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There's a poetically-gifted love rat loose in Taipei

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Apr 16, 2006, Page 18

Pressed Number 4 Edited by Joel McCaffery 80 pages

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.

One strange feature is that though drink is notionally celebrated in this issue, with the editor commenting that "liquor has been a major muse for centuries, and will continue to be a creative catalyst until the sun explodes and engulfs us all," every single contribution related to the subject presents alcohol as either the direct cause of, or closely related to, disaster.

There's a story about fishing in the Netherlands by Jordan Reeves, a devil-fable by Sean Reilly and a nicely skeptical tale about southern baptism by Kirsty Thornton, none of them masterpieces but all of interest.

There's a lot of poetry, too, in addition to the love rat masterpiece quoted above. But the rhythms, strongly grim tone and astute knowingness of that poem were so powerful I found myself unable to adjust afterwards to the other poets' smaller canvases and more limited ambitions.

What the magazine appears to be waiting for is some really masterful talent to come along and dominate it. The crucial issue is confidence. Mader, Tomassini, Paas and the anonymous Love Rat are all major contenders. But the magazine's maximum length for stories, 3,000 words, isn't approached in this issue (though the love rat piece, at exactly 100 long lines, is neatly calculated to reach the absolute maximum size allowed for poems). The result, nonetheless, is that promise remains the dominant impression. What would be wonderful would be for a really strong talent to seize the publication and shake it by the scruff of the neck.

The great virtue of Pressed remains that it's an open forum. It doesn't pay its contributors, but it does give them a stylish shop-window for their creations. Forty copies have been sent to English-language literary academics working in Taiwan and some library subscriptions should result from that initiative. A Web site containing all back issues is also promised within the year. All in all, there's plenty of reason for writers to consider sending in their work. Contact should be made to pressed@asia.com.

On a final note, the first issue of a much smaller English-language literary magazine from China has come our way. Called dongxi, it can be checked out at www.xanga.com/dongximagazine.
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