This Genre

It’s true that back in the day a guy could get arrested for writing this genre. Go ahead: check FBI records if you don’t believe me. That was before my time, granted, but I’ve heard about it. They’d wait for you on the corner.

“That looks like some funny enjambment you got there.” And: “We’re taking you in.”

Still, if you ask me, I’ve been rereading some of the old timers, and some of these guys were arrested without cause. Far too prolix. It was short essays they wrote, not prose poems. It was cryptic narratives at best.

If you ask me.

Thing is, one needs to wreck the china shop with the smallest possible bull--a bull the size of a shoe, but still recognizable as bull.

You step in the door, you set the bull down, and already shelves begin to fall.

That’s what this crime is about, David Lehman. Your anthology is way too fat. Most of these guys, they'd never get into Sing Sing.

E.M.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

My Substandard Friends

You have to be pretty wimpy to die from a scorpion bite. Ted. You have to be feeble to die from a fall down a short flight of wooden stairs. Andrew. You have to be flimsy stuff to die of hypothermia on an island technically in the tropics. Jared. You have to be lame to drown in a hotel swimming pool. Megan. You have to be a regular hothouse flower to succumb to injuries in a car accident that barely scratched the car. Helmut. You have to be a total loser to get rabies from your little niece’s hamster.

You know who you are.

* * *

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

What It Does

What it does to you is a thing you would not want done to you. Not by any stretch of the time we fell under the sway of ending.

You’re here and be grateful it’s not you either. Should you see them coming to the end of your tether, look away. That you no longer trust each other they take for granted. They’ll grant it you as a given of their supposedly benign presence. Look away. And think only this: What was is the future we hope for.

Mutterings may console. And who do they expect to fool with these arguments that I for one find utterly persuasive?

We are in the place where all fear the one thing that has happened already.

-----

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Bats

What is a bat if it is not a meat moth having a fit under the moon; if it is not a small furred contraption on the verge of going unhinged?

Indeed a bat is a haunted rubber toy dancing to a strobe light; it is Hecate’s own hand-puppet.

Bats are defiantly stuck in the 80s, as you know. Their ears are physiologically incapable of registering names like Britney, Gaga, Kanye. “Who?”

They burst from the hollowed trunks of long-dead trees like text messages sent from the cell phones of Hell.

Will the iPhone 15 be able to decipher these floppy hissing missives? The iPhone 20?

“Look forward 2 seeing u. Sooner than u think. ;) Alison”

No, your Mother can never, neither can your anxiety-disordered Aunt, nor your little sister Carrie when she found the severed gopher’s head in her lunch box--none can shriek more piercingly than the smallest bat.

Was denkst du, Fledermausmann? Müssen wir noch Heidegger lesen?

(As a teen I dreamed such dreams, and if only I had such courage now, I would fulfill these dreams: A one-room museum displaying only the cleaned and mounted jaws of the various bat species, under each jaw a photo of the bat and a sonnet in its honor.)

A bat is a mole in a manic episode. A mole is a depressed bat.

Bats hang while they sleep upside down. Bats sleep while they hang upside down. Bats hang upside down while they sleep.

Sentence 3 is the best.

And you, Kay Thiesenhusen, where are you now?

This and 42 other important public service announcements can be found in my book Idiocy, Ltd.

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:



at Books.com

at 誠品

at 金石堂

Like my Facebook author page: Eric Mader 枚德林

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:



at Books.com

at 誠品

at 金石堂

Like my Facebook author page: Eric Mader 枚德林

Idiocy, Ltd. / 白痴有限公司 and Why I Love the Prose Poem

With Sharky Chen at TIBE 2018
I was very glad to join Sharky Chen of commaBOOKS (逗點文創) at the Taipei International Book Exhibition to talk to readers about the new Chinese translation of Idiocy, Ltd. Here were my comments:

謝謝各位來到這裡。

我是寫3種文類的自由作家，也是住台北20年的台灣女婿。

我很感謝詩人枚綠金幫我找到陳允石這麼好的譯者來翻譯我的這本和台北有關的散文詩故事集《白痴有限公司》。我也特別謝謝陳允石。我和她溝通很多次，詳細說明， 讓她知道寫作的用意。也非常謝謝逗點文創的各位幫忙這本書。

