I. Yi Yi

So I've cut the Stephen Dixon love-in short, and by short I mean after three books, which is really still a pretty healthy amount of Stephen Dixon, even when none of the three books are Frog. I'm glad I finally read I. because it looks like McSweeney's will be publishing the book's sequel this summer. At least, Amazon says so. So that's pretty exciting.

Right now I'm reading The Ha-Ha by Dave King, because Austin mentioned a while back that King would be coming to Cleveland, and I was pretty sure I'd heard of the book before, and it sounded interesting, and I like seeing author readings, so. One plus one and all. Dave King will be around town Thursday through Saturday; I'll be crashing the Friday night reading at Joseph Beth Booksellers.

As for the book, I'm not too far into it, but I'm shocked to say that this book might feel more enclosed and interior and cooped-up and downright claustrophobic than any of the Stephen Dixon I've been reading, which is shocking because it's hard to get much more cooped-up and interior than Stephen Dixon (who oftentimes doesn't seem at all interested in acknowledging even the existence of a world outside the focus of his main character) unless, of course, you write a book in which the narrator literally can not speak or write but wants to very badly, which is what Dave King's gone and done, so, you know: victory, of sorts. Two perhaps obviously completely different types of "claustrophobic" literature. Also, neither of which type is "bad", nor should my comments be meant to be taken as negative reactions to the stories involved--though I guess it's maybe a little obvious I'm a, ah, fan of Dixon's work. Though I suspect this "cooped-upness" might be part of why he's not ragingly popular even amongst the literati-sect: we spend all our time in rooms, it's natural that eventually we want our literature to say things about rooms themselves, not just what's happening inside the mind of a character inside those rooms.

Maybe.