On July 17, 2023, Sagging Meniscus will publish Chaotic Good.
Preorder at Asterism, Bookshop, B&N, Amazon.
Like Neutral Evil ))), a short novel published in 2020 about seeing Sunn O))) in Philadelphia on March 18, 2017, Chaotic Good presents another polythematic core sample/associative cascade, this time in part about taking the train to NYC to see a band at “the world’s most famous arena” on December 28, 2019.
Also involves:
- a foundational synesthesiac experience
- a cylindrical hotel deserving demolition
- the renovated men’s bathroom in New York Penn Station
- untangling headphone cords
- cleaning house before moving out
- logging the past versus planning the future
- ADHD, autism, Alzheimer’s
- preferring the documentary to the drama
- waiting too long in car for spouse to return from hellacious megastore
- wielding plunger on dented bumper
- walking too far in Brooklyn with an old troubled friend
- concerns about an imminent storm of excrement
- walking with young daughter around where you grew up
- the composed part followed by the improvised part
- intentionally losing now to win later (#TTP #Lickface)
- the nightly procession of nearly invisible satellites
- remembering once in a while that the trick is to surrender to the flow.
Here are two “blurbs”:
“Mostly just found myself highlighting and typing ha or lol or the little plus sign which of course means I dig this. Affable narration. Highly readable. Entertaining. Funny. Bejeweled with alluring idiosyncrasies. Unspools with characteristic effortlessness. I felt at home.”
—Matthew Vollmer, author of All of Us Together in the End
“Just as Chaotic Good is ‘ostensibly fiction,’ it is also ‘ostensibly about a man’s solo journey into the sensuous depths of a communal music-listening experience.’ Of course it is much more. It is, scene by scene and paragraph by paragraph, a tree of singing rings—spooling, puddling, and oscillating in refracting flashes of innocence and experience, calmly paid out like vibrant candied rainbow rope, like the sliding scale of a human brain shot through and butterflied by blasts of radio wave on a magnetic field—each frame a static opportunity for digressive associative rumination—often, age-old tensions to ponder, reality as it is vs. as it was or could be: the thin man inside the fat man; the young inside the old; the bachelor inside the family unit; the mind within the mind; and, to cut things off somewhere, the individual within the concert within the city within the country.”
—Eric Bies, Goodreads, Books for Eric Booktube