大腸王: Taipei Statements 12/07/18

1. Yes, as a Westerner who’s lived here decades, I do love Taipei, and Taiwan in general. But of course there are some things that irk. That’s how it is with any place. And I have some suggestions. Today I’ve been jotting them down.

2. That smoking is not allowed on the Taipei MRT is reasonable. I get it. But I think there should be one day every year when smoking is allowed. In fact, on that day, smoking should be required on the MRT, just to balance things out.

3. This rule would be universally applicable. Which means: On that day children--yes, even babies--would be required to smoke on the MRT. 



4. Those smoking Cuban cigars would ride free.  



5. You see how interesting things would be if I were in charge? 



6. Louis Vuitton bags are ugly and crass. There are too many in Taipei. I know it’s worse in other Asian cities, but still. I myself do not speak to women carrying LV bags. I will not give such women the time of day. The larger the LV bag, the more this rule applies. 



7. Hermès, Michael Kors, Fendi--all these bags are acceptable. But dump the LV bags. What were you even thinking?

8. Since your garbage trucks here already have music, why not have some garbage trucks with live music? There could be a little stage on top of the truck. The band would crank out tunes as the garbage collectors made their way from neighborhood to neighborhood.

9. A new local musical genre might arise. 



10. Taipei traffic isn’t great, but it’s not horrendous. The worst drivers in Taipei are men. No surprise there. But in Taipei, I’ve discovered, the very worst drivers are situated at opposite ends of the class spectrum. In Taipei, taking the cake as very worst drivers, there are the men who drive the black Mercedes, and the men who drive those little blue pick-up trucks. 


11. The assholes in the black Mercedes clearly think they’re too important to follow traffic rules. As for the blue pick-up drivers, they seemingly don’t know the city even has traffic rules. 



12. These two classes of drivers, to be identified by vehicle, should be compelled by law to gather once a year in some central public square, dressed only in their underwear, for a ritual public beating.  



13. The beatings must be televised. 

14. Sogo elevators are hellishly slow. When they have the elevator girls working them, they’re even slower. Dump the elevator girls already.

15. A few days ago, I suddenly realized that the old guy who pulls himself along on a cart on Roosevelt Rd. selling washcloths has not changed one tiny bit in twenty years. Which is impossible. I'm starting to suspect he is an alien sent here to spy on us. 



16. Oddly, this morning I saw him on his cart on Guangfu S. Rd. Are there maybe more than one?  



17. Today on the MRT I saw a sad, frightened-looking woman about 22 who was cradling a baby in a blue blanket, occasionally rocking the baby back and forth. The woman was well dressed, and seemed normal, except for the sad look. 



18. When I got closer, I realized it wasn’t actually a baby she held, but a perfectly realistic life-sized artificial baby. It was plastic of some kind. We made eye contact for a few seconds, and I was tempted to ask her what was up, but because of her serious look I decided not to.  



19. Now I can’t stop thinking about her. The odd aura of dejection that emanated from her as she rocked that baby stuck in my mind. Was it some kind of therapy she was doing?   



20. To contemplate the girl cradling the fake baby is far sadder than to contemplate the disabled man on his cart selling washcloths.  



21. I’ve written elsewhere on the utter evil of house cats, an unfortunately popular thing in Taiwan, so I will add nothing on that subject here. Of course, in general, cats should be outlawed.



22. As I traveled north, the weather became colder. The rivers were covered with ice, and I could get no fish. The monster was happy when I suffered. In one message he wrote: “This is just the beginning! You will suffer much more than this!”  



23. Oh, for the frozen north! 

Eric Mader
枚德林

-----

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Idiots / 白痴: A Public Service Announcement 英/中

IDIOTS

There are idiots in every country in the world. Idiots can be annoying or even dangerous. The total number of idiots in the world at present is unknown, but this number, whatever it is, is certainly very high.

Sometimes idiots can even become national leaders. In that case millions of people will suffer.

