I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SHAD & DALLAS-“Live Forever” (2010).

Shad and Dallas Green (from Alexisonfire) recorded an EP called Two Songs and the profits go to Skate4Cancer.  The A Side is the new song “Live Forever.”  Shad is a great rapper, and make no mistake, this is a Shad song.  Green sings the hook-filled chorus (and an intro line).

Shad’s rapping is great and his rhymes are clever and interesting (he even does a fast double-time section which I’d never heard him do before). But the music itself is kind of bland.  I listened to it three times and I never really got into the flow of it.

I rather hope that sales are good (for the charity’s sake) but I’m afraid I’m not that excited by the track.

[READ: January 23, 2011] “Choynski”

I recently noticed that I had reviewed a whole bunch of stories from The Walrus.  So I wondered just how many stories there were in previous issues of the maagzine that I hadn’t posted about.  The magazine only started in 2003, and I still have all the issues (yes, that’s right…  I bought Issue 1 on the newsstand), so it wasn’t that hard to figure out.  In the early days, not every issue had fiction in it.  I started calculating and discovered that there were only about 25 stories to go.  So I thought, why not go back and read them all, eh?

This story was in Issue #2, and I have to say, good for them for picking David Bezmozgis to be their first author.  His issue bio reads that his first short story collection Natasha will be published in June.  And if you check now, you’ll see that Natasha won a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book.  Not bad.

There are essentially two stories in this piece and they tie together quite nicely.  The first arc concerns the narrator’s dying grandmother.  She is an old Russian Jew whose English isn’t great so she tries to speak in Yiddish to make up for it.  Her family understands but few others (like her doctor) know what she’s talking about.  As the story progresses, her family tries to keep the truth of her condition from her, but she is no dummy.

The second story concerns the narrator’s attempt to learn more information about Joe Choynski.  Choynski was being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame (Old Timers division) and the narrator was going to the ceremony.  In trying to learn more about Choynski (considered America’s frst great fighting Jew), he enlists the help of Charley Davis, an old man who knows more than just about anyone else about the Choynski. 

I learned pretty much every thing I know about boxing from A Naked Singularity, so I don’t know a thing about “Chrysanthemum Joe.”  And that’s okay (for me and the story).  We learn something about the man and his prowess.  But the story shifts directions pretty quickly when Charley Davis takes ill.

The narrator has to try and hunt down Charley’s next of kin and the son who shows up is a born-again Christian.  The sequence gets funny, deep and a little surreal from there.  I especially enjoyed Charley’s reaction to his son’s prayers. There’s a wonderful prayer at the end of the story that that ties everything together very nicely.  It’s a solid story and it’s included in Natasha.

And, coincidentally, I just received a prepub of his latest novel The Free World, today.