Limited offer: 20% off on the print version of Twelve Simple Songs

Twelve Simple SongsI just got the following communication from Peecho.com, the Dutch print-on-demand service I’m using for the print version of my new collection of poems and photos, Twelve Simple Songs:

Thanks for using Peecho! We think it’s awesome that you are starting to generate orders through our service. To celebrate, we’re giving you 20 free coupons so you can offer 20% OFF to your customers and friends!

I’ll distribute the coupon codes on a first-come, first-served basis. Contact me if you’d like one, and then input the code when you place your order. I’m told by someone who just used a coupon that the 20% is taken off the entire price, including shipping and handling — an even better deal than I originally thought.

If you’d like to order more than one copy at 20% off (which I think would save a lot on postage per copy), let me know and I’ll put one coupon code aside for you and wait a week to see what the demand is like on the others. In other words, I’d like everyone who wants a coupon to get one, but if there aren’t 20 takers, then I’ll consider applying the coupons to orders of more than one.

And of course if you’d just like to read, listen to or watch a film version of the book and don’t care about getting it in print form, be my guest.

Erasing Shakespeare

The Rain in My Purse:

I don’t buy the oft-touted view that one must find something totally new in erasure poetry, that the found poem should be completely independent of the source text. If that’s the case then why do erasure at all? The source is going to offer possibilities and choices. The source is at the poet’s disposal, and will set limits. The source is not going to predetermine, but it is going to influence.

I love Bervin’s note at the end of the book: “When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page.”

Twelve Simple Songs now available in print

Twelve Simple SongsYou can now order a print copy of Twelve Simple Songs from Peecho.com. The link is www.peecho.com/print/1116. I’ve also created a dedicated page for the book at my author website: davebonta.com/twelve-simple-songs.

While not absolutely perfect, the quality of the photo reproduction in the print edition is pretty adequate, I think. Including shipping to the U.S. from the printer in the Netherlands (kind of disappointing that they don’t have a print partner in the US yet), I paid just $15.78 — that’s for the medium size (210mm or 8 1/4 inches square), full-color, glossy paperback option, which is the one I’d recommend. Not bad! When you click on the link, you’ll also have the options of magazine format (which I think means saddle-stapled rather than perfect bound) and hardcover.

I’m selling these at cost because the book started as a gift and I would like to continue to give it away in the spirit of Ecclesiastes 11:1. Exploring affordable, full-color print publishing options is something I’ve wanted to do for some time, so I am very much benefiting from all this.

Twelve Simple Songs: free digital poetry chapbook

View on Issuu

UPDATE (4/16/13): Now available in print form. (Including the shipping cost, the price should be $15.78 for U.S. residents ordering the full-color, medium paperback option.)

UPDATE (4/3/13): Now available as a videopoem from Nic S. and Swoon! Also, the collection now has its own page on my author site.

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Books are fun to make, and Issuu makes them reasonably fun to read online, too. I’ve uploaded a recording of me reading the poems if you want to listen while you read — if not, hit the pause button. If you only want the reading, download the MP3 here. And if you just want the PDF without going through Issuu, here’s an alternate download link for that.

You might remember my blogging the poems back in January and February. I had the goal of a small chapbook in mind as I wrote, though I was never quite sure whether to speak of these “simple songs” in the plural or singular — most of them wouldn’t really work on their own. For Rachel’s birthday, I matched the poems with some of my photos for a one-off, full-color, glossy paperback from Snapfish, which does very nice printing but A) is kind of pricey and B) isn’t really set up for text. (It’s a good thing none of the poems have italics in them, for example, because Snapfish can’t handle that.) So this second, PDF edition is slightly different, with better fonts, a fuller copyleft page at the end and other minor changes.

I guess the best one-line description for the chapbook would be: linked verses in dialogue with photographs about an intercontinental love affair. Some of the photos have personal associations for Rachel and me, but I don’t think that should prevent anyone else from appreciating the collection at some level, at least.

As for a second paperback edition, that’s coming, I hope. Issuu has partnered with a new and (to me) exciting new print-on-demand service called Peecho. I’ve gone ahead and ordered a test copy to see if the quality’s up to snuff — and if it isn’t, I’ll tweak it until it is. If you’re in a hurry to get a paper copy, you can go ahead and order one now through Issuu, but otherwise I’d recommend waiting until I give the go-ahead. Leave a comment if you’d like to be notified about this. If there’s enough interest, I could set up as an independent publisher with Peecho rather than going through Issuu, and possibly lower the price a little. (I would sell at cost.)

