you are a little bit happier than i am by tao lin

i wanted to write a blurb about you are a little bit happier than i am by tao lin, winner of the 2005 action books prize (to be released fall 2006)

i googled how to write a blurb

then i googled my own name

so that i could read blurbs others have written for me

then i read my own blog

then i got mad at myself for not working on tao’s blurb

i want my blurb to reflect you are a little bit happier than i am itself

since blurbs often seem unconcerned with the source text

they get mired in their own rhetoric

“i” (as in the writer of this blurb) do not want to be here, in the blurb

“i” want to be the book

blurbing itself

but that’s impossible since “i” can’t be anything else except for “i”

and even if the book blurbed itself, it would just be the book

or “the book blurbing itself”

this blurb is in 11 pt garamond

(which you cannot tell because of the formatting translation from word to html)

just like in you are a little bit happier than i am

i think garamond is one of the most beautiful fonts

i’m going to try to be the book even though it is impossible to be the book

“my brain won’t ever fit in anyone else’s skull”

is a line from “i hate the world and i’m not immature”

in ‘i am “you” to you’ it says:

“art is life vicarious and life is void vicarious”

i drew an arrow between “art” and “void”

the last line of that poem is:

“i drive one hundred and twenty miles per hour and take a digital photograph of my speedometer”

i don’t want to talk “poetics” in this blurb

since tao thinks people who talk poetics are assholes:

“i think the word 'poetics' is stupidly pretentious and just stupid and if you use it without irony then you're harmful, you're actually hurting people's emotions and damaging them, which makes you an asshole”

that’s what he said on his blog

which you probably already know about since you’re reading this blurb

tao also said that:

“i think most punctuation is melodramatic

why should i put a period there, it's a waste of everyone's time, to have to look at the period”

i am an asshole

because i just used punctuation in the quote from tao

and say words like “poetics” a lot

and i even want to maybe study poetics someday

and i posted this blurb on a blog devoted to poetics

i don’t want to hurt anyone

but i hurt people like tao who don’t like words like “poetics”

this blurb contradicts itself already i am fucked

in “my brother is vacationing on a mountain with his girlfriend and i found out from my dad” it says:

“it is 1:10 a.m. and i am alone in my brother’s studio apartment and i just grinned
(it is 2:24 a.m. inside of this parenthetical and i am doing revisions on this poem and i am not that happy anymore but thirsty; but not thirsty enough to go drink something)”

you are a little bit happier than i am embraces the reality of contradiction of feelings and actions towards things and even makes fun of itself for it

here is a title of one of the poems:

“loneliness is just a word that means you are feeling alone and depressed and starting to think about how difficult and strangely impossible it is for you to be interested in the same people who are interested in you and how if you don’t change your worldview and personality soon then you will probably always feel alone and depressed because you can’t remember a time when you haven’t felt alone and depressed but really you can and that is when you were a small child but that small child seems like a different person, really, than who you are right now and you can’t become a different person anymore because you are over twenty-years old and people this age don’t change unless they fall off a barn and get a long metal rod through their brain and then they change drastically and get studied by scientists and never have to get a real job again but always look very alone and far away and doomed on TV even if they and all their friends and family and an international team of doctors, neural surgeons, and psychologists—cognitive, behavioral, courtroom, and analytical—say that they aren’t at all”

even though tao says he doesn’t like poetics, i think he secretly does or at least, shares the concern of poetics because in “poem to end my head off” it says:

“but now why does it feel like I don’t know and cannot ever know again the meanings of all these words: meaning, know, why, good, bad, best, exist, preconception, consciousness, sincerity, fact, opinion”

which is a very “postmodern” concern

tao once said this in an email to me:

“i'm not using 'terms' anymore ever. it is all received knowledge. just be specific. i hate school. and psychology terms.”

