Ralph Ellison

Yes, I read that.

Ralph Ellison.

Yeah, whoops.

You know, his name is Ralph Waldo Ellison.

I think he was named to kind of remind you of Emerson, but it's

Ellison.

I did read that in college, and I remember being very impressed and engaged by it.

Yeah, it's a

Did you read? No, I read.

Ralph Ellison, you read Native Son.

Yeah.

I'm going to go ahead and say I did not feel particularly touched by the prose of Invisible Man.

I like Native Son more, maybe because it was more action-y and thriller-y, but I just thought Invisible Man was kind of depressing.

Yeah.

This book gets you from the first sentence because Ralph Ellison's unnamed narrator introduces himself by insisting on the impossible, I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me.

He is funny, angry, astutely observant, painfully self-conscious, and politically useful to almost everyone he meets, whether he is being humiliated at the Battle Royale, working at Liberty Paints, or speaking for the Brotherhood.

But he was also very bound to respectability politics just because of the context that he was in.

He mentored James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, actually.

And they had beef with him.

Yeah? Oh my gosh.

I know.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall for some of these conversations that the three of them must have had.

But James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were younger than Hughes.

And they said...

From the September 2025 test, copyright law in general, against copyright law applied to music, of course that's law.

From the August 2025 LSAT, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and comic books, that's the humanities, and the philosophy of cause, what it means to say one thing costs another, that's science.

From the June 2025 LSAT, Uruguay and Argentina after Spanish rule, that's social science.

Whether contracts made by computers or AI are illegal, that's of course law.

But there's a way in which, you know, a part of what I've been writing about over these three books, which I've been interested in, is kind of what this weird thing we call masculinity looks like, right? Which is, what does it mean to embody it, to be uncomfortable in it, to perform it, all of these different things, right? And Cheever, I think, has just always been there as a writer who's been with a very different, in a very different cultural milieu, has done that work.

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is a book I come to a lot.

Again, another very different writer, but Flannery O'Connor's short stories are always been super important to me.

And I think, you know, the other writer that I go back to, in all his problematic ways, has always been V.S. Naipaul, the Trinidadian writer.

Ryan.

New York's Bard College has opened a center dedicated to Ralph Ellison, a key figure in black arts and literature.

The Ralph Ellison Center aims to explore his work on race, identity, and belonging.

It was funded with a $3.6 million donation.

Ellison Todd at Bard.

I thought Fat Gabe just became the invisible man there when he went off camera.

In this case, I don't mean the Ralph Ellison version.

There you go.

Throwing