Willis Johnson Quotes

Everybody in the world ought to care for books, and if there are some who do not, why that is a perfectly convincing reason why books ought to be given to them, to be a rebuke to them and, perchance, to rescue them from the error of their ways.

In fact, amid all the musical laments over not having a heart, a brain, or the nerve, did anyone notice that they didn’t have a penis among them? I think it would have shown on the Lion and the Tin Man, and when the Scarecrow has his pants destuffed, you don’t see a flying monkey waving an errant straw Johnson around anywhere, do I think I know what song I’d be singing: Oh, I would while away the hours, Wanking in the flowers, my heart all full of song, I’d be gilding all the lilies as I waved about my willie If I only had a schlong.

One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child. When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.

HARLEM STRIDE: RECOMMENDED LISTENING Duke Ellington, “Black Beauty,” October 1, 1928 James P. Johnson, “Carolina Shout,” October 18, 1921 Luckey Roberts, “Ripples of the Nile,” May 21, 1946 Willie “The Lion” Smith, “Sneakaway,” January 10, 1939 Art Tatum, “I Know That You Know,” April 2, 1949 Art Tatum, “Sweet Georgia Brown,” September 16, 1941 Art Tatum, “Tea for Two,” March 21, 1933 Fats Waller, “Alligator Crawl,” November 16, 1934 Fats Waller, “Dinah,” June 6, 1935 Fats Waller, “Viper’s Drag,” November 16, 1934

When the people kept leaving, the South resorted to coercion and interception worthy of the Soviet Union, which was forming at the same time across the Atlantic. Those trying to leave were rendered fugitives by definition and could not be certain they would be able to make it out. In Brookhaven, Mississippi, authorities stopped a train with fifty colored migrants on it and sidetracked it for three days. In Albany, Georgia, the police tore up the tickets of colored passengers as they stood waiting to board, dashing their hopes of escape. A minister in South Carolina, having seen his parishioners off, was arrested at the station on the charge of helping colored people get out. In Savannah, Georgia, the police arrested every colored person at the station regardless of where he or she was going. In Summit, Mississippi, authorities simply closed the ticket office and did not let northbound trains stop for the colored people waiting to get on. Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologists Willis T. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.

Blind Willie Johnson. ‘Dark Was the Night.

The Cedar Man also began looking familiar, and I recognized him as Willis Weist, who had disappointed my mother; she had observed him going to as many as four white-person church services each Sunday. A confirmed Methodist, she’d finally asked him which one he liked the best, to which he had responded, “Pentecostal.” My heartbroken mother asked why. He’d shrugged, “Because they have the best potluck dinners.” There

Raindrops, thunder, crickets and monkeys, footsteps, heartbeats, birdsong, trains. There’s the sound of a mother kissing her child, saying, “Be a good boy,” and all manner of songs: classical, drums, bagpipes, yelling, Pygmy girls chanting, Chuck Berry. The vinyl pops. The songs pile up. It keeps snowing. Mr. Bell announces each new track. Russian, Bulgarian, pan pipes, Mexican, Azerbaijani. Stravinsky. One song, just a man with a guitar. The man hums and moans. “Blind Willie Johnson. ‘Dark Was the Night.

Where there are people, there is injustice, and that is not God’s design. It may not be our fault, but it is our fight. Let us do our part by holding up our corners.

Instead of stemming the tide, the blockades and arrests “served to intensify the desire to leave,” wrote the sociologists Willis T. Weatherford and Charles S. Johnson, “and to provide further reasons for going.” To

believe his choice was a blond one.) I have to admit that I felt some sympathy for the scarecrow, although I don’t believe I would have been singing about the lack of a brain. In fact, amid all the musical laments over not having a heart, a brain, or the nerve, did anyone notice that they didn’t have a penis among them? I think it would have shown on the Lion and the Tin Man, and when the Scarecrow has his pants destuffed, you don’t see a flying monkey waving an errant straw Johnson around anywhere, do you? I think I know what song I’d be singing: Oh, I would while away the hours, Wanking in the flowers, my heart all full of song, I’d be gilding all the lilies as I waved about my willie If I only had a schlong.

