Read Online Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee - Free Book Online
Authors: Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee
Ads: Link
could speak, or at least write, the language better than most of the natives. On the other hand, as soon as I opened my mouth I betrayed myself as a foreigner, that is to say, someone who by definition could not know the language as well as the natives.
I resolved this paradox by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge. I told myself that I knew English in the same way that Erasmus knew Latin, out of books; whereas the people all around me knew the language “in their bones.” It was their mother tongue as it was not mine; they had imbibed it with their mothers’ milk, I had not.
Of course to a linguist, and particularly to a linguist in the Chomskyan line, my attitude was completely wrongheaded. The language that you internalize during your receptive early years is your mother tongue, and that is that.
As Derrida remarks, how can one ever conceive of a language as one’s own? English may not after all be the property of the English of England, but it is certainly not my property. Language is always the language of the other. Wandering into language is always a trespass. And how much worse if you are good enough at English to hear in every phrase that falls from your pen echoes of earlier usages, reminders of who owned the phrase before you!
All the best,
John
May 11, 2009
Dear John,
Thank you for yesterday’s fax. I feel that we have finally hit upon a workable system. A slow letter across the seas from America to Australia and then a quick, electronic transmission of paper from a room in a house in Adelaide to a room in a house in Brooklyn.
The conversation about sports might well be coming to an end, but the question about why no new games have taken hold for so many years is a good one, something, I frankly confess, it has never occurred to me to ask. You mention England and the end of the nineteenth century, but the same applies to America as well. The first professional baseball team was created in 1869, which was the same year that Princeton and Rutgers played the first intercollegiate football match. The only exception I can think of is basketball, which wasn’t invented until 1891 and didn’t become popular until forty years later when a rules change eliminated the center jump after each basket and speeded up the tempo of the game. Now basketball is played in every country of the world, and just as England no longer owns cricket and soccer, America no longer owns basketball. Case in point: two or three years ago, an overpaid, overconfident American national team lost to Greece in the semifinal of the world championship.
But essentially you are right. Nothing new has made an impact for generations. When you think about how quickly various technologies have altered daily life (trains, cars, airplanes, movies, radios, televisions, computers), the intractability of sports is at first glance mystifying. There has to be a reason for it, though, and the answer that leaps to mind is that, once codified, sports cease to be inventions and turn into institutions. Institutions exist to perpetuate themselves, and the only way they can be eliminated is through revolution. So much is at stake now in professional sports, so much money is involved, there is so much profit to be gained by fielding a successful team that the men who control soccer, basketball, and all other major sports are as powerful as the heads of the largest corporations, the heads of governments. There is simply no room to introduce a new game. The market is saturated, and the games that already exist have become monopolies that will do everything possible to crush any upstart competitor. That doesn’t mean that people don’t invent new games (children do it every day), but children don’t have the wherewithal to launch multi-million-dollar commercial enterprises.
About twenty years ago, I was watching the evening news, and a story came on about a small town somewhere in the south whose board of education—because of budget difficulties,
I resolved this paradox by distinguishing between two kinds of knowledge. I told myself that I knew English in the same way that Erasmus knew Latin, out of books; whereas the people all around me knew the language “in their bones.” It was their mother tongue as it was not mine; they had imbibed it with their mothers’ milk, I had not.
Of course to a linguist, and particularly to a linguist in the Chomskyan line, my attitude was completely wrongheaded. The language that you internalize during your receptive early years is your mother tongue, and that is that.
As Derrida remarks, how can one ever conceive of a language as one’s own? English may not after all be the property of the English of England, but it is certainly not my property. Language is always the language of the other. Wandering into language is always a trespass. And how much worse if you are good enough at English to hear in every phrase that falls from your pen echoes of earlier usages, reminders of who owned the phrase before you!
All the best,
John
May 11, 2009
Dear John,
Thank you for yesterday’s fax. I feel that we have finally hit upon a workable system. A slow letter across the seas from America to Australia and then a quick, electronic transmission of paper from a room in a house in Adelaide to a room in a house in Brooklyn.
The conversation about sports might well be coming to an end, but the question about why no new games have taken hold for so many years is a good one, something, I frankly confess, it has never occurred to me to ask. You mention England and the end of the nineteenth century, but the same applies to America as well. The first professional baseball team was created in 1869, which was the same year that Princeton and Rutgers played the first intercollegiate football match. The only exception I can think of is basketball, which wasn’t invented until 1891 and didn’t become popular until forty years later when a rules change eliminated the center jump after each basket and speeded up the tempo of the game. Now basketball is played in every country of the world, and just as England no longer owns cricket and soccer, America no longer owns basketball. Case in point: two or three years ago, an overpaid, overconfident American national team lost to Greece in the semifinal of the world championship.
But essentially you are right. Nothing new has made an impact for generations. When you think about how quickly various technologies have altered daily life (trains, cars, airplanes, movies, radios, televisions, computers), the intractability of sports is at first glance mystifying. There has to be a reason for it, though, and the answer that leaps to mind is that, once codified, sports cease to be inventions and turn into institutions. Institutions exist to perpetuate themselves, and the only way they can be eliminated is through revolution. So much is at stake now in professional sports, so much money is involved, there is so much profit to be gained by fielding a successful team that the men who control soccer, basketball, and all other major sports are as powerful as the heads of the largest corporations, the heads of governments. There is simply no room to introduce a new game. The market is saturated, and the games that already exist have become monopolies that will do everything possible to crush any upstart competitor. That doesn’t mean that people don’t invent new games (children do it every day), but children don’t have the wherewithal to launch multi-million-dollar commercial enterprises.
About twenty years ago, I was watching the evening news, and a story came on about a small town somewhere in the south whose board of education—because of budget difficulties,
Similar Books
