| Title | : | Bed: Stories |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1933633263 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781933633268 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 278 |
| Publication | : | First published April 1, 2007 |
College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny's, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days, all while yearning constantly for love, a better kind of love, or something better than love, things which--much like the Loch Ness Monster--they know probably do not exist, but are rumored to exist and therefore "good enough."
Bed: Stories Reviews
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My friend and I went on a road trip this summer and she read "Sasquatch," "Nine Ten," and the story about the man who works at a library and sits in the back seat of a car driven by high school kids who either toilet paper or egg a house aloud to me. I had already read "Bed" three years prior to the road trip, but wanted to read it again, and my friend expressed interest in reading something aloud together. She would sometimes stop during the long sentences to regain focus and would ask me if she was doing okay reading. She read "Sasquatch" as we were laying in a park in Portland, Oregon and it was sunny and afterwards we both looked at each other emotionally, didn't say much, and seemed affected. I said something like "isn't this what life feels like?" I've read "Sasquatch" aloud to both my dad and my mom and a similar thing happened at the end, except when I read it to my mom it was on the phone and her voice sounded frail and she said something like, "wow, how beautiful, how sad." I have always felt kind of bizarre and lonely and like people don't see the world the way I do. The characters in "Bed" seemed to focus on small, sort of boring and sort of really complex moments that didn't necessarily have a positive or negative effect on them, but still felt important just because they were there, and that was enough.
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I think I've reached my threshold with hipster lit. I optimistically continue to read books about people my age in New York (and in this case, Florida) who are miserable, but it never resonates in any sort of way that I feel is particularly literary, useful, or interesting. I am likely missing huge symbolic meaning (there were a number of recurring themes and objects... including toy poodles), but overall it felt like "faux depth." As I finished up, I thought to myself, "this guy would get along swimmingly with Miranda July... they have the exact same voice, except he's less funny." And lo and behold, when turned the book over to read the accolades from various authors, she was one of them.
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Tao Lin writes a blog called Reader of Depressing Books. If Tao Lin were a Hollywood blockbuster his tag-line would be Writer of Annoying Fiction. Very tedious and exasperating. A lot of the time I felt like what I was reading was less of a story and more of an exercise in reduction, and not in a good way. For me Lin's extreme minimalist approach had the effect of draining all the life out of the stories.There is way to much 'he did that then he did this then he went to this place and did another thing and then he felt sad' type of thing going on, and no amount oh-so-kooky metaphors can cover up the flatness of the characters. I can deal with fiction about people who are bored or depressed or lost and confused about how to exist in any kind of meaningful way - Douglas Coupland continually confronts these issues with far more wit, humor, warmth and, dare I say it, hope in much of his work - but this just didn't cut it for me. If the author's intention was to make the reader feel the same levels of tedium experienced by his characters then I would have to say he was successful in this respect. Maybe I'm old fashioned and distinctly unhip but I definitely prefer my fiction a little less anemic and a lot more, well, story-like, or something.
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Tao Lin gets at some of those uncomforatble thoughts we have sometimes, and it makes you wonder if he has those thoughts himself or he just knows us all so well. But he also makes you laugh, and reflect, and all of those good things books should do.
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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. -
Tao Lin, I read your book.
I liked it, for the most part. It made me want to write, which a certain kind of fiction always does. It reminded me of my own life at times. As a fellow Floridian ex-pat of roughly the same age, the Denny's references resonated. I don't know if they resonated the same way for people not from Florida. I guess it doesn't matter.
I liked the stories in the following order:
Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues
Cull the Steel Heart, Melt the Ice one, Love the Weak Thing; Say Nothing of Consolation, but Irrelevance, Disaster, and Nonexistence; Have no Hope or Hate--Nothing; Ruin Yourself Exclusively, Completely, and Whenever Possible
Love is the Indifferent God of the Religion in which Universe is Church
Sincerity
Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists
Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow
Sasquatch
Three Day Cruise
Nine, Ten
I think this may indicate that I don't like the way you write children so much. But maybe not, maybe I just found those stories less compelling.
I stayed in bed all day reading this book. I felt like I was being a little self-consciously theatrical, reading a book called Bed in bed, but in the final analysis I think I was just being hard on myself.
Reading all of these stories in one go was a little exhausting. I think perhaps your tone is a bit too consistent, but that's hardly something someone could fault you for.
