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

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

Reviewed by Bob Williams

Last Night’s Dream Corrected
Pretend Genius Press
2006, ISBN 0-9747261-6-8, $10.50, 118 pages

This is an anthology of poetry. There are thirty-five poems written by twenty poets. The geographic range is wide. Many are from the large coastal cities of the United States, some are from Europe, and one lives about twenty miles from my home.

Pretend Genius itself requires comment. This is a loose assembly of writers who do serious things but are not themselves notably serious. The level of talent is remarkable. I have all their books and I have never been disappointed in any of them.

An anthology is an unnatural animal. Some of it can do tricks, but some of it can do no more than doze by the fire. The usual inspirational suspects are here. Some of the poets draw on popular culture and some draw on more classical material. Both have the same problem: will the reader catch their drift and allusions? Other poets use the simple language that bridges the gap without allusional obstructions. Plain words work – with the odd adjective or two to dazzle and wake the reader.

The introduction is by Bloog Mandrake. He refuses to discuss the poets. “So what could possibly be said about the poets in this anthology that they might not have already lied about to their mothers?” Instead he writes about readers and poetry. The latter, although not very well, declines to die, and the former can keep it healthy if they will.

As with every anthology, some parts are better than others – or perhaps more readily accessible. Some of ones that are not immediate in their appeal will wait for their time to come, their moment of fusion with a suddenly wakened reader. But the collection makes a strong beginning (as we will see later, it also makes a flourishing end). This is serendipitous since the poems are in alphabetical order. Raewyn Alexander’s three opening poems are very likeable. I especially enjoyed this verse from ‘thunder debates with ice and lightning leads.’

i sleepwalked in the eyes of it
drenched with what used to be promises
your dark ghost loosing new hair
insurance could cover this if it had heart

‘Nostos’ by Stratos Fountoulis is too long to quote and too much of a piece for easy excerpting. It is haunting and distinguished work by a man who modestly claims not to be a poet. He is unquestionably a distinguished artist, designer of many Pretend Genius covers and creator of the artwork.

Not all of the work in this collection is ‘pure’ poetry. Susan Kennedy’s two poems (‘It was the crow you see’ and ‘Proper poems will not be written’) dwell on the ethical meanings that we fasten on the external world or the limits that the proper world tries to fasten on reality. We are treading the dreaded border of the didactic here, but Kennedy is too nimble for such a trap, and these poems combine unusual material with great talent.

And Elias Miller’s two poems (‘death brings different socks’ and ‘God the stepfather’ have some of the same qualities of Kennedy’s evasion of solely poetic purposes. Miller, however, shows himself capable of more bitter-edged meditation.

It is impossible to pass by Dean Strom’s three excellent contributions without notice of his parody, clever and funny, of William Carlos Williams.

Blem Vide’s ‘Art Without Instructions (an art disclaimer)’ presents him at his best. The reader may find this poem as the opening of Vide’s Babble on to Babylon, one of the best books by a new poet that I know of. My favorite lines:

In art as in life – be just.
But if you cannot be just – be arbitrary.

The book closes with a most appropriate poem by Richard Wright (about whom there are no details in Contributors – most mysterious) about poetry.

This is obviously something of a scattergun as a review. I liked much more than I have mentioned and if you are a reader who reads poetry, you will have the same experience. I recommend this book very much.

You my buy “Last Night’s Dream Corrected” at Amazon.com http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1240

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Cover designed by Stratos

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

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.

You may buy Blem Vide’s book at Amazon.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=774

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Cover designed by Stratos 

by Kenneth Dawson
PretendGenius Press 2004, ISBN 0-9747261-9-2, $9.95, 114 pages

Kenneth Dawson was born in 1957. He has fitfully attended universities but has – in his own words – “escaped without a degree.” His résumé shows a disconnected mélange of military service and employments. This is, it appears, his first book.

Dancing the Maze examines five areas in an approach that it would be difficult to describe as short stories. Events of a specific sort are placed in juxtaposition, some of it is in prose and some of it is poetry. The book is unified by a bleakness of vision that is arresting.

