Bennett Konesni, one of last year’s BLAST Cadre members, is travelling around the world right now on a Watson fellowship looking at work songs of farmers and fishermen. You can read the prevoius entry he sent us, and even more on his own blog.

It was- I’ll admit- a breezy, cookout-ideal, beachside concrete cube. But it was still a concrete cube. It was a domus of the sort that would appeal to soviet housing bloc designers, the sort without shelving or a fully-functioning door: a place that featured luxurious daily showers-from-a-cup. And for a short time, it was my home.

I lived in it for six weeks in Ghana as I learned fishing songs, battled tropical maladies, and considered the relative benefits of thatched roofing vs. corrugated tin. In truth, I did very little else. I cooked food in my one pot with my one spoon. I wandered down to the beach and back from the beach. I took bucket showers and stood around air-drying in the buff. Click here for the rest of this entry…