New Gold City

Still from the film "Ralph Ellison: An American Journey" It seems to me that Ralph Ellison may be this country's most important writer. Not so much for his production or even his style, but because of his deep wisdom and his remarkable understanding of the links between literature, politics, and our national struggle with the culture of identity. Every time I read essays like "Indivisible Man," "The Novel as a Function of American Democracy," or "Going to the Territory," I find a new perspective on life and am constantly amazed by the little jewels of truth that sparkle beneath the waters of Ellison's words. The greatest influence on Ralph as a writer was Fyodor Dostoevsky. Invisible Man was Ellison's "Notes from the Underground." To me, Ralph Ellison did so much more than elevate Dostoevsky to the 20th century. He pointed at the universality of true human experience, that push and pull of soul, identity, culture, politics...

When we set out on our journey to Richmond, it never occurred to me that I would have a story to tell. I took some notes on thoughts I was having at the time. I wrote in my journal some. But I never intended to write out this story. It just came to me over the course of the end of 2003, sort of as an unrelenting need to struggle with what had happened to me--especially the strange sleepy sensations I was having and the vague auditory hallucinations. I could not even have conceived of writing the story of our quest for Dana without having read Dick Wertime's Citadel on the Mountain several years ago (see "true links" to the right for a sample from the book, or click on the title of this entry to go to Amazon). Citadel is Dick's memoir of growing up with a father who was brilliant, intense, possibly connected to the CIA, and also at times paranoid and delusional. Dick's story is about trying to understand his father (and himself) after his father had died, realiz...

The Acadians of the Maritime Coast in Canada were a fully integrated culture mixing Native and French cultures over the course of several centuries prior to the Revolutionary War. They were a culture of some 18,000 people wiped out in a few years by the British, utterly eliminated through forced removal or simply driven into the wilderness to fend for themselves. Some of these displaced Acadians eventually straggled down to Louisiana. Over the next century (mostly the 19th), French/Creole language shifts eventually came up with the name Cajuns for them. An article in Salon.com contains an extended interview with John Mack Faragher, a Yale professor of history, who wrote the book entitled, "A Great and Noble Scheme." The article can be found at Salon's website in the books section, "America's Forgotten Atrocity." Here's an interesting clip from the article: " To what extent should the Acadians be viewed as a mixed-race or an ethnically mixed people?...