It is important to know how to recognize idiots and to know what kind of idiots they are so that you can protect yourself and your loved ones from danger or many wasted hours.

But I don’t really want to write about idiots here. What I want to write about is pandas. Pandas are not really bears like most people think. They are cats pretending to be bears. Pandas are large, stinking vegetarian cats posing as bears. They do it to appear special.

If you see a panda doing its usual roly-poly act in a park, do not approach it to take photos. Do not waste time warning others gathered round it. They are likely already under its rollicking spell and will not listen. Get yourself and your family to another park as quickly as possible.

Pandas should be illegal. The only thing worse than a panda is a kung-fu panda. And the only thing worse than that is a kung-fu panda in 3-D.

How long are you going to let them fool you? They are going to eat through all the bamboo forests in the world and then they will start eating domestic livestock and children. There are videos to prove this.

That pandas are cats and not bears should be obvious to everyone. All you have to do is look in the encyclopedia.

In fact cats are not even mammals. What they are is reptiles that have evolved fur so as to appear to be mammals. Cats may seem cute when you look at them, but this is just an act. When humans are not looking cats commit all manner of evil and unhygienic acts.

If you see wild dolphins in the ocean, you may want to swim near them, but this is not a good idea because wild dolphins might not like you and also sharks often follow dolphins because they feed on them.

If they think you are being a pain, wild dolphins can kill you by butting you with their heads. But even if the dolphins ignore you, the shark may interpret your swimming which is less graceful than the dolphins’ as the movements of a dolphin having a seizure, and it then may attack you because it thinks you are easy prey, which is just about right, you dumb New Age fuck.

Some authorities believe cats are actually trying to take over the universe.

Chameleons that have not encountered predators for a long time may become so lazy that they forget how to change color. Such chameleons are good for nothing and do not even deserve to be called chameleons.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.

Eric Mader
2011

白痴

在這個世界上,每個國家都有白痴。有時候白痴真的很煩人,甚至可能帶來危險。目前全世界的白痴總人口數雖仍無從得知,但不管這數字究竟是多少,必定非常之高。

白痴甚至可能當上國家領導人。在這種情況下,千百萬的國民都要遭殃。

為避免自身和親人遭逢不測或浪費太多時間,知道怎麼 辨別白痴,並能看出對方屬於哪一類型的白痴就是兩大關 鍵。

不過,這篇要談的其實不是白痴。我想討論的是熊貓。

熊貓並非大多數人所認知的那樣;牠們不是真正的熊,而是假扮成熊的貓。熊貓是種又大又臭的貓,終日茹素,性喜扮熊。牠們想藉此建立自己的風格。

如果你在公園看到熊貓耍起一貫的翻跟斗伎倆,千萬不要上前拍照。也不要出言警告那些圍觀的人,因為這麼做只是浪費時間。他們很可能已經中了熊貓的嬉耍魔咒,聽不進你的苦勸。請儘快和你的家人前往別座公園。

熊貓根本是目無法紀。而比熊貓還讓人束手無策的,恐怕就只有功夫熊貓了。不過比起功夫熊貓,3D 的功夫熊貓 更是令人一籌莫展。

你打算被這些熊貓愚弄到什麼時候?牠們遲早會吃光這世上所有的竹林,接下來就輪到家禽家畜和孩童了。有相關影像可以證實這項說法。

熊貓是貓不是熊,這應該是明擺著的事。去查查百科全書就能當下立判。

說真的,貓連哺乳動物都不算。牠們其實是為了看起來像哺乳類,才會演化出毛皮的爬行動物。貓的模樣或許挺可愛的,但那些都是作秀。一旦沒人觀看,貓就會幹出種種卑劣兼缺乏衛生的醜行。

