

Okay, so here's Tinariwen featuring Santana. Music starts a minute in.