Death metal isn't really my thing.  It's all distorted guitars and growls and physical aggression about darkness and nihilism.  But I think it doesn't work for me from an aesthetic standpoint.  I've come to understand the impulse - it shares a lot with punk music's drive towards anarchy.   Nihilism is easier for me to stomach in film and books.  It's less intense and single-minded when packaged with a narrative and character.  But in music, the darkness and anarchic streak is so visceral and immediate.  I can't imagine kicking around the house, blasting some death metal.  If there's an apocalypse and somehow I'm the only one left alive - me and my dog - walking through the rubble and debris shellshocked while scrounging for food and dog biscuits in torn clothing, then I could see pining for a little death metal to soundtrack my life.

Who knew I would find it comforting to learn death metal and heavy metal music are popular in the Middle East?  I like being reminded that youth culture everywhere, even under repressive regimes, is still challenging authority and creating subcultures and underground trends.  I produced a show on These Days on the topic of alternative music in Musliim countries, inspired by Mark LeVine's book Heavy Metal Islam.  LeVine is a musician and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California-Irvine.  He spent five years traveling through countries like Morocco, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia observing the heavy metal (and its subgenres), hip-hop, and punk scenes to learn how these art forms play out in the context of religious fundamentalism and repressive governments.   LeVine was our guest and a fantastic interview.  He's gone to places few of us have gone and paid attention to something usually ignored by the West - and he knows how to tell a story.  When he and I talked, he told me that in Iran, you see kids on street corners rhyming, playing beats off their cell phones and staging mini battles.  When the police drive by, they disperse, running in different directions as if they were selling drugs or something.  Just like in the poor urban centers of the US, hip-hop is still the most affordable way to be a musician. 

Check out Mark's book, it's an engaging read.  Also, go here to hear some of the music Mark listened to while writing the book.  It's a great resource for what's happening in music in the Middle East.  

And, in support of metalheads everywhere, especially Islamic style, here's a video from the Iranian death metal band Arthimoth.  The song is "Baptized."  The lead singer was jailed for making this video.  This is probably the only time you'll find a death metal video on Culture Lust, unless there's an apocalypse, in which case, I might be too busy to blog. 

The July/August edition of Atlantic Monthly has an article on whether Google and the Internet is making us stupid.  Author Nicholas Carr is certainly not the first to wonder about this.  I have to admit, an early paragraph in his piece felt really familiar.

"Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle."

I've occasionally felt this way over the last few years and have talked about it with friends who also used to read novels by the boat loads.  I was a Lit major and used to read all the time.  I've been known to hoard books.  Once when I was living in Baltimore, I ventured out during an ice storm with a sprained knee to go to the library and restock my reading supply.  I have vivid memories of trying to maneuver down icy stairs in a full leg brace but happy because I had a backpack full of books. 

Today, if I were stranded due to weather and a bum wheel, well, I'd just fire up the laptop and click from article to article.   I'm not saying this is a bad thing, just different, and I wonder what the overall effect will be.  I don't mean to overly romanticize some past that never was, when everyone spent their days in overstuffed chairs working their way through the literary canon.  But did we read differently before the Internet?  

This whole idea reminds me of a picture I took of my father a couple of years ago at Christmas.  He rarely reads online.  His study is a place where time stands still.  Whenever I step into it, I always feel like it's a world both foreign yet completely comfortable.

Andrew Altschul is on These Days today talking about his new novel Lady Lazarus.   Andrew lived in San Diego for a stretch and served as editor of a music mag called Slamm.  He now lives in the Bay Area and teaches creative writing at Stanford.  Lady Lazarus is about many things and one of them is the roiling creativity of punk rock and what it's like to live in the world once you've tapped into it.  I asked Andrew to imagine his publisher asking for a companion CD -- what songs would he have included?  He was kind enough to play along and sent me the following kick-ass playlist of grrrl rockers.  Andrew also explained his choices:

In the years that I was writing Lady Lazarus, I listened to a lot of punk rock, mostly from the 1990s. I kept coming back to the women - the Riot Grrrls, the Suicide Girls, the angry, sexy, in-your-face girls. The runaways. The girls making records on 4-tracks in their bedrooms. The pissed off girls who refuse to keep their mouths shut or hide their appetites. The girls you can't fire because they quit. Whatever the label, I think female anger is just more interesting and complicated than male anger, which bores me at this point. So my main character, a young confessional poet named Calliope, the daughter of punk rockers, is in some ways a tribute to those women, and the book tries to show the ways in which it's always harder, more complicated, for them than it is for the men. These songs still sound as fierce and vulnerable and beautiful to me as they did back then.

