LITERANISTA Dialogue on Multicultural Books, Tech & Life

Literanista October 23, 2008

I was just over at racialicious.com and read the post on True Blood and saw that line, “vamp on a hot tin roof,” in the comments. Oh my lord, it suits the show just perfectly, love it!

Haven’t been in the mood to post lately. There’s just too much going sometimes. I also hired a personal trainer and so far it’s going great. He has me doing all sorts of weird things like running backwards on a treadmill while simultaneously doing curls with some free weights. Weird but fun! Although, I must admit it even hurts to sneeze right now. LOL! The best part is the massage afterwards and the feeling of serenity and just being one with my body and the moment that I feel when I leave the gym.

Recently, I finished reading Candy By Mian Mian, a tough but lyrically tender story of love, self-destruction, drugs and addiction, and coming of age in China. Interestingly, Mian writes that in her language the term for whores is “chicken” and instantly I wondered if the common urban (hip-hop) usage of “chickens” or “chickenheads” for women is linguistacally related to that origin. It’s always been a term I despise, quite frankly.

Sometimes while I work and write I prefer to tone out the word with some music. Last year, I discovered www.pandora.com and it became a nice change from the Sirius Radio I was listening to all the time. I have a private subscription through W. but it annoys me sometimes that they often play the same songs on a channel several times a day. Meanwhile with Pandora, you get to discover new music and artists. So last week, I googled Lizz Wright who I sort of re-discovered on Pandora and found that www.npr.org has this great feature called “Discover Songs” and they offer new music daily and even have a media player that saves your playlists. Fantastic!!!

It led me to discover I like songs that have a folksy, southern gospel sound. Interesting for a girl from New York!

I spotted this great post on Mashable: 200+ Tools for Surviving the Economic Crisis
Another really cool site: Tip of My Tongue helps you find that word you can’t quite remember. I always have this problem.

I saw this “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004” however, and had myself a good laugh. I seriously don’t think blogging is dead if anything it more mainstream than ever and for those who don’t feel quite comfortable twittering or facebooking the blogging platform seems more welcoming than ever.

Malcolm Gladwell, recently wrote “Late Bloomers” for The New Yorker and it gives me a sense of hope in regards to my own success. Speaking of success, his new book which delves deeeply into what makes people, who are successful, succesful. The book is called Outliers and it’s due out next month.

BoingBoing brings us the news of a Librarian fined (read: irony here) for nepotism: Librarian fined $500 Whoa! Poor dad.

Also take a look at this new site for latinos: www.cafemagazine.com