你在大海裡看到野生海豚,會想游到牠們身邊吧?但這可不是什麼好主意,畢竟野生海豚不見得會喜歡你,而且,以海豚為食的鯊魚通常就尾隨在後。

要是野生海豚看你不順眼,用頭頂你一下你就一命嗚呼了。但就算那些海豚不理你,後頭的鯊魚也可能把你那不如海豚優雅的泳姿理解成海豚癲癇發作時的動作,繼而開始攻擊你— 因為牠們覺得你很好下手啊,而鯊魚這麼判斷也大抵無誤啊你這蠢到家的新世紀大草包。

有些研究權威認為貓真的在想方設法,企圖奪取這個世界。

許久不曾碰上肉食性動物的變色龍,很可能就此怠惰而日漸遺忘改變體色的方法。這種變色龍真的有夠窩囊,簡直汙辱了牠們變色龍的名字。

我們相信這些真理都是不證自明的。

枚德林
寫於二○一一年

* * *
English:

This and many other important public service announcements can be found in from Eric Mader’s Idiocy, Ltd.. Check it out at Amazon. Dryest humor in the west.

中文:

《白痴有限公司》: 還有犀牛、蝙蝠、obasans 、長頸鹿 、真英雄、台北秘史 and more. 你可以在台灣買到:



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Reminder! / 注意事項!

Reminder

Cows moo, dogs bark, sheep bleat, horses neigh, donkeys bray, cats meow, ducks quack, roosters crow, lions roar, wolves howl, ants are quiet, pigs grunt, elephants trumpet, hyenas laugh, hens cackle, llamas are usually quiet, moths are very quiet, crows caw, pigeons coo, mice squeak, trout are quiet, moles are quiet, chameleons are quiet, bears growl, oxen low, whales sing, salamanders are quiet, stag beetles are quiet, bass are very quiet, owls hoot, crickets chirp, parrots talk, impala are quiet, manatees are quiet, haddock are excruciatingly quiet, snails are quiet, lobsters are quiet, centipedes are quiet, sloths are quiet; porcupines resist all our efforts at communication: they are quiet; dace are quiet; salmon are quiet; earthworms refuse to tell us what they know: they are quiet; flounder are quiet; termites are quiet; after all our coaxing the mayflies remain quiet; hedgehogs are quiet; turtles are quiet; both the carrot and the stick have proven of no avail: walleyed pike persist in a dogged and perverse silence that apparently nothing will break.

注意事項

乳牛會哞,狗會汪,綿羊咩咩叫,馬聲嘶嘶,驢聲喔喔, 貓會喵,鴨會呱,公雞會高啼,獅子會怒吼,狼會嚎,螞蟻很 安靜,豬聲侯侯,大象會嗷,鬣狗會笑,母雞咯咯咯,大羊駝 通常都保持沉默,蛾一向非常沉默,烏鴉嘎嘎嘎,鴿子咕咕咕, 老鼠吱吱吱,鱒魚不會出聲,鼴鼠不會出聲,變色龍不會出聲, 熊會低聲咆哮,公牛的嗓音低沈,鯨魚會唱歌,蠑螈靜悄悄, 鍬形蟲靜悄悄,鱸魚非常安靜,貓頭鷹會呼呼叫,蟋蟀會唧唧 叫,鸚鵡會講話,黑斑羚寡言少語,海牛寡言少語,黑線鱈寡 言少語到令人尷尬的程度,蝸牛不太說話,龍蝦不太說話,蜈 蚣不太說話,樹懶不太說話;豪豬完全抵制我們為溝通所做的 一切努力:牠們默不作聲;代斯魚默不作聲;鮭魚默不作聲; 蚯蚓拒絕交代自己知道的一切:牠們悶不吭聲;比目魚悶不吭 聲;白蟻悶不吭聲;我們連哄帶騙後,蜉蝣依舊不言不語;刺 蝟不言不語;海龜不言不語;事實證明,不管人們來軟的、玩 硬的都沒用:一意孤行,堅持封口到底的大眼梭子魚,顯然不 會因為任何事而打破沉默。

English:

This piece is from Eric Mader’s Idiocy, Ltd.. Check it out at Amazon. Dryest humor in the west.

