Love Is No Joke

by Will Hubbard

Bed

by Tao Lin

Melville House, $10.17

Tao Lin has shown us that he is ready to be a writer of anything and everything, and from a few pages into the first story in his short-story collection, Bed, it becomes clear that all the backhanded compliments people pay him are stupid, pretentious, and insulting.

It is easy to imagine the feelings of vacant dejection and meaningless desire that Tao Lin narrates because one has actually felt them, and hated oneself for feeling them. It is my intention to write about Tao Lin's book without paying him a backhanded compliment.

The first story in Bed is great because it makes you realize you are not living the New York City dream. You are just another sentient and incapable organism helping to constitute a wealthier person's impression that they may or may not be living the New York City dream.

The fact that they cannot decide does not bode well for you, because you can only decide things about yourself after the wealthier people have done so.

Things aren't so bad for the narrators of Tao Lin's stories, and that, of course, is primarily why things are so bad. Like eating candy with no flavor.

And of course there are moments of great humor in Bed, but to dwell on them would be a backhanded compliment.

Even the drollest among us are capable of humor—and in reading these stories one comes to think that it is both necessary and unpardonably lazy to laugh. Some people will read them and think "I could write like that easily." Believing in themselves utterly, these people will live fearfully, forever.

Writers too go into stores for reasons other than to occupy space-time with something, especially when there is nothing fun to do later in the day. Occasionally writers and other artists buy things only to feel better through feeling worse. And yet don't mistake me for saying that Bed makes you feel better about feeling "existentially fucked", for it instead of course makes you feel worse.

The beds of Bed are, without a single note of false irony, the simultaneous loci of salvation and damnation. The bed can seem like a wonderful place at night and a terrible place in the morning, and vice versa. Whatever gets uttered in bed has reference to things outside of its sphere, though it does not seem so at the time. And yet love is no joke here, nor does love come when you least expect it, or just when you have given up on love. It comes when one expects it and where one looks for it, and it is real and hurtful.

Will Hubbard is the contributing editor to This Recording. He is the editor-in-chief of CapGun magazine. He lives in Williamsburg.

MUSIC FOR THE BOURGEOISIE AND THE REBEL

"End of Man" - Derek Meins (mp3)

"Over Yonder" - Derek Meins (mp3)

"Ex-Her Size" - Derek Meins (mp3)

Derek Meins myspace

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Getting a tan in Israel.

Happy and Sad with Tess.

Molly found J.D. Salinger.