I do, however, have a couple of complaints.
1. You use "eschatology" twice in this collection, which, I think we can agree, is one or two times too many.
2. In the story "Nine, Ten," you use the phrasing "_____ in the face" twice. I feel the problem here is obvious.
3. Also in the story "Nine, Ten": there is a typo on page 211. "It would take three Chopin's to beat up Glenn Gould."
I hope you will take these criticisms as evidence of the closeness of my reading rather than an overriding dislike for your work, which I feel is very enjoyable in an uncomfortable and too-warm kind of way.
I look forward to reading eeeee eee eeee, whenever the library here acquires it. -
I hate short stories so much. I hate them. All of them. Even the good ones. I always know a short story is going to end soon, so even if I sort of like it, I want it to end now. I can't stand the uncertainty. The constant thought of when will this end? If you're going to end soon, just end now. Do it. Now. Christ.
Lately short stories aren't even short anymore. They're so long it's like why don't you just write a novel? Just write a novel and stop torturing me.
Short stories make me psychotic.
But somehow, someway I loved Lin's story "Sincerity," about a couple of aspiring writers in college who fall in and out of love. It's the perfect cross of Charlie Kaufman, Woody Allen, and JD Salinger.
I couldn't get into any of the other stories, but it was worth reading for this one alone.
"Though his face was turned away, he sort of forced a grin anyway. He hated it when people got so inured that they went around being sarcastic without ever changing their facial expression. It was inhuman."
"What did it mean to believe in one self? Wasn't that just a sneaky way of proclaiming yourself God? It was, and Aaron especially did not believe in anything as vague and cliched - and with as many capitalization rules - as God." -
okay, i havent finished reading this yet, but even if the last couple stories totally suck i won't change anything.
this is how more immigrant fiction should be... something to with being second generation but... secretly. i dont mean indierctly but secretly, like maybe you wouldnt even notice it if you weren't one, because it's about some universal nontrivial thing, which is felt by everyone but only exaggeratedly by the writer and his contemporaries.
also meaning: no exotic names. no foreign words. no exploitation of cultural oddities. no appealing to fascination with the other america. because there are second generation immigrants who seem well assimilated but maybe under the surface there are cracks and the cracks might run deep -
Tao Lin - pushing pretentiousness to further heights. Having an overbearing narrative voice does not mean you are a good writer. Nothing can cover up bad writing.
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This was the 3rd book of Tao Lin's that I have read this summer. I suppose that I read them backwards as I began with his latest, "Shoplifting From American Apparel", which I read in a single brief sitting, devouring it page by page in a fury. I moved on to "Eeeee Eee Eeee", his first full length novel, and finally this collection of short stories.
I enjoyed these stories, for the most part, more than his extended works, partly because I found them a bit easier to follow, which is, I suppose, beside the point. The themes in these stories explore generally the same emotional longing, detachment and despair of all of Lin's work that I have read so far. I feel as though he is always writing from a very personal place, and the emotions that he explores in his writing he feels very connected to and although this seeming desperation sometimes seems to consume him and leave him wondering what to do either in the short term or the long term, he is able to do something productive, and honest. His writings are always honest.
The emotions are coming from such an honest place, and written about with such clarity that the humor, though very dark and very sarcastically tossed off, comes across as shockingly funny. Sometimes I didn't even realize that a passage was humorous until some time later when I caught myself thinking about what was said. Tao Lin is a very smart, clever writer.
I feel as though Tao Lin's works deserve to be read and re-read because there is a lot of ideas worked into his longer works, and even his shorter works, contained in this collection, can pack quite a punch. My personal favorite is "Sasquatch", which I felt was the perfect way to bring this collection to a close. -
i've read every book tao lin has published, and have decided "bed" exemplifies what's at the core of everything, like this is his thesis statement as an author. actually, immediately after writing that i decided no, definitely not, any of his books could be his thesis statements. that's part of his appeal to me, though. these stories feel like anthems for self-condemned-ed-ly lonely, who tentatively hope for something better (whatever that "something" may be) despite a general lack of evidence from the (as my buddy camus likes to say) "benign indifference of the world."
