Poem or list of band names?
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A few days ago, we looked at a propaganda poster in Beijing: "'Dangerous love'" (4/19/16).
In continuing research on this poster, I discovered that at one site where it was pasted on the wall, there was an enigmatic sequence of lines on another piece of paper pasted on the wall just to the right of the 16-panel poster that the whole world was talking about:
Sources: here and here (close-up).
The first thing I noticed on the light brown piece of paper was what I took to be a poem:
The Beauty
chāochē léidá
xíngzǒu de màizi
huā mò
chìhésè
The Beauty
超车雷达
行走的麦子
花墨
赤褐色
The Beauty
Radar for passing other cars
Walking wheat
Floral ink
Auburn
It reminded me of a Chinese poem written in Taiwan that I read approximately thirty years ago which had the English title "Glove" and developed the conceit of "love" being hidden inside of "glove".
I must confess that I couldn't make sense of these lines as a poem, and it didn't help much that at the top of the sheet was this line (for quite some time I wasn't sure how to read the last character):
yīqǐ hējiǔ yīqǐ fēng 一起喝酒一起疯
("let's drink together and get crazy together")
So I asked several people their opinion and was not very surprised when a variety of readings were offered. A graduate student from China suggested that the five lines were the names of bands that would be playing at a pub or club. The most amazing explanation, however, came from a poet who lives in Beijing:
I think that the line at the top is saying "Drink together, DIE together."
As for the little poem, it fits with the unsafe driving theme of "drink together, die together." Some crazy drivers install an instrument (it's not actually radar) that confuses the speed-trap instrumentation that detects speeding cars. When they need a burst of speed to pass a another car, they turn on their "anti-speed trap" device so they can blaze past it. Alternately, there is a kind of instrument that tells you a speed detector is near, so you can slow down to avoid getting a ticket. If you rely on such a device, that means you'll be driving pretty fast when you're not near a speed trap, so you'll be in danger. I have actually been in a car in Beijing in which the driver was using the latter detector! I'm not sure the former kind of instrument really exists, but the latter does, and either would explain the first line of the poem.
行走的麥子 sounds like a modern-poetry idiom for "an accident waiting to happen," namely that this is moving "wheat" that is about to get lopped off.
Chinese are fond of metaphors of splattered blood, so 花墨 means "your spattered blood will be bright-colored ink."
赤褐色 sounds like the color of contused flesh.
"Found art" is a well-established artistic form. Perhaps we can refer to the five lines on the light brown piece of paper as a ready-made specimen of "found poetry".
[Thanks to Fangyi Cheng, Meng Lang, and Denis Mair]
Rod Johnson said,
April 23, 2016 @ 10:59 pm
Your second device sounds very much like the radar detectors that have been common in the US now for a couple decades. Is that what they are, or some other technology entirely?
Ken Miner said,
April 24, 2016 @ 12:18 am
The term "fuzz-buster" (US) comes to mind. It may be a brand name. Basically a radar detector I believe.
Fluxor said,
April 24, 2016 @ 1:03 am
https://site.douban.com/school/
A quick google of the lines on that poster turns up the link above. "School" is a live music bar in Beijing. The link lists the bar's daily musical lineup. Below is a small snippet (as of today). Note the bands listed on April 14 matches those in the poster.
4.13 陈奂仁 一个循环 巡演北京站 100/80
4.14 CRAZY NIGHT主办 免费FREE
The Beauty，超车雷达，行走的麦子，花墨，赤褐色
4.15 DR.SMARTASS主办 朋克之夜 免费FREE
帝国主义混蛋，致命一击，体糙，THE FLYX，BACKFIRE，烧酒军团
Ken Miner said,
April 24, 2016 @ 2:15 am
Am I alone in my dismay at modern societies who are unsure of the meanings of their inscriptions?
Whenever I have begun to learn Chinese the utter absurdity of a modern nation-state still using a logographic writing system, discarded everywhere else eons ago, simply overwhelms me and I cannot bring myself to continue. A hundred years ago you could say this openly without fear of (usually ignorant) counterblows. Regarding the even more tragic use of this system in the fifth century by the Japanese, G. B. Sansom wrote in 1931:
"Those sounds [of Japanese], simple and few in number, are very well suited to notation by an alphabet, and it is perhaps one of the tragedies of oriental history that the Japanese genius did not a thousand years ago rise to its invention. Certainly when one considers the truly appalling system which in the course of centuries they did evolve, that immense and intricate apparatus of signs for recording a few dozen little syllables, one is inclined to think that the western alphabet is perhaps the greatest triumph of the human mind."
