Drew Zimmerman Collected

"If my work is anything, it's a fair representation of my interior landscape, my tone and voice. I am proud to be able to put that sensibility in writing, since no one else will. In 2009, when two of my marionette plays were in regular rotation on our cable access channel, a guy at a cocktail party for the station asked, 'I want to know one thing: why do you do it?' The question was snide and rhetorical, but I ignored that and fumbled something about obsession, not knowing what to say. Today, I know the answer: I make art because I can."

Sly and insightful reactions to diverse topics, Drew Zimmerman's dispatches from the front across three decades are an outlying, literary isotope: satirical essays on the personal codes-to-live-by of Hemingway, William Gaddis, and Carlos Castaneda; the apocalyptic visions of Jonathan Edwards and William Blake; and the surreal landscapes of David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Greenaway, and Jean Dubuffet. The title of one of the writer's most sprawling observations on the state of modern life, "If You Don't Agree with Me, You're Stupid: A Scientific Approach," expresses the outrageousness of the author's perspective, footnoted to show people what doing your own research looks like.

Included in the collection, the scripts of Zimmerman's four, best known, one-act marionette and stop-motion musicals: The Dime Novelties, a biting comedy of the public's insatiable appetite for cheap showbiz thrills, based on Kafka's "The Hunger Artist"; Lisa Strata, a poke at gender roles that owes much to the satire of Aristophanes; The Treasure of Oak Island, a comical revelation of what's really down there in the famous money pit off the coast of Nova Scotia, based on three Kafka short stories; and Ned and the Cuckoos a musical satire of the public vilification of Dr. Edward Jenner, discoverer of the smallpox vaccine. Featuring three kinds of animation, It's a lab riot!