P.J. Harvey, "Rid of Me"
Patti Smith, "Privilege (Set Me Free)"
Sonic Youth, "Kool Thing"
Sinéad O'Connor, "Jackie"
Hole, "Violet"
The Breeders, "Raw"
Tori Amos, "Me and a Gun"
Liz Phair, "Flower"
Fiona Apple, "Sleep to Dream"
Cat Power, "Metal Heart"
P.J. Harvey, "The Desperate Kingdom of Love"

Andrew will be reading from Lady Lazarus tonight at Winstons in OB.  Ed Decker, Sordid Tales columnist for San Diego City Beat, will also be reading.  Things get going at 6:30 - Winstons is totally chill... there's whisky and funny, smart people sharing good writing. Why would you ever pass this up?

Austin Powers, when asked by Basil Exposition what the other thing was that scared him, replied:  "Carnies. Circus folk. Nomads, you know. Smell like cabbage. Small hands."  In the novel Water for Elephants, author Sara Gruen draws her circus folk with more precision and insight than Austin Powers, though he retains the obvious comic edge.  Local blogger Aaryn Belfer recommends Water for Elephants for Culture Lust readers.  She sent me her thoughts on the book.

Water for Elephants: A Review

by Aaryn Belfer

“Either there’s been an accident or there’s roadwork, because a gaggle of old ladies is glued to the window at the end of the hall like children or jailbirds. They’re spidery and frail, their hair is fine as mist. Most of them are a good decade younger than me, and this astounds me. Even as your body betrays you, your mind denies it.”

So says nonagenarian Jacob Jankowski, the curmudgeonly yet loveable protagonist who you can’t help but root for in Sara Gruen’s novel Water for Elephants.

The circus is in town and the tents are going up just outside the convalescent home.  Inside, the home’s residents have gathered by the window with walkers and wheelchairs, jockeying for the best view. Most of them are excited about an upcoming outing to the circus, which promises freedom from the bland, antiseptic confines of their day-to-day routine. But for Jacob, the circus view and the failings of his aging body spark a wellspring of memories that pour out during his less lucid moments. Or they may be his clearest moments. Both may be equally true.

Seth Marko over at The Book Catapult is one of my trusted culture scouts, especially when it comes to books, and he's really angry that short stories don't get the respect they deserve.   He sent me the following defense, bolstering his argument by reviewing a new addition to the genre, Nam Le's The Boat.

A Defense of the Short Story, by Seth Marko

As a bookseller, I often hear the following refrain: “I don’t want that. I hate short stories.” To me, this is pure crazy talk. David Sedaris, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chuck Klosterman, and Nora Ephron are all fabulously successful based on their short writing pieces. So what gives? While I can understand not wanting to “get involved” with a story that isn’t novel-length – your emotional investment may be disproportionate to the number of pages available –  but to just dismiss what could be a potentially life-changing experience seems, well, too dismissive. Wouldn’t reading an eloquent, beautifully written short story that hits you like an emotional freight train be more worth your time than some forgettable, throw away, pulpy thriller you picked up in the airport?  I don’t mean to sound so righteous, it’s just that I feel passionately about this overlooked, kicked-around, stepchild of a genre and I feel it could use some love. Thankfully, a gentleman named Nam Le has written a brilliant collection of shorts called The Boat that just may change the way we all read (or don’t read) the short story.

The Boat is composed of seven stories, each set in vastly differing locales – Colombia, Iowa, the South China Sea - that are thematically tied together in such a way that you almost miss it at first glance. Each appears unrelated to the others, yet the emotional toll of living life manages to breathe on every page, creating a thematic bridge. I know, “emotional toll” doesn’t sound like much fun, but in the hands of Le, the raw emotional power shines through in a way I have seldom encountered.

Last week a book arrived on my desk called Not Quite What I Was Planning:  Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure.  It's a collection of six-word memoirs submitted to an online project launched by SMITH magazine.  They made a book out of it and I'll tip my hat and make a blog post out of it.   

