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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End of A Species
WSJ ran the following AP story today on an ending that made me sad for a long minute:
A rare, nearly blind white dolphin that survived for 20 million years is effectively extinct, an international expedition declared Wednesday after ending a fruitless six-week search of its Yangtze River habitat. The baiji would be the first large aquatic mammal driven to extinction since hunting and overfishing killed off the Caribbean monk seal in the 1950s.
Apart from the larger reason of the diminishment of the universe that happens when a species simply vanishes, I have a more personal reason: one of my most magical memories from my college days in India was seeing a pair of river dolphins (which I think are related to the baiji, and are similarly endangered), next to the boat's stern in which I was travelling in the Gangetic delta. Here is a poem by Wendell Berry since I can't write an elgy for the baiji myself:
For The Future
Planting trees early in spring, we make a place for birds to sing in time to come. How do we know? They are singing here now. There is no other guarantee that singing will ever be.
My Daily Notes
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Archived Comment: Six Word Narratives
Ek Haath Ka Pyaar (Bollywood Edition, Six Words)
Jadoo hai. Nasha hai. Size nahin.
"Roop tere mastana", he whispered, fondling.
"Kuch tho hota hai?!", he exclaimed.
"Rageela re", he murmured, licking moustache.
"Lage raho bahi!", his friends smirked.
Note: SM is running a must-read "bad sex" 55 words flash-fiction thread, and this is my second contribution after my prior riff on "Moby Dick" was flagged for being too verbose. Excuse me as I must now go watch Govinda in “Sarkailo Khatiya”.
My Daily Notes
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