Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Page A

alphabet, is at once transported (transpoeted, I nearly wrote) to the “God-forsaken avenue bearing the initial of Christ”!
    I suppose that is one of the features that define a great city: with the passage of time, the names of its districts and quarters and streets and buildings become so woven into the tapestry of poems and stories that even readers who have never visited can find their way blindfolded: down 42nd Street as far as Baker Street, then make a left onto Nevsky Prospekt.
    The 1950s and 1960s now look to me like a great age in American poetry, after which things have quietly gone downhill. Am I wrong? Is there something I am missing?
    Rationalists are exasperated by the way in which words, even freshly minted ones, pick up connotations that blur their sharp denotative edges. One of the great projects of the Royal Society, founded in England in the late seventeenth century, was to establish a language free of associations, a language fit to be used by philosophers and scientists. The language that the scientific heirs of the Royal Society use today looks to us fairly pure, but only because it is based so heavily on Greek words, whose connotations are thoroughly lost to us ( electricity from elektron , but who can say what this word, which denoted a precious-metal alloy, called up in the mind of Odysseus?).
    (And what of my own response to electric , forever corrupted by the passage of “doom’s electric moccasin”—Emily Dickinson?)
    Though Swift made fun of the Royal Society project, the ideal it reached for was not ignoble. I have never fully understood why Beckett dropped English, but I suspect that part of the reason was that he found the language too encumbered with literary associations. Conrad, as I recall, inveighed against the English word oak , which, he said, could not be employed without evoking a whole history of British navigation and British empire.
    It is not uncommon for writers, as they age, to get impatient with the so-called poetry of language and go for a more stripped-down style (“late style”). The most notorious instance, I suppose, is Tolstoy, who in later life expressed a moralistic disapproval of the seductive powers of art and confined himself to stories that would not be out of place in an elementary classroom. A loftier example is provided by Bach, who at the time of his death was working on his Art of Fugue , pure music in the sense that it is not tied to any particular instrument.
    One can think of a life in art, schematically, in two or perhaps three stages. In the first you find, or pose for yourself, a great question. In the second you labor away at answering it. And then, if you live long enough, you come to the third stage, when the aforesaid great question begins to bore you, and you need to look elsewhere.
All the best,
John

Brooklyn
    September 29, 2009
    Dear John,
    We walked into the film with such low expectations (not only because of your remarks but because translating novels into movies is such a precarious business) and walked out pleasantly surprised, feeling the result wasn’t half bad at all. Yes, John M. was miscast, but his performance was more subtle and less mannered than most of the things I’ve seen him in over the past few years—good enough, in any case, not to destroy the mood of the story. We thought the daughter was excellent—much thinner and more attractive than the character in the book, of course, but this is the movies, and what can you do, since attractive women are what the movies are all about. Direction, photography, production design, locations—admirably done. The New York reviews that I saw were largely favorable. The audience sitting in the theater with us was engrossed, and given how poor most films are these days, it was refreshing to see something with some spine and intelligence to it. No, it doesn’t have the force of the book, but it tries to do justice to the book, and if I were in your shoes, I would feel reasonably