Jam session

From time to time, people show up my house for a jam session.

Watch on Vimeo

My cousin Tony Bonta, a member of the up-and-coming Bald Mountain Band, and his fellow Baltimore-area musician Terry McBride stopped by Tyrone to pick up my brother Steve on their way to a Hillbilly Gypsies concert in northern Pennsylvania. They had just enough time for a quick jam session in Plummer’s Hollow.

This is a true jam in the sense that we hadn’t practiced anything together, and a couple of us were less than expert. Terry (who also plays a very credible banjo) is still learning the fiddle, and said he felt somewhat abashed about playing it in front of others but forces himself to anyway. Steve is an great frailer but hadn’t played some of these tunes in that style before, so was picking it up on the fly. I wasn’t going to join in on the harmonica but couldn’t help myself. (Note that I wasn’t intentionally hiding from the camera; there just wasn’t any way to fit us all into the frame without being a camera nazi and ordering everyone about.)

Regular readers will remember a podcast feature I did about these same three guys and their thoughts on banjo playing the last time they stopped by.

Because of my slow internet speed, it’s excruciating to try and upload too large a file, so I was very selective here — perhaps too selective. I wish now I’d included more of the two-banjo conversation between Tony and Steve. Because three-finger style players and frailers are in two separate, usually warring moieties (bluegrass vs. old-time), and because most bands only have one banjo player, one doesn’t hear this combination nearly often enough. I could’ve listened to it all afternoon.

New Sun Rising

New Sun Rising coverSpeaking of boxes, I have a brief essay about bento boxes in the new anthology New Sun Rising: Stories for Japan, available in paperback (Amazon.com link, Amazon UK link) and for the Kindle. That’s not the main reason to get it, though. Think of it instead as a donation to the Japanese Red Cross to support survivors of the 2011 tsunami, for which you get a book as a reward. None of the editors, authors, or illustrators make a penny for this, and neither does the Aussie publisher. It’s a beautiful book with a great diversity of contributions — a feel-good gift for all the readers on your Christmas list.

(There’s a bit more on my personal website. Also, I have a new recipe up there: Mugwort Spicebush Stout. If you’re looking for a gruit ale to brew for the holidays, that’s one to consider.)

Appalachian-Philippine fusion: the kubing

Watch on Youtube

I’ve been kind of shy about posting any home-made music to the blog lately, but Rachel forced my hand. The bamboo jaw harp known as the kubing may be from the Philippines, but it goes great with Appalachian music. Here are a couple of examples, inexpertly rendered under the influence of a couple bottles of homebrew. These were recorded live over the internet, so the video doesn’t quite keep up with the audio due to my slow connection.

Watch on YouTube

Live blues on YouTube: 50 more videos



Browse on YouTube

Late last night I finished compiling this second (and probably last) series of videos. If you haven’t watched the first one yet, I’d recommend doing that first, since it includes a higher proportion of big-name acts — though I have plenty of those in this one, too. Gems like the opening and closing videos are kind of hidden in plain sight on YouTube, since it’s often impossible to tell what’s a real film and what isn’t until you play it. (I think music fans tend to assume the music can speak for itself. At least I imagine that’s why they’re not too good about annotating their uploads.)

This one’s longer. The first playlist was a mere 3 1/2 hours long; this one clocks in at 4:17:47. That’s because I’ve included more multi-song videos, such as the first part of a concert by Mance Lipscomb, as well as a wonderful short documentary by blues scholar David Evans on the fife-and-drum tradition of Gravel Springs, Mississippi, complete with footage of Otha Turner cutting cane and making a cane flute. There are also more long guitar jams — though not nearly as many as I could’ve included if I were a more typical blues fan. (More about that below.)

I’ve included more younger performers, more Texas blues and more jazz-blues than in the first playlist. I’m obviously far from a blues purist, but remain conservative about including performers from outside the African-American community, favoring those who, like Doc Watson, made the music their own, rather than slavish imitators like Eric Clapton… but see Buddy Guy’s passionate speech about the importance of the “British invasion” (and the band Cream specifically) in #21. As collectors, promoters, appreciators, and (since the 1970s) audiences, white people on both sides of the Atlantic have been essential to the survival of the blues. It’s great to see a younger coterie of players, black and white, taking the blues in new directions. The next to last video, for example, is from a young Serbian guitarist, Ana Popovic, who clearly isn’t afraid to use the blues to address the intense ethnic tensions in her own country.