Of course, the original hat tip goes to Ernest Hemingway.  Legend has it Hemingway was challenged to write a novel in six words. Lord knows how many bottles of booze it took for Papa to brilliantly write, "For sale:  baby shoes, never worn."  Inspired by the legend and aware of a national memoir craze, the editors over at SMITH launched sixwordmemoir. com and received thousands of entries.  It didn't take long for the likes of Stephen Colbert, Dave Eggers, and Joyce Carol Oates to submt their versions. 

I decided to write my own.  Unfortunately, nothing came right away.

These Days host Tom Fudge is a Cormac McCarthy fan and here he tells Culture Lust readers why.....

A Cognac for Cormac 
By Tom Fudge

I didn’t spend much time watching the Academy Awards on Sunday, but I watched enough to hear the news that No Country for Old Men won the award for best picture. I enjoyed the movie, and I’m sure the Coen brothers deserve a lot of credit for making it. But the person most responsible for that movie was the man who wrote the novel, Cormac McCarthy.

Cormac McCarthy has become my favorite writer. It’s rare to pick up a novel and be immediately blown away by the quality of the prose. But that’s what happens when you read McCarthy. And if you’ve seen the movie, No Country for Old Men, get a copy of the novel. You’ll be struck by how much the scenes in the movie owe to the book. I don’t think this happened because Joel and Ethan Coen revere McCarthy. They simply realized there was no way to improve on McCarthy’s dialogue and descriptions.

One of the first things you notice, when reading McCarthy, is that he doesn’t use quotation marks when he’s writing dialogue. Here’s one example, from No Country, in which the killer, Chigurh, interrogates the owner of a gas station. If you saw the movie, you’ll remember this scene. Chigurh hears the owner say he goes to bed at about 9:30, then he says:

I could come back then.
We’ll be closed then.
That’s all right.
Well why would you be comin back? We’ll be closed.
You said that.
Well we will.
You live in that house behind the store?
Yes I do.
You’ve lived here all your life?
The proprietor took a while to answer. This was my wife’s father’s place, he said. Originally.
You married into it.
If that’s the way you want to put it.
I don’t have some way to put it. That’s the way it is.
Well I need to close now.

I’ve often thought writing is a visual medium because you see the written words. When your eyes pass over dialogue like McCarthy’s, you’re struck by how perfectly it captures the essence of the words and the drama of the situation. His method of leaving out punctuation is one way he does that.

Seth Marko, avid and discerning reader of books (so few of these left!) and author of The Book Catapult, was kind enough to give Culture Lust some love and wrote for us the following review of Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End.  Make sure to check out Seth's website and other book recommendations.  

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris. 

“Genevieve had blond hair, cobalt eyes, and a tall, gelid grace. Even the women admitted her superior beauty. On Christmas one year, she was given as a gag gift a set of twisted redneck teeth, which she was instructed to wear year round in an effort to even us all out. But when she put them on, we discovered – the men among us, that is – a desire for rotted teeth we never knew we had.”

About a year ago – several months before the March 2007 release date – I got my hands on an advance copy of Joshua Ferris’s debut novel, “Then We Came to the End”.  The book’s jacket described it as “wickedly funny” yet “bighearted.”   But I thought its workplace, cubicle setting seemed like a setup for a playful novelization of “The Office.”  Would this be something I could read 375 pages of and enjoy? The publisher then sent me one of those notepaper cubes for my desk, coated in post-it note yellow and festooned with the author’s name & book title. I realized then the book would stay in my field of view for a long time. (The pad of paper has like 10,000 sheets, those crafty marketing departments)  Nevertheless, I read only 50 pages, got distracted by something darker & grimmer, and sent Ferris back into my endless, Jenga pile of books. 

Then, in December 2007, the New York Times released their annual ten Best Books of the Year list – 5 fiction, 5 non-fiction. I met several people who purchased all ten books as gifts for friends – regardless of their friends’ taste or reading habits, but simply because the Times suggested them. That’s power you can’t mess with. Of course, Mr. Ferris’s book was on this year’s list – now I couldn’t possibly resist!

I'm so excited - it will be one of those restless nights for me.  It happens when I get really excited about a guest.  I've been reading more of his writing and about his life for the last 24 hours.  You don't want to miss this interview.  We'll talk about the state of journalism, past and present.  We'll talk about Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, Talese's famous 1966 Esquire article, heralded as the beginning of New Journalism.  We'll also talk about sports writing, and his profiles of Joe DiMaggio and Floyd Patterson.  His book The Kingdom and the Power, about The New York Times, will likely come up often.  All in all, it should be a conversation full of colorful stories and sage reflection.