the sometimes paragraph length sentences in "bed" feel deliberately paced to involve the reader in the thought processes of their characters, which results in this kind of unsettling, meta sensation (i.e. "am i reading about fictional characters? am i reading tao lin's thoughts? am i reading what tao lin wants me to think his thoughts are and does he want me to think these people are fictional or himself?") i know "bed" is probably realistically a combination of all of those things, which is what i liked most about reading it. -
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just bought an uncorrected proof of this book at a flea market and it says in bold letters at the top, "do not quote"...so i guess i will not be quoting it.
hoping for good things, and hey, if it gets tedious rather than great, there's always "Eeeee Eee Eeee" on the flip flop."
kinda been diggin on short stories and how powerful they can potentially be, so i have high hopes for this one.
yay for double-book books. i'll replace this with a review when i actually reads some of it.
*update 08.11.07:
this book, although i have read and re-read several passages, is poorly written. i swear i have read it clearly and objectively. the stories are forceful and absurd, creating sentence structures which stutter and awkward for the sake of being brash and creative.
i'm hoping that in the final short story i am proven heavily wrong in my judgment, but i can attest to the fact that after finishing the second to the last story last night, i had one of the worst night's sleep ever, tossing and turning and thinking horrible thoughts about the blandest things before falling asleep and dreaming of pillaging and underwater espionage.
i woke up achey and confused by daylight, and all because of this horrible horrible read. i mean, read it, because everyone says it's great. but it's not that great, and i had a mess of a time trying to attempt to give the words a chance to make an impression other than literary poo upon me.
**update 12.31.07:
on the last day of this year, i finally gave up looking for my copy of "bed" which was misplaced in my move between apartments. in the end though, i find that i never noticed it missing until now, and guess that it wasn't going to change the fact that i wasn't that into it at all. if that isn't a sign that you don't particularly enjoy a read, i'm not sure what is.
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This collection of short stories must be a kick in the face for any conservative, religious, optimistic, or otherwise self-deluding individual. Luckily, though, a jaded, cynical sort of person such as myself can find solace in turning the pages of this book and laughing in an empathetic sort of way at the mishaps and awkward strangeness of its characters. These people are contemplative, refreshing, and often arresting in their views of the world at hand. It’s the quirky way they observe their surroundings, or the detached pessimism with which they guide each story from quasi-beginning to quasi-end. Each of these stories is a slice-of-life of which the narrative voice is the most important and compelling part. It’s a wonderful voice for a short story – modern, accessible, and entirely fitting to the stories. The thing is, though, don’t dive in expecting nine completely variant voices or nine different worldviews. By the sixth or seventh story, you start to feel like you’re reading the same thing over and over - said in numerous ways, but the feeling stays the same throughout. It’s this itch on your brain like your life is a film reel rolling past you and you’re just sitting in the back row thinking, I can’t believe I paid ten whole dollars for this. And that’s the sickness permeating these stories and plaguing these characters. I wouldn’t recommend reading the whole thing straight through, as even the most jaded among us may tire of the cynicism which coats every word of this book. But most (perhaps all) of these stories, taken separately, are excellent reflections on life in the modern world and its effects on well-meaning but consistently existential characters. Recommended for the younger generations, and those who appreciate (very) contemporary literature.
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How did I not write a review? This is my 2nd read-through for a bookclub meeting that never happened (Hello, pandemic). Tao Lin writes existential, absurdist, K-mart reality lit about millennials. He writes in a way that is completely unlike anything I've ever read, and it is on point with the concrete, fresh descriptions. I'm a millennial and I am sorry to say (because these characters are so absurdist and awkward) that I get it way too much. Tao Lin might like me/hate me, but I'm a gushing fan. I gave a few of these stories to my HS students in a charter college class in Fort Collins, and I think they jibed with the weird realities of these stories.
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I liked this book much more than I expected to. It's odd and captivating.
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Picked this up while waiting for a ride. Haven't gotten very far...
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It's a little surprising, I've always thought, that Tao Lin hasn't achieved a higher level of literary celebrity. In many ways he seems like perfect complement to the other so-called Great Millenial Novelists (Lerner, Rooney, you know the type), but then again maybe it speaks to just how innovative his approach to structure is, how sui generis his style is, that he isn't mentioned alongside anyone so banal.