I discovered a couple of new-to-me artists in the process of putting this playlist together, for which I’m mainly indebted to John Hayes’ Any Woman’s Blues series of portraits of female blues guitarists at the excellent, multi-author music and poetry blog Robert Frost’s Banjo. I remain personally more interested in blues as a vocal art-form, but as I said on Facebook last night, there’s always something powerful about a woman with a guitar. I think my favorite discovery was Barbara Lynn, whose career exemplifies the familiar woman’s trajectory of taking a couple decades off to raise a family. But it also exemplifies something that I love about the blues: there’s always been a strong place for older performers. Like jazz, and unlike rock, blues is music for grownups.

And that leads to the last point I want to make today. Unlike most white guys in my generation, I didn’t come to blues from a classic rock background. I listened to a lot of folk music growing up, including my brother Steve’s clawhammer banjo, and more than anything I think it was that latter sound that prepared me to love the haunting, droning style of traditional Mississippi blues when a college roommate with a great record collection first exposed me to guys like Robert Johnson, Elmore James and Muddy Waters. I remain fondest of the country blues in general, because I think it’s more musically diverse and much more interesting lyrically than the more commercial stuff.

When I did get into rock music in my early 20s, I found myself gravitating toward genres where the role of the lead guitar solo was minimalized, and the emphasis was on killer riffs — mainly thrash metal and punk. So to balance what I said above about the importance of white fans in keeping blues alive, I think this may have also retarded its development quite a bit, because so many fans are in it for the electric guitar leads, and prefer blues that sounds like classic rock. Where are the great blues pianists and saxophonists these days? Playing jazz for Cassandra Wilson and Dee Dee Bridgewater, apparently.

I will say, however, that much as I share Buddy Guy’s oft-expressed impatience for contemporary blues fans’ adulation of Stevie Ray Vaughan, specifically, making this playlist reminded me that he did have a unique and soulful sound — especially compared to some of his contemporaries. I couldn’t leave him out. Ditto with Albert Collins and some of the other axemen and -women in the playlist. Perhaps it’s time to revisit my indifference to screaming guitar solos. But mostly, I’ve found that compiling these playlists has reminded me why I love the blues so much in the first place: its bittersweetness speaks to me. It makes we want to get up and get down, and the years drop away. Also, I still think I might be able to dance like Cab Calloway if I just concentrate a little harder…

Blues classics on YouTube: 50 live performances

I’ve been working on this off and on since last Friday: a YouTube playlist designed as a comprehensive introduction to the blues, restricted solely to live footage. Music on YouTube is of course dominated by uploads of songs accompanied by still images, so simply sorting through and identifying live videos was time-consuming in itself. Musically speaking, I’ve cast my net widely, including some songs by performers usually associated with other genres (old-time Appalachian music, gospel, R&B, Sahelian guitar, Mississippi fife-and-drum, etc.) and some pieces by performers usually classed as bluesmen which are not, strictly speaking, blues songs. I wanted to suggest something of the broader context from which the music emerged; I even included a snippet of a lecture (illustrated with music) by multi-instrumentalist Dom Flemons from the African-American string band Carolina Chocolate Drops.

My focus has been on the “greats,” but I’ve also included some fairly obscure artists and a few younger folks as well. I tried to balance the playlist geographically and by gender, style, featured instrument, etc., but unavoidably there are still more guys with guitars playing in the Clarksdale/Chicago style than anything else. I’ve tried to squeeze in as many performers as possible, so very few singers appear more than once, and I didn’t stop till I got to 50 videos. Rather than trying to watch the above embed in one sitting, it might be a better idea to bookmark the page on YouTube and browse at your leisure.

Don’t wait too long, though, because videos are always being removed from YouTube for one reason or another. Just in the past week that I’ve been working on this, one of the videos I’d originally selected has already gone missing. It was a good one, too! It’s almost enough to give a guy the blues…

Why we need war stories

Hoarded Ordinaries:

I suspect my students think they were assigned to read The Good Soldiers so they could be better informed about the war in Iraq, and presumably that is part of the common reading’s purpose. But a good book, like a true war story, does so much more than merely inform. Given the pictures that both Finkel and O’Brien paint of war, what does either writer want us to “do” with that information? Once you get a vivid taste of what war was like for a particular group of soldiers at a particular time, how does that awareness change you as a reader and a citizen?

A good book, like a true war story, can help you become better informed, but it also can (and perhaps should) make you a more earnest asker of questions. Forget about what happened in Vietnam or Iraq; instead, raise the question of why it happened. If there is a lesson to be learned in any war (or in any war story), what are those lessons, and have we learned them?