Momma bought two bolts of cloth each year for winter and summer clothes. She made my school dresses, underslips, bloomers, handkerchiefs, Bailey’s shirts, shorts, her aprons, house dresses and waists shipped to Stamps from the nearest Sears & Roebuck. Uncle Willie was the only person in the family who wore ready-to-wear clothes all the time.

The absentminded doctor!" Delia and Tonya giggle. But I'm thinking about how Dr. Johnson's head is so busy, he can't see the man's class ring about his daughter's neck.

Is Willis Carrier an anomaly or not? The question has real political and social stakes, because the doxa of market capitalism as an unparalleled innovation engine has long leaned on stories like Willis Carrier’s miraculous cooling device as a cornerstone of its faith.6 In many respects, these beliefs made sense, because the implicit alternatives were the planned economies of socialism and communism. State-run economies were fundamentally hierarchies, not networks. They consolidated decision-making power in a top-down command system, which meant that new ideas had to be approved by the authorities before they could begin to spread through the society. Markets, by contrast, allowed good ideas to erupt anywhere in the system. In modern tech-speak, markets allowed innovation to flourish at the edges of the network. Planned economies were more like the old mainframe computer systems that predated the Internet, where every participant had to get authorization from a central machine to do new work. When Friedrich von Hayek launched his influential argument in the 1940s about the importance of price signals in market economies, he was observing a related phenomenon: the decentralized pricing mechanism of the marketplace allows an entrepreneur to gauge the relative value of his or her innovation. If you come up with an interesting new contraption, you don’t need to persuade a government commission of its value. You just need to get someone to buy it. Entire institutions and legal frameworks—not to mention a vast tower of conventional wisdom—have been built around the Carrier model of innovation. But what if he’s the exception and not the rule?

Against all odds, the first quadrant turns out to be the least populated on the grid. Willis Carrier is an outlier after all. In the private sector, the proprietary breakthrough achieved in a closed lab turns out to be a rarity. For every Alfred Nobel, inventing dynamite in secret in the suburbs of Stockholm, there are a half dozen collective inventions like the vacuum tube or the television, whose existence depended upon multiple firms driven by the profit motive who managed to create a significant new product via decentralized networking. Folklore calls Edison the inventor of the lightbulb, but in truth the lightbulb came into being through a complex network of interaction between Edison and his rivals, each contributing key pieces to the puzzle along the way. Collective invention is not some socialist fantasy; entrepreneurs like Edison and de Forest were very much motivated by the possibility of financial rewards, and they tried to patent as much as they could. But the utility of building on other people’s ideas often outweighed the exclusivity of building something entirely from scratch.

Sounding defensive, Emily justified, “Willie went to get a job at the Pullman Company, expecting to follow in his father’s footsteps as a coal man. He was told he was in the wrong office and directed to a different department. There he was given a job as a conductor, which pays three times as much as his father makes. They had mistaken him for being White.” She shrugged. “He’s passing?

The coast at the point at which he reached it seemed specially designed by nature for his favorable and auspicious reception. There lay before him what seemed the estuary of a large and beautiful river, free from rocks or other impediments, and with a very gentle current. It had an ample depth of water for his vessels, and was sufficiently broad, even at a considerable distance inland, for them to beat about in. It was encircled by lofty and picturesque hills, the aspect of which reminded him of the "Pena de los Enamorados" near Granada, in Spain; and upon the summit of one of them was what he described as another little hill, shaped like a graceful mosque.

Deacon leads them down darker roads: Son House, Skip James, Blind Willie Johnson, moaning sweetly. All the old men who’d been bled of their fancies, whittled to bad dreams and worse habits, their music too sad for a country sick of trying.