Literate Cities
This survey informs[1] me that Atlanta (the city where I have become semi-Whitmanic in the nearly half a decade of livin', spent eating fried chikin', grits and poetry) is the third most "literate" city in USA. It ties in the third spot with Washigton DC. The two cities above it are Seattle and Minneapolis. Who would have thunk?!
The survey (somehow) takes measures of the following six different literacy categories: Booksellers; Educational attainment; Internet Resources; Library Resources; Newspaper Circulation; and Periodical publications, and normalizes it with the city's population to come up with its degree of literate-ness. Of these six measures, I can personally attest to the excellence of Dekalb County's (one of the three metro ATL's counties) public library system.
While library resources, newspaper circulation, and periodical publications of a city can be a fair surrogate measure of its literateness, this survey fails to account for how conductive a city is to someone's literary activity. Thus, unable to measure the ability of a city to produce literarture rather than just consume it, the survey unsuprisingly ranks New York City (in whose environs I will become more persistant) somewhere in the deep 30s. Humbug!
[1] AJC, the city newspaper had reported on this survey last year when ATL was ranked 4th on this survey.
My Daily Notes
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Banlieue 13
These days my movie viewing rarely veers into the action zone; it must be all those lame attempts of mine to meditate in the imitation of the Buddha, or even more depressingly that steady increase in oestrogen levels swirling inside me as I age. Anyway, give me a nice Hallmark or Oxygen Channel-type drama of a movie, and you get a contended me rising from the seat with a supressed sniffle or two.
When I borrowed a French movie titled "Banlieue 13" from the library last week, I thought it would be some drama set in the Parisian ghettos that went up in flames and riots last year. Yes, the setting was very much those slums but instead of a nice drama what I got smacked on the face with was a full blooded action movie with an opening sequence that seemed like a French speed-tripped reply to the brilliant chase scene in "Ong Bak", the last action movie I will admit to seeing at the movies.
I later googled for B-13, and discovered that the chap performing in that opening sequence, David Belle, is a master of an urban street sport called "parkour" - a sport that consists of using one's body to elegantly "flow" and "fly" through the built environment. If this sport has a motto, it must be a Zen-like, along the lines of letting the body be one with the building that one is ascending or descending. My bones are too inflexible to do the stuff these guys do with seeming effortlessness but I must admit I am hooked to watching parkour performances such as this, this and this.
Movie Posts
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