台灣讀者知道的法國詩人波特萊爾是努力推散文詩的十九世紀大師。我寫的散文詩故事已經有世界其他大師的影響。

我寫出很多新的實驗，還有我對台灣的愛。

書裡面有推薦文和序，註解，幫助讀者明白我的語言實驗，很多益智闖關遊戲和謎的神秘感覺，等待大家發掘。

That’s quite brief. Initially I’d planned to spend more time giving some rough ideas of what I’m trying to accomplish with the book. But I didn’t have time to get my comments rendered in Chinese. And anyhow, I’m not sure people sitting there wanted to listen to my painfully accented Mandarin for that long. (!)

Still, I’ll post my draft comments here because, for readers new to the prose poem, they might be helpful.

Eric Mader 枚徳林

On Idiocy, Ltd. and the Jacobian Prose Poem

Thank you all for coming to listen. I’ve been writing seriously for many years now, I’ve published a novel, a collection of essays, and other things, all in English. But since the 1990s I’ve been living here in Taipei, my life is here, I love Taiwan, and so I’m very happy finally to publish one of my books here in Chinese. Because many of my best friends are here, and now they can read some of what I’ve been working on. What’s more, I’m especially happy it’s my weirdest book that’s been translated first: Idiocy, Ltd. I’m thankful to 逗點文創 for taking on the project.

This book is a collection of short texts, including a few short stories, but mostly it contains what we in the West call prose poems. The prose poem has a very odd history, beginning in French in the 19th century with Baudelaire and Rimbaud and eventually being practiced by writers elsewhere in Europe and the US. What started me writing in this genre was my discovery many years ago of one 20th century French prose poet: Max Jacob.

With Max Jacob and a few other European writers, the prose poem took on a very different character from what it was earlier, and became very different from lyric poetry in general. Jacob turned it into a space of play. For one, he used the genre to play with narrative conventions. Jacob mastered a certain tone, both intimate and detached at the same time, a very ironic tone connected, I think, to his Jewishness, and arising from his being something of an outsider to European culture.

What do I mean by Jacob’s “playfulness”?

This will be difficult for me to express in Chinese, so I’ll try to make it very simple.

Whenever you sit down to read a story or newspaper article or novel, you immediately, in the very first sentence, are infected by a rhythm, by a certain style, that determines how the genre works and tells you what kind of thing you are reading. What Jacob did brilliantly was set off in the style of one genre--his first sentences leading the reader to anticipate automatically what kind of writing would follow--but then suddenly he would switch in some other direction, the initial style would stop making sense, or the logic of the writing would break down. In other words, Jacob was constantly tricking the reader, making the reader expect one thing, then surprising him with an entirely different thing. He would begin stories that would go nowhere, that would end up in a joke on the main character, and he’d do it all in a handful of sentences. His writing is intentionally confusing in a way that makes you think not so much about the content of the story, but about the rules according to which stories are told. Or sometimes the rules by which newspaper articles are written. Because Jacob played this kind of game with all kinds of different genres of writing: newspaper articles, love letters, family histories, fairy tales.

I don’t know if you follow what I mean. In a few brilliant sentences, Jacob would mock the way we use language, and the way he would do it would make us notice how stiff our genres are. He would show this stiffness by breaking the rules in funny ways.

I give an example from everyday life: If you’re used to using a knife to cut vegetables in your kitchen, you don’t think about it, you just reach for it and start cutting. But if one day you pick it up and it’s broken, if the blade cracks and falls off of the handle, suddenly you have this odd feeling: “This is my knife that I’ve been using for years. And now?” You look at it as a suddenly alien thing; you notice it. You realize how long you’ve been taking it for granted only because, suddenly, it is something completely different: it can no longer cut your vegetables.

This is what Max Jacob and a lot of modern prose poets after him do with language. They break language in order to wake us up. They show us what we took for granted by misleading us in unpredictable ways. Of course as a writer Jacob does more than this, he does much else as well, but this is for me his most essential accomplishment.

