- RIP: Leon Russell. The tribute A Show For You: A Leon Russell Appreciation is not only worth a listen…it includes my friend Gardner!
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Also, RIP: Mose Allison. If you aren’t familiar with Allison (or even if you are), this ►Mose Allison YouTube playlist is worth a spin or three.
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Staying on the sound and music theme, behold Soundbreaking, an “eight-part series [that] explores the art of music recording, and offers a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of brand new sounds. Featuring more than 160 original interviews with some of the most celebrated recording artists of all time.” [Thanks, Reader F.]
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“The Internet Archive Manual Library is a collection of manuals, instructions, walkthroughs and datasheets for a massive spectrum of items.” → More than 77,000 of them for everything from military manuals like the PAM 21-41 Personal Conduct For The Soldier to manuals for computer games, synthesizers, vending machines and more. [Thanks, Reader A.]
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The pens of the world’s most famous authors. [Thanks, Reader N.!]
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The always interesting Atlas Obscura says, “this frozen tunnel in central Alaska is both an engineering feat and a valuable climate classroom.” And it’s only 15 miles from me. → Permafrost Tunnel [Thanks, Reader K.]
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Unfathomable is, as Reader B. says, “…awesome: good writing, wild invention, terrifying threats, inspirational success.”
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Today in 1923, South African writer, activist and Nobel Prize in Literature winner Nadine Gordimer is born outside Johannesburg. The daughter of a passive Russian refugee father and an activist mother, Gordimer would go on to write more than a dozen novels (at least three of which were banned in South Africa) and close to two dozen collections of short fiction, almost all of which probed the subtleties of race, love and politics in South Africa. Winner of practically every major literary award (and recipient of 15 honorary degrees), Gordimer joined the African National Congress when it was illegal to do so, advised Nelson Mandela during his trial and was active in the anti-apartheid movement and many post-apartheid causes. “The truth isn’t always beauty,” Gordimer would write in The London Magazine, “but the hunger for it is.”
Addendum: in Gordimer’s excellent Nobel Lecture, she makes an observation that remains critical today at near- and far-remove:
“… In retaining this integrity, the writer sometimes must risk both the state’s indictment of treason, and the liberation forces’ complaint of lack of blind commitment. As a human being, no writer can stoop to the lie of Manichean ‘balance’. The devil always has lead in his shoes, when placed on his side of the scale. Yet, to paraphrase coarsely Márquez’s dictum given by him both as a writer and a fighter for justice, the writer must take the right to explore, warts and all, both the enemy and the beloved comrade in arms, since only a try for the truth makes sense of being, only a try for the truth edges towards justice just ahead of Yeats’s beast slouching to be born.”