There is a buoyancy to this book which redeems it from hostile criticism. For the reader who has no objection to writing that stands on its edge this will be a very desirable book.
Reviewed by Bob Williams

by Dean Strom
PretendGeniusPress 2004, ISBN 0-9747-2611-7, $14.95, 181 pages

PretendGeniusPress is the co-operative publishing venture of a group of writers who produce serious work but decline to be serious about it. The back cover of Nothing Will Save You, for example, has the usual blurbs but they are by Hernando Cortez (conquistador), Ferdinand Magellan (explorer), Bloog Mandrake (editor) and Mohammad Saeed al-Sahaf (public relations). All of these were or are actual earthlings with the possible exception of Bloog Mandrake.

The immensity of the United States prompts perpetual restlessness and the ubiquity of motorized vehicles exists to satisfy insatiable – if often pointless – curiosity. Strom takes us on the road but it is no road that you would ever find or easily imagine for it is often less a physical road than an imagined highway through the quirkier recesses of the mind and spirit. Pate, the narrator, quasi-dedicated to a sketchily described form of salvation on the Internet, travels in an automobile that is sometimes of one make and sometimes of another. His traveling companions vary and may not always be real. Strom’s style matches all this waywardness and careens from gnomic to comically literary. He uses typographic tricks to prevent all this from dissolving.

But he adopts an everyday mode about midway through and in midpage at that. Moe, the hitchhiker that Pate has picked up, along with some of Moe’s friends, beat Pate into unconsciousness and abandon him. Having learned his lesson, Pate almost immediately picks up another hitchhiker. This is Jennie Strom and she and Pate tumble happily into bed together.

The love affair blossoms. Pate abandons his plan to travel north and goes to Honolulu to be near Jennie when she goes to school there. Pate observes the yachting community of which he writes “People are living up to the names on their boats, so many boats. People talk about boats across boats and inquire after the health of other boats.”

But Jennie does not come to Hawaii. She dumps him. Pate spends most of his days in idleness and many of his nights cruising the gay scene. He resolves to kill himself although resolve may be too strong a word. He composes an artfully meaningless suicide message and shots himself. But the gun is loaded with blanks and he recovers by virtue of the farce of this episode. The end is funny and itself farcical.

After this novella we find a section of poems interspersed with several short stories. The former are mostly in the style of ‘Jabberwocky’ and the stories are high in acid. Of the poetry we can say that Strom leaves no sound untuned.

Given the extreme alterations in style within the novella, we are not prepared to abandon Pate where Strom leaves him and expect a resumption of his story. It is a defect that the book is not clearly mapped out with a table of contents to assist the clueless reader. But this is a minor stricture. There is a buoyancy to this book which redeems it from hostile criticism. For the reader who has no objection to writing that stands on its edge this will be a very desirable book.
buy the book: http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Will-Save-Dean-Strom/dp/0974726117
Review from: Compulsive Reader

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Cover designed by Stratos

June 3rd - June 8th, 2008
12 p.m. - 9 p.m.
www.balelatina.com
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bâlelatina 2008. Press Release received.
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“The Place to Be for Latin Art”
Noted for its setting on the banks of the Rhine, bâlelatina, now in its third edition, follows two successful years and continues to be the only Latin Art fair to be staged in Basel, Switzerland during the annual art extravaganza. In its 2008 edition, balelatina, with its unique and international character, returns with an invigorating image and agenda, to show the hottest contemporary Latin Art trends, including the established art movements that have marked the path of Latin Art until today.

Like no other international art fair, bâlelatina is exclusive focusing on a cultural vision and concentrating on a universal Latin concept. bâlelatina’s Selection Committee will handpick contemporary and modern art galleries from European countries with Latin roots like Italy, Spain, France, Rumania and Portugal, as well as galleries from Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States. The selected galleries represent artists from these regions and offer an immediate overview of modern and contemporary LATIN ART.

Y OLE!
In what will become an annual tradition, Spain has been selected as the guest of honour during balelatina 2008. A section of the fair will be reserved for the five invited galleries who will showcase artists emblematic of Spain’s emerging art scene. In addition, a leading Spanish Cultural Institution will be invited to present six solo artist exhibitions curated by emerging Spanish curators.