In a lot of the texts in Idiocy, Ltd., I’m working in this way too. In many of them I use the language of persuasion and argument to make claims that aren’t persuasive at all. Or I state facts about things that aren’t actually facts, but absurdities. But I state them in a tone as if everyone already accepted the claims as true. Or I start out in a certain style, say adventure narrative, and shift into something very different, putting the whole notion of adventure in doubt.

Reading this kind of thing, some readers just say “Huh? It doesn’t make sense,” but other readers, they laugh. They’re led to laugh because the effect has worked.

Another thing I want to say about this kind of writing--I mean the kind of prose poem writing that a lot of writers have been working on during the recent decades: it is a method that can take up almost any genre of text and deform it in humorous or revealing ways. So, for example, here are some kinds of texts that could be taken up by a prose poet:

political speech;
fable;
folk take;
restaurant review;
message in a bottle;
public service announcement;
travel log;
medical report.

I make fun of some of these in my book by infecting and bending them.

Now this kind of writing is hard to translate into another language, and I’m very lucky that for this book I had Pansy Chen as translator, because she worked very hard to make the odd changes in tone work in Chinese. From people who’ve read the book so far, people here in Taiwan, I can tell that she often succeeded brilliantly. She and I met regularly for awhile, discussing most of the texts in the book line by line, so she always knew just what I was trying to do.

I want to thank Pansy for that careful work. I think any of you here, though you’re likely to find some of these texts just strange or opaque, other texts will make you laugh or make you look at things in a different way. So it’s a book about breaking perceptions, or at bending them in unexpected directions. I’d love to hear from you if you have any comments.

You can look at the handout I’ve given you. I invite you to follow my author page on Facebook and post comments there. In the coming weeks I’ll post any reviews that come out about the book. So you can see what other readers think of it.

Again, thanks for coming.

E.M.

白痴有限公司在台灣:

books.com

Eslite 誠品

Kingstone 金石堂

The English original is available through Amazon:

Idiocy, Ltd.

Reviews of Idiocy, Ltd., etc.:

Who’s the Idiot?

My novel A Taipei Mutt is out in a second edition. The Asian capital unmuzzled:

A Taipei Mutt

Cheers.

Obergefallen

I.
Even as a puppy her husky was averse to meat. It would beg for bits of salad at the dinner table. Her guests thought this amusing, but she warned them: “This isn’t something to laugh about.”
     Later her husky would only eat grass. She hardly needed to mow the lawn.
     She decided her husky wasn’t a husky, but a cow. Even two zoologists from the university agreed: “It’s a cow.” And the husky himself barked proudly: “Cow!”
     Some pointed out that her cow couldn’t produce milk, so couldn’t actually be a cow. They pointed to the sleek gray fur, the pointy ears, the canine shape.
     Then the Supreme Court weighed in: “It shall be called a cow.”
     The husky was so happy at the news that he barked all night for a week.
     What's more, three of four academic studies now suggest he can in fact produce milk.
     The community brings the dog salad three times a day. After months of this treatment, he’s gotten pickier. He demands romaine lettuce, only organic.

II.
The kids in the geometry class I teach wondered why they weren’t allowed to draw four-sided triangles.
     “Because a triangle has three sides,” I said. “That’s the meaning of the word triangle.”
     “That’s just ideology talking,” Susan said.
     By the next week they were all drawing rectangles and saying: “See? Triangle! Triangle!”
     In the teacher’s lounge I talked to the principal about this odd class.
     “You shouldn’t call them odd,” he said. “Four-sided figures also have a right to be triangles.”
     I continued to teach the class my way, Euclid and all, doing my best to get them through the theorems, which wasn’t easy without triangles.
     Some parents complained.
     Then the Supreme Court weighed in: “A triangle is a three- or four-sided figure.”
     "I told you to be careful on this," the principal said.
     They didn't renew my contract.

III.
She’s a strict vegetarian who loves a good bratwurst. I pointed out to her--she was grilling on the patio--that bratwursts were made from meat.
     “It’s right there on the label,” I said. “Look!”
     I should have kept my mouth shut. First the threatening phone calls, the snubs from neighbors. Now her vegan friends have started picketing my place of work.
     Eight of my Facebook friends have unfriended me.
     “Just ‘cuz you’re not vegetarian yourself doesn’t mean you have a right to hate them!” one messaged in explanation.