Today it has become unpopular to praise the alphabet. But as Korea fortunately discovered, writing speech directly does make vast numbers of people literate. Some day the real limits of literacy in China will come to light. Probably not in my lifetime. I have a hunch that in China and Japan it was not considered desirable to make vast numbers of people literate. This would surely be offered as a motive if, say, Egyptian logographic writing had persisted to the present day.
I understand the thrill of learning Kanji. I took Japanese in college for three years. I loved it. But now I think this beauty does not justify the beast.
Jamie said,
April 24, 2016 @ 2:31 am
While I have some sympathy with Ken's view, I don't think the writing system is the cause of the ambiguity here. Isn't it just a lack of the necessary cultural context (knowing that these are names of bands, for example)?
Ken Miner said,
April 24, 2016 @ 2:48 am
Jamie, yeah. My remarks really pertain to long reading of this blog. The orientalists (and I certainly respect their knowledge) are constantly trying to figure out the meanings of inscriptions.
MikeA said,
April 24, 2016 @ 1:01 pm
Not a language comment, but a technical note. The first sort of "radar jammer" has existed at least once in the U.S., where an acquaintance of mine (an E.E.) cobbled one up from war-surplus items. I know of this from his relating his encounter with an un-amused radar officer: "I don't know what you have in that car, but if I catch you doing it again you will be jailed". Since it was blatantly illegal, I doubt such a thing is openly for sale in the U.S. But then, so are many things.
KeithB said,
April 25, 2016 @ 9:07 am
Rod Johnson:
Sounds more like the highly illegal jammer/spoofer*, not just a detector.
*I just made the term up, but a spoofer puts out a signal that makes the radar think you are going at a different speed than you are really going.
andyb said,
April 25, 2016 @ 5:16 pm
@MikeA: From the late 80s until 1997, you could buy commercial jammers, of various types. Since 1997, they're illegal to sell (even if they don't work), and to use near airports, and states are explicitly allowed to make their use a felony (although only a few do). Also, most of the later models didn't work—not really because they were scams, but because making them work reliably, and keeping up the arms race with the police guns, was just too hard. And even if they couldn't counteract jamming, it's dead easy to detect most kinds—and if a cop detects that you're jamming, he'll write a ticket saying "eyeballed at 80 in 55 zone, speed gun maliciously jammed", and good luck trying to fight that. (Or, if he's really annoyed, he can write 110 instead of 80…)
If you really want to build one, a dumb active jammer should still work, but the power requirements were insane for K-band, and should be much worse for double-extended Ka-band, and the same for the emissions.
As for passing other cars, the biggest problem with the legal active jammers was that you'd set off every radar detector in the vicinity. Eventually you do pass all the cars, but you spend more time slowing down because of everyone slamming on their brakes in the left lane than you save speeding…
andyb said,
April 25, 2016 @ 5:30 pm
@Ken Miner: "Those sounds [of Japanese], simple and few in number, are very well suited to notation by an alphabet, and it is perhaps one of the tragedies of oriental history that the Japanese genius did not a thousand years ago rise to its invention. Certainly when one considers the truly appalling system which in the course of centuries they did evolve, that immense and intricate apparatus of signs for recording a few dozen little syllables, one is inclined to think that the western alphabet is perhaps the greatest triumph of the human mind."
OK, I can understand criticizing kanji, but kana? Surely it's far more efficient for each mora to be a single symbol from a collection of ~50, than for each one to be one to three symbols from a collection of ~20-25?
Obviously a similar script for, say, English wouldn't work nearly as well. But the 9th century Japanese weren't trying to write English, they were trying to write Japanese.
anonymous coward said,
April 26, 2016 @ 2:51 am
Whenever I have begun to learn Chinese the utter absurdity of a modern nation-state still using a logographic writing system, discarded everywhere else eons ago…
You do you realize that the Chinese knew about alphabets long before England even became a country, right?
Perhaps them not 'discarding' their characters has nothing to do with them being too dumb to figure out phonetic writing, hm?
Deeae said,
April 28, 2016 @ 3:42 pm
Ken Miner, you are definitely not alone. Thank you.
Victor Mair said,
April 30, 2016 @ 9:31 am
"China Promotes Vigilance at Home With National Anti-Spy Campaign:Emphasis on national security comes amid trying economic times" (WSJ, 4/29/16)