‘Paralysis’ accounts for the early life of a man abused by his father, enfeebled with and turned bitter by a debilitating disease. The protagonist later serves in Vietnam where he is at last rendered numb by the brutality of the war. In the end he creates a kind of private truce and sits oblivious of military protocol. “And I knew secrets. If you’re not willing to shoot them you must be careful with people who know secrets.”

‘The Blues You Play’ stays in the same area of human brutality but the expression is cast in terms of even more remotely connected insights, most of them expressed with the concision of poetry. “If there is a God, is it manifested in the forgiveness of survivors? I think of a woman who lived through My Lai describing horrors in an interview and saying she didn’t hate Americans, but only wondered, why? Perhaps she, transcending hate, is why.”

‘Confession of a Race Traitor’ brings the soldier out of service into a struggle with the equally insane demands of civilian life in a debased and vicious society. The situation, rather than the story for there is none, is built up of comments, descriptions and meditations.

‘Manifest Destiny’ has three parts: an Indian that explodes against the depravity of those that oppress him and goes on a killing spree; an anthropologist who shares his information on an obscure tribe with the military which kills the tribe off for political but essentially trivial reasons; and an Indian shaman who has adopted a fictitious role unknowingly but is led to embrace it as still the best that he can achieve in a sick world.

‘The Great American Desert,’ the short closing piece, is a rhapsody on the deserters from society. Almost all the books that I have been reading lately show a great debt somehow to Kerouac. Since I have never regarded Kerouac as a great or even a good writer, I am happy that all of the writers that I have been reading lately are much better writers than he.

Dawson told me more about human brutality that I want to think about and put my forbearance to the test. Happier writers, if they are any good and not fools, will know that there is much to fear and much to dislike but they seldom bring us reports from the abyss. Dawson does and the honesty of his report wrings admiration from me reluctantly. This is what a book should be as a transfiguring instrument and there is nothing to say that such an experience will be a happy one. Thus warned, every reader will need to meditate on his or her need for such a book. For my part I found it an extraordinary experience which I would not have missed but which I would not want to repeat.

Buy Kenneth Dawson’s book at Amazon.com
http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=736

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cover designed by Stratos

cover illustrations by the Author

Vladimir Nabokov
(April 22, 1899, Saint Petersburg – July 2, 1977, Montreux)

Now, why am I posting about Nabokov out of the blue. Well, first of all it’s summer and I’m about to select some old-read books + buy some new ones for the holidays in some lovely Greek Island. While am at all this Nabokov came to mind as I stumled upon an old edition of a “Norton Reader” volume, looked under “literature and the Arts” and my eye caught this excerpt from a Nabokov’s lecture on literature(1980) where among other he declares that:

“Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader…” .

I’m not going to go any further writing on this, as Nabokov dialectically develops his reasoning, this will take too much of my time and besides, this post is intended to stay short. I hope I made my point. It’s the heat of July…

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a Wikipedia photo of Nabokov

The degree of finish and the form of the meditations vary. Some are stories or almost. Most of them are outpourings of a tormented heart. The author has a very special voice and he aims it at the reader directly and personally.

Reviewed by Bob Williams
The Baltimore Years
by J. Tyler Blue
PretendGenius Press 2004, ISBN 0-9747261-3-3, $12.95, 145 pages

Baltimore, already graced by novelist Anne Tyler, receives an altogether different homage from J. Tyler Blue in these meditations on drawing breath alone and in pain.
The degree of finish and the form of the meditations vary. Some are stories or almost. Most of them are outpourings of a tormented heart. The author has a very special voice and he aims it at the reader directly and personally. It is a strange feeling to be addressed in this manner by an author and I am not aware that any other author comes close to Blue in this type of communication. A convention to the other authors that have attempted it, to Blue it is a realistic literary form.

Those parts of the book that are not stories or near-stories are poems. By a paradox the poems offer the more objective comments.

This is an entire chapter from The Baltimore Years:

Burning Dear John

I slept today
Or maybe it was yesterday
I don’t know
Heartbeats ceased making sense of time

I scratched out a message to the gods
On another empty match book.
I am mailing it to NASA
To send to the heavens.