Eric Mader

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.

Snails

The snail: mere presence of life in a small wet clot. The snail: moist pair of lips without face or voice to trouble its progress.

I love the snail, but will it ever love me back?

It will not, it cannot.

On the humid island where I live the snails I see are the size and weight of walnuts, but more precious. They wend their way at a snail’s pace up and down moss-grown cement embankments. At excruciating slowness they harry the smooth stone walls of overfunded government redoubts.

May they finally dissolve the Hai-Ji-Hui in their delicate mucous caress.

That snails never get more than two meters from the ground I consider a great virtue. To hell with eagles on their rocky crags. They sit up there with Leni Riefenstahl. To hell with all that flies above and surveys, in pixellated high-definition.

O, I will shoot it from the sky.

The poets whose words take flight are not my poets. Flying things are too many now. Already when white sails began to scud over seas, raking in empires, flight grew suspect.

And look--before you can blink that bigot Lindbergh had crossed the Atlantic back to Europe.

You can have your Nabokov with his girly lepidopteral perversions. The artist as marzipan-scented fart, it’s not for me sorry. I’ll stay here with my Russell Edson, my Dostoyevksy, my steady poetic of slugs.

In fact the snail is the sexiest of creatures. Is this maybe because it will never love me back?

What is the snail’s experience of time? Can you get yourself into a snail’s head? What is it to have no before and after, no night or day, but only the cool (immobile time) and the less cool (mobile time)?

I sit near the snail, lean toward it, my nose just inches from its own eyeless face--and the snail doesn’t even know, it can’t, that I am here.

I blow a puff of breath on it: its soft antennae retract; that is all.

Though we now share the same space, one cubic meter of dank air, still the snail and I exist in utterly different dimensions.

If the snail could doubt, it would have every reason to doubt my existence. And yours too.

Snail A: “There are huge beings of vastly superior intelligence that move about around us, sometimes stepping on us wantonly, most times just ignoring us.”

Snail B: “Enough of your silly nonsense. You don’t have a shred of evidence. There’s only the cool, the less cool, and the occasional accident.”

Snail C: “You're too confident, B. Actually these huge beings may exist or they may not. We can’t know for sure.”

Snail B: “Pshaw! It’s nonsense.”

Snail A: “It’s not nonsense. They exist. And I believe there is one of them, one of these beings, that even loves us.”

Yes, this discourse is hardly likely. I don’t care. Weirdos like me, who sit by the Hai-Ji-Hui before work, who watch the women walk by with their faces in iPhones--weirdos like me can well imagine such snail talk as this.

Eric Mader
Taipei

Mosquitoes and the Political Process

What do mosquitoes eat? And why are they such bastards? I begin with these two questions.

Of course it’s wrong to say mosquitoes eat blood. They take blood to nourish their eggs or incubate their eggs or some damn thing. They don’t eat blood. They eat dust mites, or just dust.

Are mosquitoes maybe vegetarian? Now that would be ironic.

What do mosquitoes fucking eat anyway?

The truth is I haven’t learned a thing about mosquitoes since high school biology class. And I’m too annoyed at the little fucks at present to go searching on the Internet about them.

In fact every night as I’m drifting off to sleep there’s always precisely one mosquito in the room to harass me. Yes, there are dozens on the balcony where we wash clothes, seven or eight in the hallway by the elevator, but there’s always only one that comes when I’m falling asleep.

My question is: How do they decide which one? Are they maybe democratic, the bastards?

Democratic vegetarian bastards who nonetheless suck your blood. It’s doesn’t sound exactly counterintuitive when you put it all together like that.

I’m very attuned to the one that comes. I am. I can hear the faint whining of wings from a distance in the darkness. I know when he’s arrived in the room long before he gets near me. And if he flies over my face, be it even three feet away, I feel the ever so faint rush of air on my cheeks.

It’s kind of pleasant really.

