Words from Ralph Ellison
Words from Ralph Ellison that I’ve long carried in my head started knocking around in there yesterday, so I added them to the Words to Live By in the sidebar.
Distraction-free devices
In The New Yorker, Julian Lucas wonders whether “distraction-free devices” can change the way we write. I was distracted by errors of fact about Ralph Ellison and Frank O’Hara.
“Is it still celebrated?” Yes.
On June 19, a passage from Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.
No deal
Donald Trump’s fixation on making deals, great deals, betrays a mindset that has no room for the deep truth of what it means to be human. Because to be human is, finally, to lose. Every hand is a losing hand; every life, a losing proposition.
Ralph Ellison stamp
Ninety-one cents = three ounces.
From Invisible Man
“There may be no exact parallel between what happens in Ellison’s novel and what happened in Ferguson, Missouri. But across sixty-two years, the general resemblance is clear and appalling.”
On “trigger warnings”
I wonder: what do students who favor trigger warnings expect to find in literature?
Colgate Optic White
“I find it impossible to decide what’s more plausible: that the name Colgate Optic White is the work of a snarky creative type who’s read Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952), or that this new toothpaste just happens to share its name with one of that novel’s most important tropes of color and invisibility.”
Invisible man: Louis Armstrong and the New York Times
The NY Times' early coverage of Louis Armstrong
Barack Obama and Ralph Ellison
From Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia today: I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with ...
It's Ralph Ellison's birthday
He was born March 1, 1914; died April 16, 1994. The author of Invisible Man (1952), one of the permanent American novels. Here is Ellison o...