中文:

《白痴有限公司》: 還有犀牛、蝙蝠、obasans 、海豚、真英雄、台北秘史 and more. 你可以在台灣買到:



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吃蝴蝶 Eating Butterflies

自然教學法

我還沒刮鬍子,人也還昏昏欲睡,但依然鎖上我在台北 這位於五樓的家門,等著電梯來。我看看手錶,上課快遲到 了。然後,當自高樓層龜速降下的電梯總算在我面前打開, 我便瞧見這位媽媽和她年幼的兒子。這對母子是樓上的住 戶;兒子差不多四、五歲,抱著一大片用保鮮膜包好的西瓜。 那是片黃肉西瓜,而且顏色就跟他 T 恤上印的腳踏車一般 黃。做媽媽的則提著一只過大的 LV 包包,臉上仍舊化著過 濃的彩妝。小男孩對我笑了一笑,但婦人始終低著頭。

接著,就在電梯關起門時,她忽然狠狠打了一下兒子的頭,還用中文破口大罵:「不要一直摸西瓜!都被你摸壞了誰還想吃啊!西瓜就像蝴蝶的翅膀,一摸就壞!」

電梯開始往下走。我從鏡中觀察小男孩的反應。

「有人會吃蝴蝶的翅膀嗎?」幾秒鐘後,兒子問媽媽。

她「嗤」了一聲,然後只回一個字:「笨。」她將那只大包包往身上一攬。

電梯快到一樓時,我和鏡中的小男孩對上了眼。就在這 個高大的外國人面前被打被羞辱,小男孩心裡肯定很不好受。正當電梯準備停在一樓,我便笑著告訴他:「我們國家的人會吃。」

於是小男孩望向媽媽,並在電梯即將開門之際不服輸地說:「他會吃蝴蝶的翅膀!」

我步出電梯,卻瞥見這位母親橫眉豎目地瞪著我。可是小男孩開心了。我知道他的腦袋正在描繪外國人吃著黃色蝴蝶的翅膀,那副津津有味的模樣。

如今,上課快遲到這件事已經變得無關緊要。我走進雨裡,撐起那把不大堅固的破傘朝著捷運站走去。我很慶幸能在電梯裡碰到那對母子。大人就該盡可能趁孩子年幼時,多多啟發他們才是。

寫於二○一四年

Natural Pedagogy

Unshaven, still drowsy, I lock the door to my 5th floor Taipei flat. I check my watch as I wait for the elevator, realizing I’ll likely be late for class. When the elevator door finally opens, after an annoyingly slow descent from a floor high above, I come face to face with some upper-story neighbors, a mother and her young son. The boy is four or five and carries a huge slice of watermelon covered in clear plastic wrap. I notice the yellow of the melon perfectly matches the yellow of the bicycle stenciled on his teeshirt. The mother, as usual, has way overdone her makeup, and is carrying an oversized Louis Vuitton bag. The boy smiles at me, but the woman keeps her gaze on the floor.

Then, as the doors close, she suddenly whacks her son sharply on the head and snaps in Mandarin: “Stop touching the melon! You’ll ruin it and no one will want to eat it! It’s like butterfly wings. If you touch them you ruin them!”

I watch the boy’s reaction in the mirror as the elevator begins to descend.

“Do people eat butterfly wings?” he asks her after a few seconds.

She makes a scoffing noise and says just a single word: “Stupid.” She clutches her bag closer to her.

As we near the ground floor, I catch the boy’s eye in the mirror. He’s clearly upset to be hit and insulted in front of the tall foreigner. As the elevator slows to a stop, I smile at him and say: “We eat them in my country.”

And just before the doors open, he looks up at his mother and defiantly says: “He eats them!”

