Stephen Crane, Allen Ginsburg, Shaquille O’Neal, Wayne Shorter, and Gloria Gaynor all have rooms… as do the city’s illustrious inventors and Newark’s Alma Flagg, who in 1964 became the city’s first African-American principal of an integrated school. If you come to our headquarters down the street, where nearly a thousand Audible employees work, you will see dozens of conference rooms named for illustrious people who came from or made an impact on Newark. Well-composed words sound like music to me, and after being a writer for 20 years, this led directly to an idea that became and our 20-years of applying new technologies to the celebration and elevation of the unbridled power of the well-spoken word. On those long afternoons when he taught me, he would talk about Duke and Louis as if they were in the room, and he would help me understand what he called an “outlaw art” that was tethered directly to the sounds of African-American stories and prayer and protest.īecause of Ralph I always heard the sound of what I read and what I wrote. It is also fitting that we are here to celebrate Ralph and jazz. While Ralph Ellison taught me that Americans needed to create our own archetypes and myths, he also conveyed that in a nation creating itself without kings, a new order was created based on the color of people’s skin. I think it is fitting that we are celebrating Ralph Ellison in Audible’s hometown of Newark, a city essential to the history of jazz and to the African-American cultural, historical, and political experience. I understood from Ralph that the American experience derived from the process of a nation constantly making and remaking itself, a place that needed to create its own myths and art and even its own sounds because we had to. We spawned singularly American musical art forms … jazz and the blues. We built American vernacular buildings and invented American techniques and technologies. We created a distinctive way of talking and telling stories, which led to the distinctive voice in the way we wrote. I learned from Ralph Ellison that Americans worked to create an identity from a synthesis of divergent cultures. Ralph encouraged me and spoke up for me publicly until he died in 1994. Ralph also helped me gain the courage and occasional insight to write, and I went on to make a living as a writer for 20 years after that. Over the next three years, after Ralph Ellison allowed me into a small seminar focused on the American vernacular, and a year after that, when he took me on as a tutee every Wednesday afternoon until I graduated, one of the greatest of all American writers taught me how to read.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |