you are a little bit happier than i am by Tao Lin

by Tao Lin

This book is fun, smart, manic and ecstatic; it puts on a clean shirt before it loads the gun. You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am has the energy and oddness of a thing that is rising very fast that is not supposed to be rising, or that is supposed to be rising but for a moment you forget that, and for a moment this ordinary thing looks very strange and exciting

Genres: Poetry, Fiction, The United States Of America, Humor, Contemporary, Asian Literature

Paperback Bunko

First published November 1, 2006

About the author

Tao Lin posts on Substack and lives in Hawaii.

Reviews

[Megan Boyle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think "you are a little bit happier than i am" is usually the first book people read by Tao Lin, as it is his first. I read it last. I think when people always refer to "Tao Lin" style poetry they're referring to this book. Seems like the iconic first doctrine of self-conscious, disappointed with people/the universe/the self (to some degree) poetry.

Death is an abstraction to anyone who is alive, but it's also inevitable that everyone will die. The person writing this book seems to have known this for a long time, and it has maybe influenced their worldview in that it seems like there is something fundamentally unavailable about being alive, it will never be fulfilled in itself or reach some 'level' where 'it all makes sense.' It has to end by dying. We can never know what everything we've done in our lives has amounted to, because we're dead. A lot of the poems in this book are about how relationships (both platonic and romantic) are also unfulfilling. Relationships seem out of control because their outcomes aren't just determined by your thoughts alone. Another person perceives and decides things too, and they might decide something that makes you feel bad and it's impossible to predict that happening, fully. The person writing this book seems to find comfort in their imagination because it is something certain that he can know, I think. It seems comforting to add sarcasm to the image of yourself getting rejected by the National Book Award, because it draws attention to the insignificance surrounding the feelings of rejection/the self/the National Book Award/writing/everything. There is another poem where Lin receives the Nobel Prize for telling his mom she only thinks [something] because she watches Fox News, but then the Nobel Prize committee asks him to continue and he earnestly describes his feelings of confusion about the nature of consciousness/perception and what it means to have finite thoughts in an infinite universe. That poem, "poem to end my head off" starts with this:

i haven't told you what i found out yet

that in life
when tabby dies
she dies by the laundry machine

Death happens in laundry machines to pet dogs. His mom accidentally text messages him that life is too sad without "tabby" (accidentally sent, perhaps, because of thinking "I don't want to bother anyone with my sadness" or "my sadness isn't validated even though I am still saying it is the saddest thing in the world"). Seems really vulnerable, and also true. Later in this poem, Lin says he wants "laundry machines to drink coffee at night and secretly collect things that no one else will." He wants the world to be different and better, I think. In your imagination the world can be different and better. He wants a world that makes sense even on the tiniest level of wanting "Tylenol cold" to be one word. I felt very affected by this poem.

Reading "yaalbhtia" feels like having a conversation with the voice inside of Tao Lin's head, which seems to be the only reliable thing in an unstable world, and so it feels like a 'glimpse' of what it would be like to know someone in a way that really is never fully possible (but often sought-after, and impossible to not seek if you are a person who feels lonely and somewhat 'cheated' by the nature of existence), I think.

[Amar Pai · Rating 1 out of 5]

Typical Tao, it mostly feels like tossed-off gimmicky nonsense, but there are occasional worthwhile moments. This barely seems like poetry though; it's just sentences with weird line breaks and no capitalization.

if that's all that's needed
for something to be a poem
then i'll just reformat this review
voila
i am a poet

Here's one poem from this collection I did like, entitled "pessimism? or robotics?"

pessimism? or robotics?
__________

i am able to sit through an extremely funny movie
without making a noise or changing my facial expression

i am incapable of laughing without trying to laugh

i am never interested in anyone
unless they first show interest in me

i try not to think of myself as a person
but a metal object, build suddenly by machines in complete darkness
something impossible to hurt with a shovel

[tao_lin3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like this book. I can read this book in any mood and enjoy it, I think.
The words all have meaning that my brain can process. After I read the words I feel emotions. Each sentence makes me feel emotion.

I will read this again later on and probably more times later on.