As I step out of the elevator, I catch the mother scowling at me. But the boy is happy. I know in his mind he’s already picturing foreigners munching on yellow butterfly wings.

That I’ll be late for my class matters little now. I step out into the rain, hoist my flimsy umbrella, and head to the subway. I’m glad I caught them on the elevator. One must always try one’s best to get to children when they’re young.

2014

中文:

《白痴有限公司》: 還有犀牛、蝙蝠、obasans 、海豚、真英雄、台北秘史 and more. 你可以在台灣買到:



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English:

Have some deadpan with your coffee. From Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

Who's the Idiot?

It is a rare privilege to recognize just how one is idiotic, how idiotic one is, the howness of this state and how it’s interwoven with anything one might call one’s intelligence.--Eric Mader
Idiocy, Ltd. is now available. You do need a copy.

Some readers:

Whether its smoking giraffes, Florida-style rehabilitation, or the oddities of a whole cast of characters in Taipei, Eric Mader shows a sure hand in balancing satire, spoof, and twilight-zone weird, revealing hints of Kafka, Borges, and other worthies, but with a spirit all his own. With its riotous absurdity, its jarring changes of register, and its underlying critical but humane tone, Idiocy, Ltd. will make you laugh and, more important, make you think. --Duncan Chesney, Professor of Comparative Literature,
National Taiwan University
Unpredictability is Mader’s stock in trade . . . an endlessly fascinating eccentric. --Bradley Winterton
The best of these poems surprise us not with a flashy detail, but an image or an abstraction we somehow knew was right around the corner. In the most imaginative moments, where the poems are surprised by translation across language and culture, we are playfully and seriously moved to open our eyes wider and our ears to hear the delight of words. --John Poch, author of Fix Quiet and winner
of the 2014 New Criterion Poetry Prize
More:

BOOKISH ASIA has posted a review by Prof. Hugh Hochman of Reed College. A scholar of 20th-century literature, Hochman raises some of the questions that most interest me, especially that of genre.

Idiocy, Ltd. is now available in a Chinese edition published by Comma Books. See: 白痴有限公司 Launch Party.

Also of interest may be Letter to a Young Prose Poet, on the roles Max Jacob and Daniil Kharms played in getting me into this fix. See also: Idiocy, Ltd. / 白痴有限公司 and Why I Love the Prose Poem.

Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest damn prose in the West.

Letter to a Young Prose Poet

Dear Paul:

When I was 18, already aware that literature was my life, I came upon Paul Auster's anthology of 20th century French poetry. The first pages of that collection, after a brilliant selection of translations of Guillaume Apollinaire, presented a poet I’d never heard of: Max Jacob.

Jacob, a prose poet, worked in the Parisian milieu of Apollinaire, Picasso, the Montmartre Bateau-Lavoir crowd. His life was a study in contradictions: a gay Jewish man, he converted to Catholicism after a series of mystical experiences. His writing was extraordinarily odd. Something hypnotic and dull and irreverent in the voice stuck in my crop, and I immediately started writing pieces in a similar tonal register.

Two years later I was in university learning French so as to be able to read Rimbaud and this fellow Jacob. By sheer chance, my university’s French department happened to include Sydney Lévy, an Egyptian emigre who’d written a book on Jacob. Lévy’s short book, The Play of the Text, revealed to me some of the subtlety of Jacob’s rhetorical tricks. Lévy himself, a chain-smoking Jewish man of Mediterranean cast, was astounded that out of nowhere had appeared a hulking Midwestern boy interested in the obscure French joker-poet Jacob. What’s more, this milk-fed country boy had appeared in his office befuddled, indignant even, that Jacob’s most important work, a collection titled Le Cornet à dés [The Dice Cup], had yet to be fully translated into English.

I remember complaining to him--how was it possible, so many books on Picasso, the surrealists, Apollinaire, how was it that only Jacob was still untranslated? Why didn’t our library have more?

