Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Page A
Authors: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
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verbs—but the cumulative effect is jarring, making the book unpublishable as it stands now. Corrections will be made, of course, everything will come out right in the end, but all through my labors I kept thinking back to our discussion several months ago about the notion of a “mother tongue” and how truly complex a business it is to master a language, how many rules and principles and exceptions to rules and principles must be absorbed into one’s bloodstream to be able to “own” a particular idiom. The slightest misstep reveals a failure to understand how the system works. A single flub, and alarm bells start ringing. Not unlike what happened to me the other day when I called our local car service for a ride into Manhattan. I gave the female dispatcher the address, which she must have looked up on a computer map, and then she asked me if it was between such-and-such street and Houston Street (pronouncing it Hewston, like the city in Texas). Everyone who lives in New York knows that it is pronounced Howston—and I immediately said to her: “You’re not from New York, are you?” and she said no, she had in fact just moved here. It reminded me of certain scenes in war movies, spy movies, in which a German posing as an American or an American posing as a German gives himself away with a small slip like that—saying Hewston instead of Howston and thus exposing himself as an impostor. The firing squad comes next. A whole battalion is slaughtered. The war is lost. How intricate the knowledge of a mother tongue, how subtle its workings!
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Your insight into the Enlightenment’s mania for quantification and the development of organized sports is ingenious. I don’t know how familiar you are with baseball, but given the time you have spent in America, you must have at least a passing acquaintance with it. As you are probably aware, it is a sport dominated by numbers. Every play, every action within a play is immediately transformed into a statistic, and since those statistics are kept on file, every action that takes place in a game today is read in the context of the entire history of the sport. Few Americans can remember who the president was in 1927, but anyone who follows baseball will be able to tell you that 1927 was the year Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. To give you a taste of this almost Talmudic obsession with numbers, I enclose a photocopy of a page from The Baseball Encyclopedia which, among other things, includes the career record of every player who has participated in even a single game since the sport was invented. Note that Paddy Mayes’s entire career consisted of just five games, all in 1911, whereas Willie Mays, the legendary Willie Mays (he of the absent pencil story), played from 1951 to 1973 and appeared in 2,992 games. Quantification indeed. To the uninitiated, these charts will look like utter nonsense.
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You mention that the rules of football were codified in the mid–nineteenth century. While researching my little piece on soccer/football more than ten years ago, I found out that standard rules were introduced as early as 1801—even closer to the mid–eighteenth century and the birth of the “quantificatory spirit,” thus making it possible for Napoleon to have been defeated “on the playing fields of Eton.” But you are right about the present-day rules of football, which were drawn up at Cambridge University in 1863.
As for bat-and-ball games, I stumbled across this theory about the origins of cricket: knocking down three-legged milkmaid stools with a thrown object (stone? ball?) and then, as time went on, to make the game more challenging, the introduction of a stick to prevent the object from hitting the stool. The three legs of the stool eventually became the wicket. Plausible? Perhaps.
•
You refer to the interview I did with Kevin Rabalais for The Australian . To tell the truth, I have absolutely no memory of what I said to him. Nor can I remember anything I have
•
Your insight into the Enlightenment’s mania for quantification and the development of organized sports is ingenious. I don’t know how familiar you are with baseball, but given the time you have spent in America, you must have at least a passing acquaintance with it. As you are probably aware, it is a sport dominated by numbers. Every play, every action within a play is immediately transformed into a statistic, and since those statistics are kept on file, every action that takes place in a game today is read in the context of the entire history of the sport. Few Americans can remember who the president was in 1927, but anyone who follows baseball will be able to tell you that 1927 was the year Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs. To give you a taste of this almost Talmudic obsession with numbers, I enclose a photocopy of a page from The Baseball Encyclopedia which, among other things, includes the career record of every player who has participated in even a single game since the sport was invented. Note that Paddy Mayes’s entire career consisted of just five games, all in 1911, whereas Willie Mays, the legendary Willie Mays (he of the absent pencil story), played from 1951 to 1973 and appeared in 2,992 games. Quantification indeed. To the uninitiated, these charts will look like utter nonsense.
•
You mention that the rules of football were codified in the mid–nineteenth century. While researching my little piece on soccer/football more than ten years ago, I found out that standard rules were introduced as early as 1801—even closer to the mid–eighteenth century and the birth of the “quantificatory spirit,” thus making it possible for Napoleon to have been defeated “on the playing fields of Eton.” But you are right about the present-day rules of football, which were drawn up at Cambridge University in 1863.
As for bat-and-ball games, I stumbled across this theory about the origins of cricket: knocking down three-legged milkmaid stools with a thrown object (stone? ball?) and then, as time went on, to make the game more challenging, the introduction of a stick to prevent the object from hitting the stool. The three legs of the stool eventually became the wicket. Plausible? Perhaps.
•
You refer to the interview I did with Kevin Rabalais for The Australian . To tell the truth, I have absolutely no memory of what I said to him. Nor can I remember anything I have
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