Who's the love rat? The question dominates the latest issue of Taiwan's biannual literary magazine Pressed. More compact, and according to the editor giving the journal "a more ergonomically sensible durability," it looks better than ever. Four thousand copies have been printed, and it's available free in many of the places foreigners tend to congregate. But over-arching all else is the question of who wrote a magnificent anonymous poem hidden away in the magazine's back pages.
Entitled My Life as a Love Rat, it's written in unfashionably long rhyming couplets, a fact that only goes to endorse its author's manifest independence of mind. It's narrated by a serial one-night-stander and contains brilliant strokes of cynical self-loathing. His women are his victims, and the author's mastery of the verse form matches his (or her) mastery of the relevant emotions, and their repression.
"My girlfriend's coming round so I'm afraid you'll have to go".../And so she left my lair with just her odor for a trace,/"You haven't got my numb...eh?" as the door slammed in her face.../And so I'd send the usual text and wait for a reply./ILL MEET U BACK @ MY PLCE IF U FNCY A GUD TIME./OK. ILL B 1HR IF U WNT ILL GET SUM WINE./Red or white it mattered not, to a rat they taste the same - /JUST MAKE SURE U WEAR SOMETHING HOT I WNT 2 PLAY A GAME.
The poem ends with the rat reforming, but of course we don't believe it.
Eric Mader, author of the novel A Taipei Mutt, contributes one of the best pieces of prose fiction, a tale set in Florida in 2019. The narrator is in custody for being insufficiently over-weight, with fellow detainees being held for decrying golf and Fourth of July barbecues. The story, which continues in the spirit of the same writer's satires published on www.necessary-prose.com, contains several incisive instances of quiet irony, such as the following: "And you must also know that reading French novels is technically a felony ever since the dissolution of NATO during Jeb Bush's second term."
There are other fine stories too. One is by ex-editor Jason Tomassini, now living back in Canada. It uses the well-established gambit of revealing the world of adults through the only half-understanding perceptions of a child -- the reader sees the whole truth, however. The themes here are Jewishness and sibling rivalry for the affections of the son of one of them. It's a subtle, masterly piece of writing, and you feel you want to read it again the moment you've finished it.
Another strong piece, terse and considered, is a story by Noel Dallow about a samurai seeking to baptize his new sword in the blood of a total stranger. The lack of moral comment reinforces the tone of the prose, as in "an explosion of crimson astounds the snow."
Elsewhere, an apparent obsession with drink is explained by "alcohol" having been the theme for the issue's competition, and the cover contains a nice piece of artwork by N.W. Jones. The magazine is not without its minor flaws, however. I counted three punctuation errors (two "it's" for "its" and one "who's" for "whose") in one poem alone; I thought they might be intentional, indicating a drunken speaker perhaps, but looking again I doubt this.
The alcohol contest itself was won by one of the magazine's old hands, Mark Paas. He has come up with an efficiently-crafted story about a man who, in an effort to rejuvenate his marriage, engages in role-play with his wife. It's given the necessary alcoholic dimension without concerning drink very centrally, but was a deserved winner nonetheless.
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