“Well,” he said with a soft laugh, “in fact there isn't much in any library. Not much has been written on Jacob. And believe me, I agree, it's a serious lack.”

Though still quite an amateur (!) I offered to begin work on a new translation with Lévy. And he was gracious enough to agree. Of course he knew my French wasn’t up to the undertaking. But we soon settled into a rhythm: we’d meet every two weeks and he would edit the drafts, catching my worst missteps. As it turned out, we got off to a promising start, but only completed about a third of the book. The following year Lévy opted to take a new post in Santa Barbara, and continuing our work by post, in those pre-Internet days, wasn’t feasible.

It is perhaps part of Jacob’s sad fate (arrested by the Gestapo, he died en route to a concentration camp in 1944) that his major work may forever remain only partly translated into English. Still today, decades later, Le Cornet à dés, his most important collection, has never appeared in an English edition.

Modigliani's portrait of Max Jacob, about 1916
My attempt with Sydney Lévy was one of three that I know of. The results, a rough start, are here: http://www.necessaryprose.com/jacob.html. One decent collection of Jacob's work in English containing many pieces from The Dice Cup is William Kulik's Selected Poems of Max Jacob. John Ashbery has done some of the best translations, but his collection is long out of print.

But why do I send you this letter? Because you complained about not being able really to get into any of the writing projects you started; about not having enough faith in any one project to go through the grind of seeing it through. You asked me if I had any advice.

I’m hoping possibly to infect you with the same bug for short prose that I got.

I recommend journal writing, muttering to yourself on the bus, writing things on folded sheets of paper kept in your pocket--writing down the things you mutter and then elaborating on them. And of course: You must constantly be reading literature, every day, reading the writers you most admire, to keep your head in the rhythmic state suitable to making good sentences of your own. Journal writing, muttering to yourself, scraps of paper always to hand, reading, muttering, scraps of paper, elaborating, journal writing. This then is a basic starting approach.

Some of the scribblings you come up with will, hopefully, develop into short but sharp prose pieces. Certain of them, sharpened further, may be worked into prose poems. Or may have been rough prose poems from the first scribbling. Which is of course the best.

The genres on the border of which the prose poem can flourish are legion: rant, fable, folk tale, menu, editorial, plea, query, public service announcement, romance, fait divers, news report, joke. Many have tried to define the genre as it emerged (mainly over the last century) but most critics, in my view, have wasted too much time trying to pin it down in relation to verse poetry.

I have my own theory of the genre, but won't bother laying it out here.

I began above with Max Jacob. Another writer well worth reading, who worked in a similar register during some of the same years Jacob was active, is the Russian Daniil Kharms. Here are some links:

http://chneukirchen.org/tmp/www.geocities.com/Athens/8926/Kharms/Kh_E_Intro.html

http://chneukirchen.org/tmp/www.geocities.com/Athens/8926/Kharms/Incidences.html

Or if you want to buy one of the collections in print, there's Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms.

Of course I've no idea if this odd genre called prose poem will get under your skin and engage you to take up the pen. But this is my response to your writer's dilemma.

Best,

Eric

P.S. There's now been quite a bit of work in English in the prose poem too. There's an excellent anthology out: Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present. The American writers who’ve most impressed me are Russell Edson and Gabriel Gudding. The latter especially is one of a kind, a verbal prankster of the first order. Some of the poems and passages in A Defense of Poetry and Rhode Island Notebook are stunning. Unfortunately, Gudding is also a New Atheist, and ended by convincing me that, like most in that camp, he was incapable of dialogue with those who think the universe is more than what empirical science can tell us. A sad story, but not one that’s worth retelling here.

Both Gudding and Edson have work online, if you don't want to buy the book right off. And in any case I shouldn't throw too many voices at you all at once. Just start with Jacob and Kharms and see where it leads.

Update 2015: My own work in the genre: Idiocy, Ltd..