Still, if I get up and switch the light on to find and kill him he’ll drop instantly out of sight. In my experience only mosquitoes in Taiwan know to do this. Have they maybe evolved in symbiosis with humans as their main blood source? I believe so. American or Russian mosquitoes are fucking dumb compared to mosquitoes here.

If I could tell the mosquito, the one that comes, to just bite my hand and get it over with I would. But how can I tell him--what language do mosquitoes speak? I’m guessing it’s a dialect of Mayan. I’m also guessing even if I told him he wouldn’t just bite my hand and get it over with, but would keep fucking buzzing round my wife and I and causing her to flail her arms in the dark and groan and make things worse in general. He wouldn’t listen to my offer no matter how fluent my Mayan was because he enjoys being the fucking annoying little bastard they elected him to be.

I’m nearsighted now, but can remember looking at mosquitoes close up back when I was younger and could see. I remember their upper bodies were covered with soft brown fur, which kind of made them look like tiny bloodsucking deer.

At least in Wisconsin, where I grew up, the mosquitoes had fur.

My question is: How short would people have to be for it to be cost-effective to make mosquito fur coats? I’m guessing if people were two or three centimeters tall that might be about right. And we’d have to shoot the mosquitoes out of the sky; we’d hunt them.

But if we were only three centimeters tall, we’d probably be too worried about ants to think much about luxuries like fur coats.

It’s 1:40 a.m. now. I’ve gotten up and left the mosquito in the other room with my wife and am here at my computer with yet another fucking mosquito in the study. Perhaps this one was voted in as vice president.

Sorry but I just killed the vice president. Callous I know. And how can I do it anyway--kill a few of the poor bastards every day without even bothering to learn their language first? Think about it. There’s something unjust there.

Yes, I know very well that calling them bastards isn’t quite right either--not because they deserve better, but because the mosquitoes that bite are the female of the species, the males just hang out in swamps and read the papers. And since the pejorative term bastard is usually applied only to males, it was kind of incorrect to keep calling them bastards here.

But I wanted this to be a feminist piece.

Eric Mader
Taipei

Acquiring Wisdom in Life

A long life, though filled with trials and sorrows, may also bring one wisdom. For instance, one might learn what I have learned about moths: that they do not like being washed. They are quiet and their dust is part of their personality. Though the moth seems truly to cry out for cleaning, it does not want to be cleaned. I have learned in fact that no creature looks more forlorn than a moth that has gotten a good scrubbing with a coarse brush.

Many are the things I have learned in my long years. I shall write them here in due time.

A Man of Action

Taxiing before takeoff, not even on the runway yet, we all heard the dreaded thud. The contents had shifted seriously in the overhead compartment.

The perfectly shaved man in seat 10B, directly above whom the contents had shifted, looked up from his pulp thriller with vague panic in his eye. My God, it's actually happened. The contents have shifted!

Then, just as quickly, his eyes twisted quizzically and I could see him kind of laugh at himself as he realized: So fucking what? I mean--it's just my carry on!

He glanced over the aisle and caught me watching him. His hypershaved face blushed slightly and, annoyed I'd gotten into his head, he turned his eyes swiftly back to his Tom Clancy.

As for me, I took out my own book, another distinguished Jesuit explaining Aquinas. Our plane took off, and after a handful of pages on the Virtues, before we'd even reached cruising altitude, I'd somehow drifted into sleep.

Natural Pedagogy 自然教學方法

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.

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.

自然教學方法

昏昏欲睡了，還沒刮鬍子，我把我五層樓房子的大門鎖好，等電梯來。我看手錶，了解我第一堂課會遲到。電梯從很高的樓層下降得很慢。門終於打開我遇到上面某層樓的鄰居，一個媽媽和她小兒子，大概五歳。兒子帶著一大片西瓜，上面有保鮮紙。我覺得黃色的西瓜搭配他T恤上面的黃色腳踏車。照樣，他媽媽的化妝太濃，她帶著一個大大的LV包。

