• From the depths of Michigan State’s college of arts and letters website, there’s an archive of literary talks by some real writer-celebrities: Atwood, Irving, McCullough, Sontag, Updike, Vonnegut, and a bunch more. The files are in .rm format, but VLC comes to the rescue.
• Speaking of literature, here’s a bummer of a Wikipedia list: book burning incidents throughout history.
• George Harrison spent some time at Dylan’s place at the end of 1968 and came home with an early copy of the Basement Tapes. The Beatles never recorded a proper take of it, but they did a few off-the-cuff recordings of “I Shall Be Released” the next month at the Get Back sessions. Elvis did his own little take in ’71.

I like how the production of this video allows you to slip into someone else’s musical world for a moment. It’s also nice to see most people’s street faces turn to a smile once they understand the question.

Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks – Ilya Repin (1880)

Set in 1676, this painting depicts the scrappy Cossacks writing a legendary reply to a demand for submission by the Sultan of the Ottoman empire. Their vulgar letter is the stuff of myth (it circulated like a 17th century meme), but no one seems to put it past the Zaporozhians to have really sent it. Read the full correspondence on Wikipedia.

Sometimes PBS shows this hour-long documentary by Richard Proenneke about his time in the Alaskan wilderness, but I’d never caught the whole thing. In it, he builds a log cabin and spends a year alone. And he would spend 30 more there after that. In contrast to Christopher McCandless and Timothy Treadwell, it’s captivating to watch a lifetime of peaceful experience at work.

How Charlie Christian joined Benny Goodman’s band:

The encounter that afternoon at the recording studio had not gone well. Charles recalled in a 1940 Metronome magazine article, “I guess neither one of us liked what I played”, but Hammond decided to try again—without consulting Goodman, he installed Christian on the bandstand for that night’s set at the Victor Hugo restaurant in Los Angeles. Displeased at the surprise, Goodman called “Rose Room“, a tune he assumed that Christian would be unfamiliar with. Unknown to Goodman, Charles had been reared on the tune, and he came in with his solo—which was to be the first of about twenty, all of them different, all unlike anything Goodman had heard before. That version of “Rose Room” lasted forty minutes; by its end, Christian was in the band. In the course of a few days, Christian went from making $2.50 a night to making $150 a week.

• Solar System Scope is a nifty Google Maps-like application for checking in on our closest neighbors. I like the real-time view.
• Simple, reliable examples of chord progressions spelled out with Nashville numbers. The first few have people actually singing the numbers.
• This call for an open wireless movement from the EFF sounds good, but it doesn’t even get into privacy and location tracking from things like Skyhook. It seems open wireless would enable those technologies as well, or maybe it would add an important layer of deniability. A lot depends on the vague new protocol they propose.