The cognitive part of the heart: an appreciation of Jonathan Williams

Artist Liv Wynter resigned as a Tate artist-in-residence the other day in response to what she called "invisible inequalities" at the museum.

The late Jonathan Williams writes in his book The Magpie's Bagpipe, Selected Essays, "I'm not the kind of writer who ever employs an agent--they don't like to live on air." As a writer of unpopular texts myself I've always found this refreshing, weary as I am of the overproduced, overdetermined texts the culture deems big and important (The Goldfinch pops into my head, but there are so many others, The Goldfinch being the most egregious perhaps), and reading Williams' words this morning brought to mind an encounter I had with him while he was still very much alive.

Late 1990's, Santa Barbara, I'm almost sure it was at the Isla Vista home of Sandra and Harry Reese whose small but distinguised imprint, Turkey Press, had brought out something Jonathan had written. I'm pretty sure it was a celebratory reading and that Jonathan read, and that then there was wine and beer and finger sandwiches. We had a mutual acquaintance--the poet Tim Reynolds whose book Whatever Happened my small press had just published in a typo-ridden first edition--and I approached Jonathan as he was in the midst of lighting a small cigar.

Hi Jonathan, I'm Brooks Roddan, Tim Reynolds says hello.

Oh yes, Tim...where has he got to?

Tim's in LA now. He works at Arco as a typist and lives in a hotel in Little Tokyo.

This is as much of our actual dialog that I remember.

Jonathan asked me if I liked baseball, I remember that. He rooted for The Atlanta Braves, and talked for ten, fifteen minutes about Greg Maddux, one of the Braves's great pitchers then. Once in awhile I got a word in. Jonathan, as much as he talked, was also watching me watch the beautiful blue wisps of smoke emanating from his small cigar. He was kind enough to offer me one, which I took.

Reading some of the pieces in The Magpie's Bagpipe this morning, I'm struck how deliberatively outside the culture Jonathan Williams stood for someone who knew almost everything and everyone. The essays, collected from writings Jonathan made from 1959 through 1982, tromping around the English countryside where he lived part-time and in the North Carolina mountains where he was born and raised. It's really quite a fantastic book; the invisibility of it is for the purpose of being able to say anything he wants to say.