Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee
You wouldn’t think that Dennis Rodman and
Kim Jong-un had anything in common with Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee, but they
do. That very strong link is sports. Rodman recently visited North Korea and
hung out with Kim while they bonded over their basketball obsession. In a recent book of letters exchanged between
2008 and 2011, Auster and Coetzee spend at least a quarter of the book lobbing
their ideas about sports back and forth. They meander between wonder about various games they’ve played and absolute confusion and guilt over the hours
spent glued to a TV screen vicariously hypnotized.
I’ve never understood this culture’s obsession
with spectator sports, so it is an incongruous pleasure reading these great minds at
work. This is Coetzee musing about envy: "One
starts by envying Federer, one moves from there to admiring him, and one ends
up neither envying or admiring him but exalted at the revelation of what a
human being—a being like oneself—can do." At one point they go into this
riff about the rise of mass sports, the cult of numbers, and the importance of
hooking people with numerical packaging (think baseball stats). These guys are
anthropologists, historians, poets and most importantly pretty engaged human
beings.
I
have experienced such a strange pleasure reading these letters, perhaps a
little like watching spectator sports. One of them will serve up a subject like
dying, which will lead into the difficulties with language and the chimera of
memory, which opens up a path to our obsession with food and food rituals. I
feel like I’m almost there with them.
They both dislike interviews. Coetzee writes, "I have often felt oppressive boredom as I listen to myself mouthing off to interviewers. To my way of thinking real talk only occurs when there is some kind of current running between the interlocutors. And such a current rarely runs during interviews." The current in this book kept me up reading late into the night!
- Barb
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