電梯門關了，媽媽突然打兒子的頭，說：「別一直摸！你會弄壞，不會有人想吃！像蝴蝶翅膀，你摸就會弄壞！」

我在鏡子裡可以看到孩子的臉。電梯開始下降。

「有人會吃蝴蝶翅膀嗎？」兒子過幾秒問他媽媽。

她發出嗤音，只說一個子：「笨。」她把她的包包拉近一點。

我從鏡子裡看到男孩在看我。我明白他在高高的外國人面前這樣被打又被受辱感到羞愧。當電梯快要停在一樓時，我微笑對他說：「在我的國家我們會吃。」

然後，電梯開門跟前，他抬頭對他媽媽强嘴說：「他會吃！」

我走出電梯時，一眼看看媽媽做鬼臉。不過兒子開心。我知道他在心裡已經可以看到吃黃色蝴蝶翅膀的外國人。

我會遲到第一堂課沒關係。大部分我的學生也會遲到。我打開雨傘，往捷運站走。儘可能啟發小孩是必要的。

[四十多歲小孩寫的文字。 謝謝我學生畢莘幫我改我的錯誤，但她應該太有禮貌， 應該還有怪怪的地方。]

畢莘

In the Dean's Office

"Did they bite you or beat you?" the dean was saying to the slender woman seated before him.

The woman, head down, frazzled, was rubbing her temples. She mumbled something inaudible.

"I didn't hear that," the dean said. "What was it: bite or beat? Bite, you know, has a long vowel, a long i, because of the silent e at the end."

The woman raised her head.

"I know it has a long vowel," she said curtly. "I have a PhD. from Berkeley!"

"Yes, yes. . . . So what was it: bite or beat?"

"Both."

"What do you mean both?"

"I mean both," the woman said. "They bit me and they beat me."

The dean's eyebrows went up. He really seemed almost shocked.

"No," he announced decisively. "They either bite you or beat you, but they never do both."

"Well, they did both," said the young academic, holding up her forearm to show him the two gauze bandages, then pulling aside her collar to show a dark bruise arcing round the base of her neck.

"You want to see my belly?" she asked, making as if to stand up.

"No, no, that won't be necessary," the dean waved dismissively. "Was there . . . Were there any offers to tattoo you?"

"One kid said he wanted to leave something tribal on my thigh," the woman said. "That's how he said it: 'I wanna leave something tribal. Right on your inner thigh.' Then he made a clicking noise."

"That's tattoo talk," the dean said.

"No kidding," the academic said.

The dean sat thinking a moment.

"And they bit you and beat you?" he said finally. "All the students? All of them did both?"

"Yes, they all bit me and they all beat me, all nine, repeatedly. It was the whole last thirty minutes of class!"

"Amazing," the dean said. "Really amazing."

The woman said nothing, went back to rubbing her temples. A moment passed.

"I think you've got a serious future here," the dean said in conclusion, closing the folder on his desk. "Really. This is unprecedented. In my experience at least."

"Great," the woman said, in a tone that was impossible to read.

"I mean, if they're biting and beating you already, after only a week! Well, let me tell you. With a strong start like that I wouldn't be surprised if we were already paying you something by the end of semester. Just symbolic of course, but something."

"Great," the woman said flatly. "Even symbolic is helpful. Great."

Japanese News 日本新聞

JAPANESE NEWS

Was in the living room watching the news today before lunch. A Japanese news channel with Chinese subtitles. There was an in-depth report about a panda that didn't want to be a panda, so it dressed up as a badger and applied to zoo authorities to live in the zoo as a badger. The zoo accepted the application, but soon the zoo's real badgers started complaining to the zoo keepers because the panda was too lazy to dig burrows like they did. So the zoo keepers decided that maybe the panda could dress up as an otter and float in the water with the sea otters. The next segment of the report showed the panda in an otter costume floating next to a talkative sea otter. The sea otter was just starting to teach the disguised panda how to crack clams when my wife came in and said: "Come to the kitchen already! You said you'd help cut the vegetables! And no more BS about how you have to watch the news. This isn't even a news channel. It's cartoons!"

My wife: always splitting hairs like that.

