The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, --Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon Magnificent desolation. --Buzz Aldrin, 2nd man on the moon, July 20, 1969 |
| I started taking notes for Vegetable Dreams after reading Jerry
Mander's
Four
Arguments for the Elimination of Television while I wrote and studied
poetry with Allen Ginsberg at Brooklyn College
in 1993. After finishing my MFA I took my notes to
Prague in September 1994 where I figured I could
knock the book out in the eight months I would live there. That didn't happen.
I housesat in Brooklyn and worked on nothing else for four humorless months
between September 1995 and February 1996. Nearing nervous collapse, I shelved
the project and took first a teaching job at the City University of New York,
then in August '96 I moved to Baltimore where my college roommate John had
gotten me a job. I resumed work in a tentative
way in spring and summer 1997 but again grew frustrated. I thought I was
close to completing work on it in February '98 after I moved to Manhattan,
but the manuscript refused to become anything more than a pastiche of vignettes
on a theme: the quest for connection in increasingly disconnected times.
I am now in Seattle and realize that the book was trying to tell me something,
that the dislocation my protagonist feels reflects the lack of stability
in my life, and perhaps too the absurdity of straitjacketing a story about
memory into a strictly linear form. To this end, I've decided to start publishing
chapters here rather than let the book languish interminably. The sequence
of these chapters is intuitive and subject to change. Like a poetry anthology,
I think they can be read in no particular order and I encourage the use of
the random chapter button below.
notify me when new chapters are added
I © robert zverina 1994-2000 |