BED, his only non-auto fiction, is interesting because it gives us another lens through which to get a glimpse of what his "project" is, whatever that might mean. While it's probably fair to suggest that Lin isn't a born writer of short stories, and that quite a few of the stories here struggle under the weight of influence -- Barthelme, Hempel, Wallace, et al. seem sometimes to take up more space than Lin himself -- at their best they offer a concise distillation of his broader thematic concerns. "Nine, ten," for instance, is a precise exploration of what the much-heralded "End of History" really means, and not in the narrow way Fukuyama intended when he coined the phrase, but what living with foreknowledge of the (probably) inevitable apocalypse does to a whiny, wealthy American and their children on a psychic level. And it's only because of his formal bravura that any of it rings true: you will find a style that stands almost in purposeful opposition to what DFW in his excellent essay "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" calls "Workshop Hermeticism":"fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what’s 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by any Freitag on any Macintosh."
There is no easy climactic resolution, nor is there a prose-style that's scared -- the way the shiny, detail-rich but ultimately empty minimalism so ubiquitous in our current literary moment is -- to evoke the blurry, affectless texture of the twenty-first century.
The characters in BED are aware of their fate, their ineluctable doom. Jed, the ten-year-old in "Nine, Ten," gives us a perfectly reductive summary: "Things would get worse, he knew. There would be old age, cancer, arthritis, global warming, tidal waves, acid rain—life was just a tiny, moonstruck thing, really, and the world was just a small, failed place."(He's a great prose writer, have I mentioned that yet?) Tao Lin is one of the very few artists working today who not only recognizes this truth, but is able also to respond honestly and, yes, beautifully thereto.
(I realize I've just spent a few overlong paragraphs on defining Lin's work mostly by specifying what it's not, but perhaps that's the only way to see the contours of work that is so much about negation -- the negation of characters with rich interiors, of plot, etc. And perhaps that's what we need at the moment.)
Anyway, it's probably only a book for Lin-heads, but if you only read one story collected here it should be "Sasquatch," which is a quietly heartbreaking masterpiece. -
I’m calling it. Did I read every word of every store in this (very mixed) collection? No. Do I feel I met the requirements to say I’ve “read” it, were one to ask, or were I to add it to my READ list on Goodreads? Yes. Should Goodreads create a shelf ™️ for MOSTLY READ? Perhaps. But I digress….
Here’s the deal: the first 3 stories in this book? Fantastic. Original, funny, weird, compelling. The next 5? Derivative slogs in which all originality from the first 3 is being poorly copied, less-compellingly reproduced, and did not have the magic anymore.
Tao Lin demonstrates that he certainly has a few tricks up his sleeve, but after doing those tricks, it’s the same tricks over, and over again, each time worse than the last. -
Well, it seems like some people are born with brown hair and some people are born with loneliness
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this book was hard to read in a slightly different way than I expected it to be hard to read
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I took this book from my job
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Uneven. Which I don't mean as a bad thing, really. Some of the stories in this collection are incredible, feel "brand new" even and are excitingly fresh to read. Some of the moments in some of the stories are are unparalleled in their originality and in their aptness for depicting whatever it feels like to be a "person" at times. But then some stories meander, some take the whole "plotless" thing way too far, some are just plain uninteresting. But even those have flashes of brilliance.
Seems like Tao Lin is best at writing closely to one character or to a relationship between two. The story "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues" (cool title, right?), about Greg, who "[felt] that he was doomed in small but myriad ways", who lives by himself, spends time drinking coffee and watching the history channel, who eventually gets a job at a library and goes with some kids to "roll" some other kid's house (throw toilet paper all over), is wonderful, probably my favourite. Lin gets this kind of quiet loneliness and mundane suffering just right. Same with "Sasquatch", in which Chelsea works at Denny's and struggles with social anxiety. Of Chelsea's college education: "unassimilated and separate and dully stimulating as tropical fish" and of an unspoken awkward subject between her and her father: "like a thing that was large and trembled when approached."
The stories that don't work have moments like this, but they just feel, either too ambitious, or they lack the claustrophobia that makes the others work so well, a claustrophobia of being stuck inside one's own fucked-up head. There is also a peculiar writing style Lin takes on sometimes, for instance in "Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow": "People talked. They said, "there's this rumour..." Then they pointed at something that was happening in the distance. They shrugged. Itched their forearms. They were easily distracted." It just felt, to me, so unclear in what was trying to be achieved (if anything, or maybe that was the point).