“I’ve been missing you since before I knew you were”
She smiled
She said she felt the same way once,
About tea and cigarettes.

Did I see you? “On the stairs?”
I breathed, hoping she would catch it.
Hoping she would before leaving
For the moon.

When the element of story is weak and the style is indisputable prose, the result is a torrent of words as if Blue opened his mind to his word processor in a struggle of creation that becomes the effort to capture the self, to snare the truth in the most rapidly constructed net of words that Blue can manage.

This is a very intimate document with a greater emphasis on truth than beauty. It is also a convincing display of the creative process in action. This makes it startlingly different. Since different is not always a blessing, I must add that it is of exceptionally high quality. Every reader that values probity in a writer and has no fear of the adventurous will want this book.

You can buy the book from Amazon

Review from: http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=735

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cover designed by Stratos

The arrangement of the many stories in Still Life is an adventure in itself. The groupings have titles and the succession is ‘stories about something,’ ‘stories about nothing,’ ‘stories about things that might have happened,’ ‘true stories,’ stories about things that should have happened’ and so onwards with playful ingenuity.

Reviewed by Bob Williams

Still Life in Motion

by Sean Brijbasi

PretendGenius Press 2004, ISBN 0-974261-0-9, $14.95, 248 pages

Fiction usually brings us recognizable themes and characters set in a world that we perceive as real. The creation from this of an artistic work involves some manipulation and artificiality. The obtrusiveness of such manipulation will be more or less obvious depending on the skill of the writer but we will tend to accept it even when it makes a spectacle of itself. But there are alternatives.

Brijbasi explores such alternatives. He concerns himself with the irrecoverables of life. These are the small, almost invisible, quirks and reflexes that play on the surface of our minds and actions. Irrecoverables exist at a level prior to character, incident or conflict. Brijbasi is the poet of irrecoverables. The shadowy figures of his skeletal world have no faces and they would not accept epiphanies. They do accept absurdities and they revel in contradictions. Brijbasi carries this to a degree that naturalizes absurdities and contradictions. The result is less fiction than a display of the mechanics of fiction that focuses on the bare minimum of expected content. This austerity, however witty it often is, brings the reader to considerations of what reality might be like if we look at it closely and if it is in fact real.

This is the second book by a young writer. The first and shorter book, One Note Symphonies, appeared three years ago. It already showed a mature polish and acceptance of exotic worlds worthy of report. Still Life is more varied and presents a wider range of ability. There are effects that might elude the reader. For example, in a scene where the protagonist watches television and hears the following, the reader will miss the point unless the reader knows that Brijbasi was born in 1967: “Born in 1967, he went on to do nothing and was remembered by no one.”

But there are constants in Brijbasi’s shifting world. Martin from One Note Symphonies is a frequent actor in Still Life. Sasha from the opening story makes a floating appearance elsewhere before she takes on a more concrete existence towards the end of the book. Martin proves to be a nuisance and Brijbasi kills him off several times (in ‘Minor Character’) only to have him revive and end up in bed with the heroine.
The arrangement of the many stories in Still Life is an adventure in itself. The groupings have titles and the succession is ‘stories about something,’ ‘stories about nothing,’ ‘stories about things that might have happened,’ ‘true stories,’ stories about things that should have happened’ and so onwards with playful ingenuity.

Brijbasi’s playfulness is often displayed with funny and apposite descriptions: “So this girl that I’m meeting tonight, Saturday night, I’ve known for a few years now, but I’m starting to misknow her because, well, it’s hard to admit, but I know that she has been unloving me slowly for the last year or so and I want to crash land like a lullaby in some stripper’s arms.”

In the section entitled ‘Reading Stories’ Brijbasi loiters with intent over academic writing and tests. The satire is loony but exact and a construction of elaborate wit. Too involvedly sustained to quote, it contains such delights as sportscasters commenting on a public reading.
This book is exhilarating in its freedom and its poetry and wit are a constant refreshment. In my review of One Note Symphonies I wondered if such a special talent could survive in today’s glut of books but Still Life indicates that he is a survivor. This is very good news for us all.

To buy the book: look at Still Life in Motion - Amazon.com

http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=672

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cover designed by Stratos