日本新聞

今天午餐前，我在客廳看新聞。是日本新聞台，有中文字幕。他們專題報導一隻熊貓不想當熊貓，所以申請裝扮成獾，去動物園工作。要當動物園的其中一隻獾。他們願意僱用牠。不過過了一會兒，動物園真正的獾開始對飼養員抱怨新來的獾太懶惰，不願像牠們一樣挖地洞。所以飼養員決定把熊貓裝扮成海獺，把牠跟海獺放一起。新聞報導下一段可以看到裝扮成海獺的熊貓漂在一隻海獺的旁邊。當海獺剛剛開始教熊貓怎麼㪣開蛤蜊，我太太進來說：＂唉！快來廚房！你不是說你會幫我切菜？別跟我說你要看新聞！這不是新聞台，這是卡通台。＂

她總是鑽牛角尖。

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..

Sonnet en M

It was 1990 or ‘91. I was in an intro-level grad course in the University of Wisconsin-Madison French Department, and our assignment was to write a sonnet in the manner of one of the great French poets. I remember my first effort contained these lines, after Baudelaire:

La nature est un temple où un grand M doré
Laisse parfois sortir de confuses paroles
Le clown y traverse une forêt de symboles
. . . .

Des pommes frites frais comme des chairs d’enfant

[Nature is a temple where the Golden Arches
At times emit confused words
There the clown passes through a forest of symbols
. . . .

French fries fresh like a child’s flesh]

This is all I can remember of the poem. The text is lost.

Prof. Yvonne Ozzello didn’t accept my sonnet and wanted me to do something else. I’d written an analysis of Rimbaud’s “Voyelles,” she pointed out, so why not respond to that work? I still have this second sonnet, which I now find embarrassing at best:

Voyelles! Qui dira vos humeurs étourdies?
--Sur nos pages vos pas avancent oubliés;
Les nuits où vous veillez entre l's et le t--
Lavez-vous nos poèmes ainsi que d'une pluie?

Comme des brouillards froids sous des flèches vieillies
Pèsent sur nos jardins et places oubliés,
Vos pouvoirs échouants m'ont trop désespéré
Et vos brefs désaccords irritent mon ennui.

Les scribes anciens pour honorer leur Dieu
Veulent des parchemins fins pour leur très saint hébreu,
Et les maçons obscurs de ce peuple choisi,

Sur les piliers forts de leur Temple sacré,
Ont ciselé de Dieu les lois sanctifiées,
Sans lettres d'alphabet pour vos sons affaiblis.

[Vowels! Who might speak your dizzying moods?
--On our page your steps leave no trace;
The nights you keep vigil between s and t--
You wash through our poems like rain.

As chilly fogs draped beneath age-old spires
Weigh on our gardens and deserted public squares,
Your exhausting powers push me to despair
And your slight disaccords aggravate my ennui.

To honor their God the ancient scribes
Sought fine parchment for their sacred Hebrew,
And the nameless masons of this chosen people,

On the pillars of their holy Temple,
Chiseled God’s holy law
Without any letters for your feeble sounds.]

Ozzello accepted this poem.

But the first sonnet, my real masterpiece, is now gone. Concentrate as I might, I can’t remember more of the lines: whenever I try I envision the clown instead.

He stands at the edge of one of those McDonald’s playgrounds, grimacing at me, gloating. It’s as if he guards a doorway that keeps me from getting at the lost lines of my poem.

To tell the truth the “M” sonnet survived until recently in a small black filing case I’d asked my father to keep in the basement of his Pewaukee, Wisconsin home. Besides the poem, the case contained all my graduate work in French: papers, notes, ideas for further study. I had no space for these things in my small Taipei apartment, so I left them with my father.

But last time I visited him, in 2008, the files were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t say anything about it, but still I wondered. Had they perished in the recent basement flooding he mentioned, or had they simply been thrown out?

The filing case was airtight sealed plastic. It should have resisted flooding.

“He’ll never look at these things again,” I imagine my father saying as he opens the slightly muddied case. “Look! It’s all in French! Why do we need this stuff in our basement? Get rid of it.”

Is this how it happened? I can’t be sure.