[Raechel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This - stolen from Tao Lin's blog - captures the essence of the book, even though he wrote it about one poem in particular:

"If this poem were a parrot it would fly calmly around a room four feet above the ground saying something stupid repeatedly. Someone would find out it was a robot parrot, but then when someone hit the parrot with a baseball bat in order to knock it out of the window, to be funny, the parrot would hit the wall and real blood would come out, because it is not a robot parrot but a real parrot."

Here's the link: http://reader-of-depressing-books.blo...

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know if Tao Lin writes good poetry, but he is entertaining. A bonus is that Karen makes a cameo in one of the poems, and I had the excitement at being the first person to find it.

[Kara Brightmeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

people i've known who call themselves poets and like saying "i'm a poet" seem to have this certainty about what poems are and what it means to call themselves "poets." my friends have invited me to poetry readings, which i've sat through mostly feeling bored and annoyed and like everyone is in on something i'm not, and i've just thought "okay, poetry isn't for me, poetry is like sports." i don't think i would've bought "you are a little bit happier than i am" (or "cognitive-behavioral therapy") had i not read other things by tao lin and felt intrigued about how he would treat what i previously considered the foreign, alienating world of poetry.

the poems in this book seem like the antithesis of poems to me. i read them all in one sitting, feeling like i had broken into a more interesting, slightly more disillusioned male version of jenny lewis' apartment and found this under his bed, and like i needed to hurry and finish them before he came in and found me.

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

i enjoyed every minute of reading tao lin's collection of poems. i want tao lin to write and publish at least 50 more books so i can spend all of my time in his world.


"and if i had three wishes
i wouldn't be able to sleep
and i would feel like shit all the time
finally i'd wish i didn't have three wishes
then i'd feel cheated and want those wishes again
and i'd wish for a million wishes
but the genie would be like, 'you can't do that; it's against the rules'
and i'd be like, 'what, do you work at burger king or something;
think for yourself'
and i'd punch the genie in the face
and my fist would go through his face
and the genie would laugh at me
and later on, a year later, i'd make eye contact with the genie, in a park
and i'd avert my eyes wildly"

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

"So this is where it all started." That's what we'll say in the future, when Tao Lin is Poet Laureate of the United States, and reads his poems at inaugurations and state dinners, and the people in the audience clap because they are supposed to, but what they actually feel like doing is shivering because they are unsettled, but they do not know the thing that unsettles them. That thing is Tao Lin. Buried in his detachment and depression are little bits of happiness that mean more than ordinary happiness because they are found in this place where happiness is not expected. You can't see stars in the daytime because the sky is bright like them, but at night when the sky is no longer bright the stars are there, quite bright, surrounded by blackness. That is Tao Lin. He is a pinprick of joy/happiness/love on a black canvas. Maybe a gray canvas. Darker than light, but maybe not so dark as it at first seems. "I feel funny," is what you will say. And you will mean it in every way that it can be meant.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tao Lin's You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am is a very funny book of poems that, despite just a tad too much mopery, is also profoundly moving.

This book is so post-modern reading it is like driving a golf cart backwards along a Möbius strip of highway through a CGI version of Las Vegas. Or something. But instead of confusion, the constant self-referential absurdity actually enhances the book's detachment and places it squarely in the middle of our hopelessly fragmented world.

On the mopiness front, well I guess that's to be expected considering the book's title. I never found it tiresome or an impediment. It was just there. And I think that's the point.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's easier to follow Lin's poetry than his prose, though I usually enjoy the prose more. These poems give the latter part of the previous statement a run for it's money, though. I enjoyed these poems more than some of Lin's prose, though some of his prose is still my favorite Lin work. Either way, I got into these poems more than the poems in "Cognitive-Behavior Therapy." They just seemed funnier and more playful, as well as more insightful and moving. In short, this is a good Lin one to check out.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

This surprised me and wasn't like what I expected. These poems are actually sweet and lovely. I think I understand this part of Tao Lin's writing career a lot more than I understand things he made later. But it's okay because once Meghan and I had a band called Forever Wolf that we thought was really really funny for some reason even though nobody else did.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bed is better, but this is a good start. Some of the poems are WAY too indulgent but better than if he hadn't written anything.

["Robert Ekberg" · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[J]ag skulle vilja ge ut böcker i [E]uropa. [I] så fall hade jag åtminstone inte behövt veta hur efterblivna mina läsare är" (s. 93).