Bed reads like a collection of literary experiments. Like experiments, some fail, some work out, some reach satisfying conclusions, some don't but didn't need to. The fact that all of it feels so original is what makes it worth the read. Something about the less captivating stories makes the collection feel intimate, as if Tao Lin has something to convey, and will only convey it in his language. He's worth listening to, I think. -
I got this book at a library sale for 50 cents and for some reason expected a lot from it. Maybe because it was next to a Joan Didion book.
And I really wanted to like this... Lin does some things very well. Instead of just stating emotions, he (usually) shows them through actions. He isn't afraid to write about states of mind that most of us don't want to dwell on -- boredom, depression, apathy. He notices details. And he's only a little older than me and has published tons of books, so he must be doing something right.
But I hated this. I couldn't get through the whole thing, so I guess I'll never know how just much I hated it. Lin doesn't bother to set scenes. The characters are always predictably sad and self-absorbed. And then there are sentences like this: "All of the moody emptiness inside of them swelled and joined, and then esconced them, like bubbles, and there, inside, they floated - the qualmish, smoked-out bodies of them, stale and still and upside-down." That's worse than reading my angsty teen diaries.
At least in those diaries I wasn't trying to impress readers with my astute (/shallow) observations of human behavior. Let's see... I'm having trouble finding a great example ... but here's one: "Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true - life wasn't supposed to be incredible after all. Life wasn't some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once." Blegh, that just does nothing for me. -
Tao Lin, Bed (Melville House, 2007)
Eighties fiction still lives, and lives large, in the work of Tao Lin. These stories are eighties fiction writ large, but with slightly more contemporary settings to explore those same eighties-fiction themes (restlessness, alienation, ennui, and the like among the twentysomething generation). The big problem with eighties fiction, of course, was how unsatisfying it was; it takes all the angst of existential literature, but fails to inject any of the timelessness one expects after reading the finest existential works. Not that this necessarily has to be a bad thing; if you're fond of the big names in eighties fiction, especially those who were most associated with the trend (McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Janowitz are the Big Three, but one could also rope in just about anyone who got a volume of short stories published by Vintage Books between 1983 and 1989), you'll probably find quite a comfortable home in Tao Lin's fiction. If, however, you always gravitated towards the authors who were constantly pushing the eighties-fiction boundaries (Vanderhaeghe, Chabon, Ethan Canin, chaps like that), then this will likely feel like an underinflated retread. I chose to think of it as a nostalgia trip; interesting, but not necessarily something I'm going to need to revisit for another decade or so. *** -
I don't even remember how I came to own a copy of Tao Lin's collection of short stories in Bed. I think that I bought it on a completely random whim to have some short stories to read. I ended up loving almost all of the stories in this book. I don't like much contemporary stuff, but these stories are great. When these were written, the author was 23 years old and explains he was only written stories from shear boredom. All of his characters are lost, bored, self-deprecating, lonely, under-stimulated, etc. These are the modern American tales of absolute disappointment. Tao Lin goes about depicting a world where all the characters were told they could be something great, that great things would happen to them, that happiness was just around the corner if you worked for it, that life would be exciting, good, etc. And all of the characters come to realize that that's not what they got. That reality kind of sucks. And the way he goes about creating this world is very unique and interesting. I don't think I have ever read any stories quite like these.
My only suggestion is to get the short stories as opposed to Tao Lin's novel. The stories give a great taste of the author's writing that you will probably need to really appreciate any of his stories. I was a little disappointed by the book in comparison. -
After having read Tao Lin's blog (my friend "discovered" it and shared it with me a while ago, which I am grateful for) I expected his books to be cheerful and funny.
They are funny, and somewhat cheerful as well, but also very different from what I expected.
I don't know if this is a bad or good thing yet. I think it's good. I wanted to underline many sentences but sadly it isn't my copy of the book.
I laughed out loud a few times and often read things that I wanted to share with people but then realized I was sitting alone. And that made me sad. And annoyed. But I still really enjoyed the book. It wasn't hard to put down and I didn't walk around missing it when I wasn't reading it (something I often do when in the middle of a book I love), but that doesn't mean it was boring when I actually was reading it. If I am making any sense..
I did enjoy it. Quite a lot. But I haven't decided if I think it is great yet. I'm not sure what feelings I'm left with after reading it. It's all a bit confusing.