There’s another possibility, slightly more plausible. Not far from my father’s home, on the Pewaukee offramp, is a McDonald’s with one of those playgrounds, the same kind of playground as shows up in my dream. I imagine the clown breaking into my father’s home in the dead of night. Flashlight in hand, he goes down to the basement to steal the files. Further, I imagine the clown back in the restaurant the next day, grinding up my French graduate work into pulp and adding it, spoonful by spoonful, to the French fry batter. In this way my writing is both completely obliterated and served to customers in their Happy Meals.

This I believe is the real meaning of “Freedom fries”: freedom from anyone who would do something as nonsensical as graduate work in literary studies.

I know, I know. You’ll say I’m just using the clown to exculpate my father, who is, in his way, kind of a clown himself. But who’s to say it didn’t really happen like this? Or who’s to say that my father, my mother, even myself and Prof. Yvonne Ozzello too--who’s to say we’ve not all of us been working for the clown all along?

Curiosity

That curiosity killed the cat is not so impressive. I mean, we're supposed to beware curiosity because of some cat? Now if the idiom were "Curiosity killed a herd of bison" or "Curiosity wiped out all the beetle species in Borneo in a single night"--now that'd make one think twice. But a measly cat?

馬的問題 -- The Problem With Horses

從前，馬是非常好的交通工具。如今多數卻成為上流社會女性用來炫耀的裝飾品。

如果人人都能有一匹馬，牠應該會獲得尊重。可惜，目前來看，有錢有閑的人才有能力養馬。

在目前無解的難題中，暫且拋開階級層面的考慮。單單探究馬的智力就是無比沈重的負擔：馬究竟有沒有自覺？

由於馬頭乃是木刻而成，馬會有智能，使人感到意外。在木作的腦內，到底可以有多少個神經元同時運作？科學家仍然十分困惑。

從外觀可我們明顯可以看出：馬頭從馬的身體長出，宛然樹幹，又從樹幹長成馬頭的樣子。眼睛有真實動物的模樣，其實不過是木刻。看來也不過就是樹木。牠在看人的樣子就像呆呆的木頭。你怎麼可能對牠有所寄望？連流浪狗都可以在牠腳下繞，也，佔上風。

勞勃‧瑞福的電影＜＜輕聲細語＞＞可能會誤導人們對馬的理解。事實與電影情景相反：對馬輕聲細語的那位，並不希望別人聽到他說什麼。

馴馬師可以教馬跳舞。通常馬能跳舞，也可以跑得好。

散文名家蒙田寫過一篇文章，提到馬可以用蹄數拍來回答算術。我可一點也不信。

以上這些討論都只是初步探討階段。我還未進行到問題的核心。問題關鍵在於：馬總是讓執韁者決定行動方向。對於任何一匹馬而言，我們該問的是：誰在騎馬？

換一個角度來問：權貴階級究竟想往哪裡去？

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THE PROBLEM WITH HORSES (original)
Once a useful helper and means of getting where one needed to go, horses have become largely a decorative toy on which upper class ladies show off their poise.

Horses might still be respectable if everybody could have one, but at present only the idle rich can afford to keep a horse.

Class issues aside, the problem of horse intelligence is no small matter in our current impasse. Are we even dealing with a creature with a mind of its own?

Given that horse heads are carved from wood, it is amazing the animal shows any intelligence at all. How many synapses can fire simultaneously in a wooden brain? Researchers still puzzle over this problem.

Having grown out of the horse's body like a tree stump, the head slowly carves itself into standard horse shape. This much we know. The eyes make it look like an animal rather than a tree, though in a way it really is a kind of tree. It stares dumb at you, all wooden. What can you expect from such a creature? The lowest street dog could run circles round it, and does.

Don't be fooled by the Redford film. In reality a horse whisperer is someone who doesn't want you to hear what he's telling his horse.

Horses can be taught to dance and seem to enjoy both dancing and running.

Montaigne writes of a horse that could tap out the answers to simple sums with its right front hoof. I don't believe it for a minute.

But all this is just preliminary. I haven't gotten to the real problem with horses. It is as follows: Horses always go wherever the person holding the reins wants them to go. In other words, for any given horse we must ask: Who holds the reins?

Or to put the question another way: Where do the rich want to go?

Eric Mader
Taipei