The Continental Review
For years now Jordan Stempleman’s The Continental Review has been quietly turning out the farthest seeing television on the prophetube (witness past videos by Ryan MacDonald, Michelle Taransky, Dana Ward, Cara Benson, K. Silem Mohammad, Linh Dinh, Tom Beckett, Susana Gardner, Chris Tysh, Nico Vasilakis, Kiki Petrosino, Eileen Tabios, Alyssa Wolf, Joshua Clover, Noah Eli Gordon, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Ben Mirov, Daniel Borzutsky…) In the past few weeks, Stempleman’s turned it up to 11. First Amanda Nadelberg’s “Alternatives Considered” and then Paul Legault’s English to English translation of Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Today new videos by Peter Davis and Dara Wier (above) dropped. The latter, a stop motion setting of Wier’s cant miss “Not That Lake,” is a collaboration between Heather Christle, Ben Pease, Emily Pettit, Guy Pettit, and Bianca Stone. They made it in more or less one day, planning a birthday party the whole way. You can watch it in 3 minutes. Or twice in 6 or 3x in 9 or eleven times in 33. You will see.
Round this–
A new major book review section is about to open, at… the Wall Street Journal?
Jeff T. Johnson’s got an essay on “The New Hybridity” at Fanzine.
Castro thinks Ahmadinejad should stop slandering the Jews. You can add that to the list of things Castro and I agree about.
Mathias Svalina has been writing Book Proposals for Broadway Books. From “My Year on a Moving Sidewalk”:
This book will be popular among readers who enjoyed such books at Mary Roach’s Stiff, Mary Roach’s Packing for Mars & the City of Portland, Oregon’s downloadable pdf “SIDEWALK REPAIR MANUAL: How to Repair and Maintain a Sidewalk.”
Bianca Stone has a new chapbook coming out. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows is now available for pre-order from Argos Books.
Tender, imaginative, wry and wise, the poems in Stone’s first collection take the reader from the bottom of the ocean to the orbit of the moon. In between, the geography of the heart is mapped lyrically and unexpectedly.
Not a lot to complain about in that description, is there?
At the Faster Times, Kyle Minor absolutely loses his shit over Amelia Gray’s Museum of the Weird. I stopped pretending I could follow what he was talking about somewhere toward the middle, but the upshot seems to be that he likes her book very, very much.
And finally, as if you needed me to tell you, the launch event for Richard Yates is at BookCourt tonight. It begins in about ten hours, which means that I am going to leave my house in a few minutes to head down there and claim a seat.
Meet Bianca Stone
Bianca Stone makes poetry comics. I’m really in love with them. The first time I met her she gave me a chapbook of a collaboration she made with Matthew Rohrer, and then last night, after we read together at Happy Ending, I was lucky enough to obtain two more sweet, sweet poetry comics: “The Secret Intimacies of Insects,” and “Book of Beasts,” a collection of her abandoned fragments, revisions, and drawings. I’m really excited to read these little books, and to get to keep them. I think you could do a lot worse with your Friday afternoon than make friends with Bianca’s work. Here’s her blog. And here’s a sweet little poem, comic-less but that’s OK, “Watching Superman” in the current issue of elimae (which, btw, also features Mike Topp, our own comment-thread regular Darby Larson, fiction by Elizabeth Ellen, Michael Kimball interviewing David McLendon, and more. Maybe somebody else will post soon about the new elimae.)