Tune in tomorrow at 10am to These Days.

Basically, I work myself into a dust storm of anxiety and when the dust settles, I print out the NY Times list and post it in my cubicle. I assure myself that bearing witness to the list will prod me into literary rigor. At some level, I also look forward to the day in February when the long arm of The Times loses power over me and I tear down the list, relinquish my guilt, and happily return to reading about books and watching YouTube. But right now, dear readers, I'm in the middle of the dust storm and looking for absolution. I decide to consult more trusted sources on what to read. I email Seth.

Seth Marko is a bookseller and jack-of-all trades at Warwick's bookstore in La Jolla. Seth also writes an insightful blog about books called The Book Catapult. Check out his list of top 10 books for 2007 and his highly entertaining posts on My Life With George. Seth upset some readers by voicing his frustration with the publishing industry's obsession over neurotic dogs, a la Marley and Me. It's good stuff.

Anyway, I asked Seth what five books he would suggest as gifts for book lovers. He emailed me the following choices with his thoughts on each...

Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson (fiction)

Fresh from winning the National Book Award, Johnson's magnificent saga of the Vietnam War is one of those books I think will stand up as an important, politically poignant piece of fiction - most likely remembered as the quintessential novel of Vietnam. The story of humble, everyman soldier, Skip Sands, is funny, sad, serious, critical, cynical, all the time, on every page. I was pleasantly surprised at my level of emotional and intellectual commitment by the end, as one can't help drawing parallels to our current foreign predicaments.

Gentlemen of the Road by Michael Chabon (fiction)

Chabon is one of those writers for whom I feverishly drop whatever I am reading whenever his latest crosses my path. This I wouldn't really call "serious" fiction - although Chabon's work rarely is - for it's clearly a playful piece for the author. (His working title for this was "Jews With Swords"....) Set in the neighborhood of 950AD, the "gentlemen" of the title are two compatriots & part-time swindlers/swordsmen, cut from very different cultural cloths, who spend their lives adventuring around the cities on the western Caspian Sea. Written with typical brilliant Chabon wordplay & filled with bizarre, beautiful characters (elephant lovers, harems of beautiful women, murderous Russian warriors, cruel emperors), this is escapist fiction at its finest.

Five Skies by Ron Carlson (fiction)

A heartbreaking, beautifully wrought masterpiece of devastating loss & questioned faith, of earned trust & unbreakable friendship. Ron Carlson's unerring command of language sweeps over you with its beauty and subtlety - there's something about his voice that utterly compels you to listen, to heed every word he has to say. Three men fleeing hardship and pain in their lives meet on a summer-long worksite, high on a barren plateau in southern Idaho. You can feel the mass of the sky above you, see the chasm of red rock canyon, and hear the sounds of the river below. As the men slowly begin to trust each other in work, they each begin to toil inward on their own wounds. Watching the transformation of these characters, these men, in the hands of Mr. Carlson is unlike anything I can recall reading. Easily the best book I read in 2007.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman (non-fiction)

Weisman presents a readable, cohesive series of hypothetical situations in order to explore humanity's impact on our planet. What would the world be like if humans disappeared overnight? How soon would the earth reclaim? Would the damage we have already done be irreversible in global terms or would the planet rebound quicker than we would imagine? Really a fascinating book that subtly scares you with science, forces you to reflect on your own footprint, and tries to get all of humanity to view the world through greener eyes.

Clapton by Eric Clapton (non-fiction)

This is a very candid, (seemingly, hopefully) honest memoir of EC's life as a rock god, his struggles with fame, addiction, & healthy relationships, and the crafting of some of the greatest rock albums of all time. I think he realizes how lucky he is to have survived his own life - and his natural humbleness regarding his own work, as well as his awe for the artists he's worked with, feels genuine. I also heartily recommend dusting off any of your old Clapton LP's to accompany your reading - I spent a week with only 461 Ocean Boulevard and Derek & the Dominoes in my rotation. What can I say - "Clapton is God".

In the coming months, you'll find more book recommendations from Seth Marko on Culture Lust, but until then and in between, visit The Book Catapult.