[Aron Sven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tråkigt förord, mot min vilja blev jag geodata

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this book while stirring onions on the stove top

[Philip Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Going through Tao Lin's first collection of poetry after being introduced to him through Taipei and his second collection, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, is a bit odd. I'm inclined to say it's an almost preferable order, however, because I think starting with his strongest work and ending with his weakest would have left me with a more sour taste in my mouth than reverse did.

It's easy to see why Tao Lin rocketed to the top of the literary sweetheart list after this collection was published. If anything, that's likely due more in part to his prose and short-stories/novels than this book of poetry, but I'd like to believe the rawest, most sincere facets of his voice are embodied in You Are A Little Bit Happier Than I Am. The honesty, sincerity, and disarming sparsity that are now hallmarks of Lin's style are all here in their primeval form, and the effect is to create a delightful war in the reader's mind between wanting to hug the author as an entity, and also to berate him for being such a mopey sad-sack. The 'whining child' persona that some of Lin's dis-creditors have ascribed to him since his rise to fame is at full form here, but it's easy to cut Lin a break when his moments of agonizing honesty and sincerity break through.

Frankly, if anything has made me want to read more of Lin's work, this is it. I felt a mix of happy irony and earnest melancholy bleed through on almost every page: even when experimental poems repeated the same line over and over, or began sentence after sentences with rambling conjunctions, it seemed obvious to me that Lin didn't have anything other than sincerity in his efforts. The only poems that fell flat for me were the very long ones; this is probably why I didn't like Lin's second collection as much, where he went for long poems much more often than short punches of resonant brevity. Lin tends to ramble and get off track when he has too many pages to work with; the verses that complete in a page or less seemed the most powerful to me.

While a lot of Lin's poetry is lacking the hallmarks are what are considered 'traditionally good poetry' (concrete detail, centered imagery, etc.), he maintains a consistency of voice and focus on small, personal moments, with a sort of detail-oriented description that forces the reader to connection emotionally with the content in a more invested way. Whole stanzas go by with Lin detailing actions and events with no emotional context in his description (will include example here later). The result is that when Lin does decide to go for the throat with an emotional claw, it leaves the reader breathless. I found myself more than once completely staggered at a poem's conclusion, right when Lin decided to amplify the beam of his detail to an almost blinding intensity.

This collection isn't perfect, but few are—and, in contrast to Lin's second volume of poetry, it's a markedly more honest and engaging effort. I'd like to see Lin's future work return to the only subtle irony shown in this work, rather than continuing to traipse along the self-parodying ironically-morphological caricature of sincerity that his recent material has become. Maybe he's too big for that now, but I'll hold out hope for volume 2 of a book this compelling.

(will include favorite and least favorite poems later, as I left my copy elsewhere while writing this review :S)

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

These poems were a little bit happier than I am, so I’m a little jealous. But I’m glad I read this book because I enjoyed it.

[blckshrt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would say something between poetry / short story / prose.
This is a really nice read. Sometimes vulnerable and delicate, other times strong or mean, which makes it seem honest and sincere.

What I like is that somehow Tao Lin is able to combine meaningless ramblings with really meaningful insights about life, death, relationships, time, space, reality etc. He blends the line between banal and profound so you are not sure what you just read is meaningless rambling or really insightful, which makes it intelligent and perfect. And this makes so much sense to me, because in the end we really are not sure what is true. I mean there are all kinds of believes and theories that contradict in the world, so it is all just a matter of how and what you tell to make sense of your own believe-system. In this book it seems as if the writer is trying to create or search his/her believe-system by making sense of the world he perceives.

I found aspects of nihilism, Buddhism, absurdism. all in a new and interesting way. First I thought this book is more pessimistic than CTB, but then I remembered how in CTB is trying to learn how to be more positive and optimistic, which made me feel really sad and empty at the time 9which is a good thing), even more than this book.

I loved "Poem to end my head off", "i am about to express myself" and "i saw you on the street': these poems had everything in them. Like the frustration of being in a relationship with other people (not only partner, but also family bonds), how you can't ever be on the precise same level with someone or even know what they truly think because firstly they are another person and secondly they themselves most of the times don't know. Yet we do think we understand each other or know what the other thinks. This distance between people is very obvious in Toa Lin's writing. This is a subject matter that interests me a lot, maybe the reason why i like his books.

