Culture: The Story of Us

Culture: The Story of Us, From Cave Art to K-Pop
Martin Puchner
W. W. Norton & Company (February 7, 2023), 371 pages
Kindle edition $16.90, Amazon hardcover $31.50

When I saw this book listed as an upcoming release in a New York Times rundown, I knew it was something I wanted to read. I originally thought about describing it as a Western Civilization course focused on specific individuals, but that would be unfair. The author has a global perspective, going well beyond the West.

He opens the book in his introduction describing ancient cave art from 35,000 BCE. The first chapter delves into the world of Egyptian queen Nefertiti and her husband Akhenaten who upended Egyptian polytheism with their focus on the worship of Aton, the disk of the sun. He discusses Plato and his view of the ideal society, certainly central to western civ. However, Puchner points out that Plato was a great admirer of Egyptian culture, something we often forget when making him central to western thought. Puchner then heads to India, where king Ashoka built an empire and a culture in the third century BCE.

The author discusses ancient Pompeii and its cultural diversity. He points out that Pompeii was a provincial town, and while we have so much preserved from the city that it “is simply too good a time capsule not to be used,” it is not necessarily typical of the Roman empire. Giving ample attention to the East, Puchner discusses Buddhist thought and diplomacy in ancient China. The author writes about an Ethiopian queen and the legends about her affair with King Solomon, Christian mysticism, and Aztec encounters with the Spanish.

Puchner devotes considerable space to literature and literacy. He discusses how Baghdad became a storehouse of knowledge shortly after the rise of Islam. He describes how Charlemagne, though illiterate himself, ordered the collection of manuscripts from throughout the empire. His scholars were faced with a variety of scripts from across Europe, so to simplify matters they developed a new script to improve legibility. That was Carolingian minuscule, the basis for our modern scripts.

In the modern era Puchner writes about George Eliot, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans and who wrote historical works under her own name. Puchner then discusses Japanese art, and in the last chapter describes Nigerian cultural conflicts with the west while the country sought its independence.

The subtitle of the book is a bit misleading, as we see nothing of K-Pop until the epilogue, but the author does a superb job of helping us to widen our definition of the word “culture.”

We Play Ourselves

We Play Ourselves: A Novel
Jen Silverman
Random House (February 9, 2021), 323 pages
Kindle edition $5.99, Amazon paperback $17.00

I first read about We Play Ourselves when it was published in 2021. The New York Times Book Review had good things to say about it. I downloaded the Kindle sample and pretty much forgot about it, as I read mostly nonfiction.

I was, however, recently nonfictioned out and a mention of the book in the Newest Literary Fiction group on Goodreads jogged my memory. Given that We Play Ourselves focuses in part on the theater, and given that I have long loved theater, I thought it would be a good choice for my next book. It was.

The first-person protagonist, Cass, has been laboring in the New York theater world for several years without a great deal of success. Finally a script she wrote won a (fictional) prestigious prize. This got her an agent and the agent facilitated the production of her play to be directed by a well-regarded director. The reviews of the play were highly unfavorable. Meanwhile, another winner named Tara-Jean Slater, a dozen years younger than Cass, is achieving success with what Cass sees as absurdist productions. Cass inadvertently causes a scandal at the younger woman’s opening night party and flees to the West Coast in humiliation.

In Los Angeles Cass secures a bedroom from an old high school friend, Dylan, who is gay. Living next door is a woman named Caroline who sees herself as a director and is producing a movie with a group of high school girls she has recruited. Caroline hears Cass’s name as Cath and asks her to assist with the film. Cass doesn’t mind the name change as she sees herself in the light of the old New York Cass and the new Los Angeles Cath. Cass’s life is complicated by the conflicts between Dylan and his lover, by her discovery that Caroline will cross ethical boundaries to get the film she wants, and by Tara-Jean Slater’s arrival in Los Angeles to complete a big Netflix deal. (Cass always refers to Tara by her full name.) Things spiral out of control to the point where Cass returns to her parents’ home in New Hampshire.

The final 15 percent of the book somewhat falls apart as Cass’s mother recruits Cass to produce a puppet play at her church for Easter. But that notwithstanding, the rest of the book is an engaging page-turner with plenty of twists and turns. What little I have said here is not enough to diminish your enjoyment of the novel with its character development and the angst that Cass experiences.

Author Jen Silverman writes briskly and with wit. She knows the residential areas of Los Angeles well. When parking near the home of one of the high school girls she has Cass notice:

a particularly complicated three-part sign that seems to be saying either that it’s okay to park on weekdays between certain hours or else that it’s okay to park at all times other than weekdays between those specific hours.

Silverman’s knowledge of the California coast is less solid. She has Cass saying that she can drive from Monterey to San Francisco in an hour. Don’t think so.

That’s just a quibble, however. If you like a good novel and if you appreciate the world of the theater We Play Ourselves is enjoyable reading.

The Hard Crowd

The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020
Rachel Kushner
Scribner (April 6, 2021), 246 pages
Kindle edition $13.99, Amazon paperback $12.99

I first became familiar with Rachel Kushner a while back when I began reading her novel The Flamethrowers. I only got halfway through with it when I got bogged down. It wasn’t too much of a loss, though, as I bought the Kindle edition in an Early Bird Books sale for something like $2.99. How I was not aware of The Hard Crowd, which was published in 2021, until recently I have no idea. I’m always happy to read a book of well-written essays, however, so I thought I’d give the present volume a go. I was, for the most part, not disappointed.

The opening essay suggests Kushner has a lot in common with her female protagonist in The Flamethrowers. In the novel, the character is involved with a team trying to set a land speed record in the salt flats of the American Southwest. In the opening essay of The Hard Crowd, a rather long piece, Kushner describes participating in the Baja 1000, an illegal motorcycle race that went from San Ysidro, on the California/Mexico border, to Cabo San Lucas, at the southern tip of Baja California. The author explains she had been a motorcycle enthusiast since childhood, her father having had a prize motorcycle on which he worked regularly. Since her love interest at the time was participating in the race she felt the need to do so as well. Kushner describes the ordeal in excruciating detail, recounting a crash caused by another racer, having her wrecked bike hauled away by pirates from whom she had to buy it back, and losing all of her money and identification because of the incompetence of the crew on the rescue truck.

Her taste for adventure shows up in other essays as well. In one piece she describes visiting a community organizer in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem. In another, she describes buying a 1963 Chevrolet Impala near Asheville, North Carolina and how it broke down in Iowa as she drove it back to California. (I am not a car and motorcycle buff like Kushner, but I have to like her. She says that she still owns a 1964 Ford Galaxie that she bought years ago. My first car was also a sixties Ford Galaxie.)

Kushner’s quirkiness comes to her naturally. Her parents once converted an old school bus into a sort of makeshift motor home and drove it to Oregon one summer where her father was going to start a college teaching job in the fall. She writes that her parents “looked like hippies, lived like hippies, and were very often mistaken for hippies” but, she says that “they didn’t really consider themselves hippies—which, to them, seemed a movement with its own conformities, and they were against conformities.”

In the final essay, Kushner describes her life as a young adult in San Francisco, where she waited tables and hung out with people who sold and consumed drugs.

At the end of that final essay she writes, “I’m talking about my own life. Which not only can’t matter to you, it might bore you.” I didn’t find Kushner’s stories the least bit boring. But I am slightly surprised, though happy, that she still lives to tell the tale.