please don’t hate me for using the word “postmodern,” tao

or anyone else reading this blurb

i only use that term because i can’t think of anything more specific

another reason why i think tao is concerned with poetics is because the table of contents of you are a little bit happier than i am is itself a poem

which seems to represent a rejection of the “titling” of things

which goes back to the “poem to end my head off” quote i cited

how the book is about the preconception of things rather than the things themselves

which is a very lorrie moore thing

i laughed reading this line in “you published a one-page comic where someone freaks out while eating breakfast:”

“i had a lorrie moore novel and you said i had it to steal from her”

i laughed at a bunch of other places too

while i was re-reading “i am unemployed,” i was in a café and laughed aloud and looked up to see if anyone saw me laugh

no one did thankfully

why did i look up?

i wrote “i~you” in the margins a lot while reading the book

since “you” is many things in the book

the author, a lover, a friend, “my mom,” etc.

maybe i did want someone to notice my laughing

so that they could ask what i was laughing about

and i would say, “here. look. read it”

and then point to the part about being in an owl suit and swooping down to maul campers

which is in the same stanza as the essay that is critical of the national book award people because they won’t accept his nightmare because it’s a nightmare and not a book

almost every poem in you are a little bit happier than i am begins towards the bottom of the page

the space seems to represent preconception before utterance

beginning at the end of something

when i read “things i wanted to do today” i saw these two lines at the bottom of the page:

“i wanted to join a water polo club
i wanted to buy a white t-shirt”

i underlined both lines because i thought that was the entire poem

and assumed that because tao left just those two lines

they must be extremely important

then i turned the page and was happy to discover that

the poem isn’t really two lines long

it keeps going and fills the entirety of the next page

in “i am about to express myself” it says:

“i think this poem is serrated”

and if you look at the whole page, it’s sort of serrated but not really but it kind of is if you look at it but it’s just not serrated in a regular way or maybe i’m just forcing something that just isn’t there and am just pretending that it’s there

tao said in email once,

“i try to only type and think in concrete terms. as in, how will this affect things in concrete reality”

you are a little bit happier than i am does what postmodernism tries to do in that it avoids rhetoric while simultaneously engaging in rhetorical forms

but unlike postmodernism, tao does this in a non-pretentious, non-academic, accessible way that is just as thought-provoking as anything “PoMo”

tao once sent me an email that said,

“everyone thinks their current generation is different”

perhaps this means that our “postmodern age” is a bunch of crap

in “poems that look weird” it says:

“another time i was thinking about you
i was thinking that you think weird poems are pretty
and i think you are pretty
and i was thinking there was something there, in that thought
some sort of connection that was completely free of bullshit, finally”

sometimes i would wonder why tao doesn’t experiment more with form but after i read “poems that look weird” i saw that tao is aware of the form he is engaging in

the forms of you are a little bit happier than i am don’t really vary from the form of this blurb

occasionally there will be some punctuation like this.

And maybe even some Capitalization.

the spacing might be single-
or double-spaced



but it always stays fixed to the left

the default setting for Microsoft Word

it doesn’t waver much because it knows the uselessness of the attempt

you are a little bit happier than i am is inescapable and uncomfortable and defies experimentation

but that dosesn’t mean it embraces convention

it just resigns itself to its situation

to be honest, i don’t enjoy writing this way

this is what the book looks like for the most part

it’s annoying

i feel like i’m holding my breath when i write this way

i am having trouble breathing

writing this way

it’s really hard to write this way

i am not sure how tao does it

i feel anxious writing this way

like at any given moment i could break something

ok this is very scary i don’t want to write this way anymore

no i’m going to keep forcing myself to write this way since that is what the book does

this form forces “you” (as in the reader) to deal with the situation you’re in

which i think is brilliant

since this is a fucking miserable situation

i lied when i said i wouldn’t talk poetics

tao sent me a poem from his next book called fucked and that poem ended with the word “fuckhead” and had a bunch of other swear words in it along with some lettuce