To give you an example, this is a short poem from the book:

"you are my mom"

you cried in your bedroom when your sister's husband died of the flu
you came out of your bedroom and told me that your sister's husband
died of the flu and you grinned
and i ran away
and i ran away upstairs into my room and played the drums and used a lot
of cymbals and my ears rang

[Wendy Trevino · Rating 5 out of 5]

(from YOU ARE A LITTLE BIT HAPPIER THAN I AM)

BOOK REVIEWERS ALWAYS PRAISE BOOKS AS 'LIFE-AFFIRMING' BECAUSE THE MORE HUMANS THERE ARE ON EARTH THE BETTER

i click a link on the internet
i watch a video
a bullfighter in spain
pushes a sword into a bull's shoulder
the entire sword goes down into the bull
like a toothpick into a plum

and the bull keeps moving and bucking
and as it moves around
the sword cuts up its insides
and i want to see the bull's eyes
but the video is quicktime
and the size of a baby's forehead cut in half
and i turn my head
to a different angle
so that i might see the bull's eyes
but this is on a computer screen
and two-dimensional
and now the bullfighter is cutting off the bull's ears
from behind, and the bull is on the ground, and shivering
as if it were cold, and just wanted a blanket, and a bed
and i deleted this line
and i deleted this line, too, in revisions
and i deleted this line that was talking about god
and this line was also talking about god and it said something about the
universe and i deleted it
and this line kept talking about semantics and i deleted it

[Colin N. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lin is really wonderful at evoking feelings of loss, loneliness, and disconnect, and his ability to capture these emotions is on full display in this collection of poems. Not poems in a strict sense, more like prose-poems, these bits of people's lives read like fragments of the stories in his other works. I loved Bed and EEEEE, so reading this work was enjoyable, visiting similar themes but rendered in a different format.



It's also interesting to see someone younger writing poems (lots of references to email and IMs here). Which at first seems a little gimmicky in a look-I'm-a-hip blogger type of way, but somehow comes across as genuine. Especially when I think about how much email and IM really has become a part of daily existence.



What is also great about Lin's writing in how funny yet sad it all is. So what would otherwise be depressing is instead punctuated with moments of hilarity and sweetness.



A nice read.

[jess sanford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book, almost completely inexplicably. The superficial layer of this book is forgettable, nothing altogether special, but what boils up beneath the surface and around the edges borders on the incredible. There's an interesting conflict of sorts, almost from poem to poem, between a feeling of absurdity, a refusal to be serious and an honesty, almost despite itself, that I was unable to not be compelled by.

There's a kind of abstract rebounding back and forth going on, and I think once Lin settles a bit, despite himself, some rather brilliant things are going to erupt in his work.

[Martyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok, so I think Tao Lin's poetry is better than his prose, at least more engaging. I didn't like everything here but it was mostly intense and interesting, which can't be bad. I loved the poem Spring Break, I would have given this a five for that alone had most of the others been just slightly better. A very intriguing author - I'm not sure if I like his style but I really want to read his work.

[Jeff Reguilon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I thought the beginning of this was a strange poem I didn't get. Turns out, it was actually the table of contents. Now, I may be a moron, but I found that string of non-sequiturs more interesting than the self-absorbed Livejournal-quality poetry that follows.

[Vicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tao Lin is so right about those moments on AOL instant messenger, fantasy of getting hit by a truck, being unemployed/going to interviews, what loneliness is, that you are a little bit happier than I am, etc.

[María · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this, i am pretty sure i am a little bit happier than Tao. I loved it, every poem had a pile of emotions that i could feel, maybe it sounds pretentious but this is the best "*~alt lit kind of~*" ever.

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked most of these poems. I usually don't like poems.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

a good collection, though i think tao's best collection of poetry is his ebook, "this emotion was a little ebook": http://www.bearparade.com/thisemotion...

[Allegra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Closer to a 4.5 but still a 4. It's AMAZING in the beginning but starts to lose steam as it goes on. Favorite poem is "i am unemployed."

[farm · Rating 5 out of 5]

good job

[DeWitt Brinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would read this book even if I were a mole and had no understanding of language, but not if I were an advances robot from the future.