HOT HOT HOT
This year, bâlelatina will be giving special recognition to different personalities from the contemporary Latin art world! The HOT Collector, HOT Curator, and the HOT Artist will be selected and rewarded during the fair. In what promises to become a yearly prestigious affair, fairgoers will also have a chance to partake in this unique selection by choosing the HOT Gallery from amongst the participating galleries.

Complimentary Events
A comprehensive lecture series by top professionals on Latin Art will be conducted during the fair in a comfortable setting on the banks of the Rhine. Happenings, Performances and Site Specific Urban Projects will complement balelatina’s 2008 art fair experience. bâlelatina will provide a great gathering point where collectors, art professionals and fairgoers will meet and enjoy in a relax setting.

His poems are free in form, receptive to rhyme and meter as the occasion serves and efficient at combining poetry and prose within the same poem. But words fascinate him and he expresses this with great variety and notable ingenuity. Unrelated words become bedfellows if they have sounds in common or if they differ in sound but somewhere have links in meaning.
Reviewed by Bob Williams

Review: Babble on to Babylon
by Blem Vide
PretendGenius Press 2004, ISBN 0-9747261-8-4, $11.95, 171 pages

This is an outsiders’ book. These poems – witty, irreverent and spiced with allusions drawn from many sources – will appeal to the patient and receptive reader. The audience for poetry is small and the special demands of Vide’s poetry will involve even fewer readers but those readers will find much in this collection to make their experience abundantly joyous. The reader should pay attention to the phrasing of the copyright notice, engagingly different. The cover, like all PretendGenius books, is very handsome and is mainly the work in this case of the author.

In one of Aldous Huxley’s novels a character becomes entranced with the phrase “Black ladders lack bladders.” Vide is similarly fascinated with this and all kinds of verbal play. His poems are free in form, receptive to rhyme and meter as the occasion serves and efficient at combining poetry and prose within the same poem. But words fascinate him and he expresses this with great variety and notable ingenuity. Unrelated words become bedfellows if they have sounds in common or if they differ in sound but somewhere have links in meaning. An example of the latter is in Vide’s ‘Serve the Creative Impulse, Idiots’ – a work in which poetry and prose live together happily – “And I want to be regarded as an Elvis Presley look-alike. On the double.”

When he does not make these unaccustomed combinations through sense or sound, he resorts felicitously to puns as in this example from ‘Rigva Raga Loop:’ “pomes never end/they just go republic.”

There are poems in which his fascination with sound sets meaning aside in favor of a personal language that cannot be construed.

“Agawon. I supter. Sun blackness.
‘On toma volute nagavini!’”
‘Ulahan the Latuganist’

There are two qualities in which Vide especially excels. He frequently addresses the reader directly and in ways that arrest the attention. He also plants within his poems sharp and witty observations that send the reader an electric jolt of pleasure and recognition.

“Not every house is
a limousine, but not every house can speak cottage.”

“This was my back porch before I stole it from the cops.”

“Vanity is nothing to
fear, unless you are intimidated by beauty.”

“if a taxpayer dreams
forest in the ocean
is there a gov’t to poison the world?”

“god never serves food
on good dinnerware
when we’re at the table”

The last quotation strongly recalls Emily Dickinson’s observation about God’s table being too high for us unless we dine on tiptoe.

‘Protecting Intellectual Property by Giving It Away Free’ also has its background, shadowy and suggested, of a writer familiar with Finnegans Wake. It has the same stubborn march and carefully plotted variety of the first thirteen pages of Joyce’s chapter six. If not done in the neighborhood of Finnegans Wake, it is an interestingly Borgesian coincidence.

This is a long book for a collection of poetry and it could have been better as a book if Vide had chosen fewer poems for some are notably better than others. But, as a documentation of a writer, with much accomplished and much still to offer, this is a selection that will acquire additional meaning and value as we have the felicitous opportunity of seeing more of his work.
To buy: http://www.amazon.ca/Babble-Babylon-Blem-Vide/dp/0974726184
From: http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=774

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Cover designed by Stratos and the Writer