Ismaël Lô came into my life thanks to Pedro Almodóvar’s film Todo sobre mi madre. His song “Tajabone” formed the background of a haunting scene of a taxi ride though Barcelona; beginning in the mountains, passing the Sagrada Familia, and ending in prostitution-filled outskirts. Lô is a Senegalese musician and it is the multilingual nature of his music that brings me to share him today. Years ago I was introduced to his duet “Without Blame,” sung with Marianne Faithfull. It is a song that soundtracked various moments in my life and yesterday returned when I was washing the dishes. There is just something special about music’s ability to meld two languages. Enjoy.

José Andrés has crossed my path several times. He’s from Asturias, a part of Spain where I have family and friends. It’s a region that likes to eat; a place where lunchtime conversation is about dinner and dinnertime talk focuses on tomorrow’s lunch. To be a chef that sticks out in that region means cooking well. His restaurants in the US have been successful and I was lucky to eat at one in Washington DC a couple of years ago. Since then, he has taken the special skills for cooking good food for lots of people to Haiti and Puerto Rico, places that had suffered natural disasters and were not receiving the help they needed. Today he was interviewed on NPR and it is worth hearing. It is exciting to find someone who so obviously feels strongly about good food and helping people.

​Last year I wrote some thoughts about the advantages and disadvantages of online learning. Suffice to say, I think the positive outweighs what is lost when taking a course via the internet. For this reason, I not only continue to teach online courses, but I’m trying to do it more often. Again, I don’t want to repeat what I wrote before, but it is wonderful how accessible online learning is for people who might otherwise have difficulty finding their way to a classroom.
 
With this in mind, it is exciting to announce that this fall I’ll be teaching a graduate-level course on Latin American and US Latino culture. You can find all the details at this link. I’m looking forward to the experience. 

​Whether or not it is okay to separate children from parents at the US border continues to divide opinion in the US. The back and forth between the various actors recalls countless political games, only this time children and families suffer through move and counter move. Greg Weeks created a good summary of the latest, but with the subject’s fast developments, he did not have a Pro Publica report that included audio of crying children and indifferent police.
 
Said simply, this has been created by Trump and the people in his administration. They decided to supercharge this divisive issue. They have the power to stop it at any time. However, in some unfathomable calculation, they have determined that it is not only a clever idea, but that it should continue. Perhaps the goal is, as Weeks suggests, to hold the kids hostage so Trump can force funding for his wall. Or maybe he wants the emotional reaction, so the public is distracted from his ever-growing legal issues. The math that went into the decision is not interesting to me. This is not a game. The result is child abuse.  

Researching in the British Library has a lot of advantages. Beyond the enormous resources, there is also knowledgeable staff. It can be a little expensive, but the food in the cafeteria is excellent. There is also a museum section. This last one is particularly great when your mind needs to separate from work and wonder for a few minutes.

One thing that fascinates me about art in a museum is the ability to see the detail of a painter’s strokes or the marks of a sculptor’s fingers. I like the idea of thinking that the mad genius whose work I’m admiring had (Lovingly? Obsessively?) touched the object. This experience augments the human element in the artistic equation. In literature and music this isn’t common. We hear a piece or read a book. The composer or author is there in many ways, but often biography and historical context are the limits of his or her presence. The British Library, however, makes possible an experience akin to the art museum. They have handwritten music by Beethoven on display. You can see Stravinsky’s penciled corrections. There is a property deed with Shakespeare’s signature. Nearby, a letter Elizabeth I wrote rejecting the Duke of Anjou’s offer of marriage. One of my favorites to visit was a display on English literature. It included the original pamphlets where Dickens -paid by the word!- published The Pickwick Papers. It also had a manuscript of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, complete with the author’s corrections. Having already counted myself as one more person who tried and failed to read this book, it was wonderful to see the pages filled with Joyce’s inconsistently sized writing, crossed out words, and lines connecting thoughts with different colored notes. The words on the page did not move in straight lines, but in oceanic waves, floating from one side to the next. Every few weeks the people who curated the museum would turn the copy on display to another couple of pages. They were all the same. One after another, covered in corrections and wild writing. Years earlier, a professor had referred to Finnegans Wake as the exhaustion of the novel. For him, the book was a great scream that pushed the form to its limits. Seeing Joyce’s handwritten manuscript somehow made that argument seem even more precise.
 
This weekend I read an article in The New York Times. It was about a Boston professor’s efforts to create a definitive edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. The man was described in a way that evoked an eccentric genius who was consumed with the minutiae of his subject. He went so deep that he sort of disappeared and some of his colleagues even thought he had died. I won’t reveal what happened to him, but suffice to say, reading the article brought back memories of the British Library. I hope you enjoy.

​Where is north on your moral compass? How well does it calibrate with the idea of a government official, someone acting in your name, forcefully separating a child from his or her mother? Language was where it began. Instead of referring to someone as a person, we forced them into the tight confines of labels like “immigrant,” “Hispanic,” or “illegal”. Once their humanity was displaced it became easier for these people to be treated in ways that are, said simply, inhumane.
 
In a healthy society, inhumane treatment should be rejected. When it is done by the government, that rejection should become protest. CNN has many faults. However, much of yesterday they dedicated their front page to humanizing the consequences of Trump’s policy of separating immigrant children from their parents. One article’s particularly heartbreaking headline: “She says federal officials took her daughter while she breastfed the child in a detention center”. The story contained details that deepened the cruelty: “When the woman resisted, she was handcuffed”. This is sickening.
 
In my mind, I want mothers to feed their children. It is natural and right that children are cared for by their parents. How do we justify breaking this bond? We hide behind legal terminology. The language of the law becomes a buffer between our actions and our moral compass. We need to reconnect to those morals and act accordingly.
 
CNN appears to be trying. This morning’s front page focuses on the same issues. This cruelty began with words. Let’s hope that more words can push us back towards our humanity.