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"On entering the waiting area," writes Michelle Williams of her interview to become a mortuary technician, "I saw a woman dressed from head to toe in black gothic clothing with very long curly straw-like red hair, who was one of the other applicants. She greeted me cautiously; I smiled faintly at her and decided to sit on the other side of the room."

The plucky Williams, a former health-care assistant who worked with learning-disabled patients, impulsively decided to take up work in a hospital morgue in Gloucestershire. "Down Among the Dead Men: A Year in the Life of a Mortuary Technician" is a memoir of her first year on the job. Not surprisingly, the scenarios range from ghastly to extremely ghastly. During her first weeks of training, the 36-year-old Williams encounters maggot-eaten bodies, severed limbs and a 560-pound dead man whose cadaver, too large to fit inside a refrigerated compartment, slowly decomposes in the laboratory while technicians wait desperately for the sign-off authorising a postmortem. There's also the motorcycle rider, decapitated in an accident, who arrives on a gurney with his head riding shotgun. Her reaction to such sights is often to murmur a curse and fetch a cup of instant coffee. Williams is a cool customer, and her writing style is correspondingly concise and sportive. More Intelligent Life has extracted a few bits of underworld knowledge from this engaging memoir.

On avoiding mistakes:

Checking the identification on a body—via tags affixed to the big toe and wrist—is a technician's most important responsibility. "Every so often the wrong body gets eviscerated," Williams is told by her supervisors, "and what follows is a tidal wave of trouble."  read more »

Libyans sing along to Lionel Richie’s “Hello”, Iranians jam to Django Reinhardt, and Indonesian teenagers favour the post-punk stylings of British cult classic Wire. Who knew? Richard Poplak, for one. Poplak is the author of “The Sheikh’s Batmobile: In Pursuit of American Pop Culture in the Muslim World”, a tour through 17 Muslim countries in search of local interpretations of American culture, from cheesy reality television to Metallica. The chapters are organised by country—Libya, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, etc—with each section prefaced by religious statistics and venerated local pop-culture icons. The result is packed with surprises, five of which More Intelligent Life has chosen to highlight.

On heavy metal:

Egyptian heavy-metal fans call themselves Metaliens and, like America’s native metalheads, they prefer long hair and black T-shirts. On January 22nd 1997, Egyptian police conducted a series of raids on the homes of Metaliens, confiscating metal posters, CDs and instruments, interrogating about 100 suspects (“Do you participate in pagan rituals?” “Do you spit on graves?”) and jailing many of them for weeks. “Metal is far from an anomaly in the Muslim world,” Poplak points out, citing the massive Dubai Desert Rock Festival.

On video games as propaganda:  read more »

Given that Mary Roach has written about sex, cadavers, leeches and the human soul, it should come as no surprise that her forthcoming book, "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void", addresses such phenomena as “fecal popcorning”, weightless burping, and the exigencies of puking in your helmet during a spacewalk.  read more »

All novels should be preceded by trailers. This, at least, is the conviction that most viewers will adopt after a glance at the four-minute preview of Gary Shteyngart's forthcoming "Super Sad True Love Story" (out later this month):

Here are five things More Intelligent Life gleaned from repeated viewings:

On James Franco:

If the debate over James Franco—future Yale PhD candidate, hunky actor and writer manqué—centres on whether he's ridiculous or a sly parody of a ridiculous person, the Shteyngart trailer seals the deal in Franco's favour. "What he really wants to do," Franco explains earnestly of the author, "is, uh, you know, cash in on the whole Hollywood vampire thing."

On creative-writing programmes:  read more »

Calling all couch potatoes and media theorists: "The Cult TV Book", edited by Stacey Abbott, has arrived. The volume—half textbook, half reference manual—assembles more than three dozen academic essays that address the question of what constitutes cult television and how a small number of smart, genre-busting shows have influenced a vast amount of our viewing material.

What counts as cult TV? Well, like the definition of the term itself, that’s a topic for productive argument. A short list might include "Star Trek", "Battlestar Galactica", "Twin Peaks", "The X-Files", "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", "Alias", "Firefly", "The Avengers" and "Lost". Herewith we’ve culled five things from Abbott’s book to ponder over on the subject of television.

On where it all began:

The origin of cult-TV appreciation can be placed in the period following the debut of "Star Trek" in 1966, when the show teetered on the brink of cancellation and was rescued from a premature death by ardent letter-writing campaigns organised by fans.  read more »

Something sad has happened to "Sex and the City". As a television series, it offered a not unintelligent escapist fantasy of the urban single female condition. Wearing Manolos and drinking cosmos, Carrie and friends spent week after week giggling and kvetching about love and life in a way that felt both resonant and idealised. These bosom buddies inhabited a vision of modern womanhood that mixed empowerment with vulnerability, materialism with frustration. They adored what they could control (their wardrobe) and lamented what they couldn't (their suitors). The result was meringue-like entertainment with just enough insight to keep feelings of disgust (self and otherwise) at bay.

So what's the deal with these movies? Oy. Andrew O'Hehir at Salon has written a beautifully zealous take-down of the latest. These are five of his finest moments:

On sadism:

"It would have been more merciful for writer-director Michael Patrick King to have rented Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda out to the "Saw" franchise, or to Rob Zombie, so we could watch them get shot in the head or skinned alive by Arkansas rednecks."

On homosexuality:

"King seems to be posing the rhetorical question: Can a gay-wedding scene staged by a gay director still be homophobic and offensive? I think I'm voting for yes..."

On storytelling:

"King's storytelling operates on the premise that the viewer zones out every few minutes, and when she swims back up to the surface again, something new should be happening. Preferably involving camels."  read more »

Last week Michael Crichton's collection of contemporary art sold at Christie's for a whopping for $93.3m. Every work sold, including a record-breaking Jasper Johns flag for $28.6m. Though partly the product of trigger-happy Hollywood types and the return of consumer confidence, the success of this sale lies in Michael Crichton himself, who collected not what was trendy but what he loved. For Crichton, a popular novelist and screenwriter who died from cancer in 2008, writing was his day job; he would lock himself away with a typewriter and take records of how many pages he wrote, how many days it took. But art was his passion. He treasured his paintings, placing them around the house to fit his mood and projects so often that he had to change the walls to cover the pockmarks.

The late writer of "Jurassic Park", Crichton also often wrote and spoke about art, offering an insightful outsider's take on the Los Angeles art scene and his experiences as a collector. He even wrote the exhibition catalogue for his good friend Jasper Johns's 1977 retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Courtesy of the Christie's catalogue of his collection, we've culled five ways Crichton found meaning in art:

On pop art:
"I was beginning to work in the visual medium of film, and I was struck by the fact that American painters employed much more modern, if mundane imagery than American filmmakers in the 1960s. I wanted this print imagery around me, and I was interested to see what, if anything would change in my work as a result."  read more »

John Waters's new book "Role Models" is a collection of conversational essays about the people who have inspired his cult filmmaking. The book includes a hellish Little Richard interview, a tribute to Johnny Mathis, his  life-long idol, a section on a fabled mistress of Baltimore bars, and a boatload of perverts.

"Role Models" ia a roundabout autobiography in the best sense: a portrait of Waters through the lens of the people he loves best and the ways in which he thinks about them. It's a gleeful, wisecracking read with a heart of gold (or pyrite, perhaps), much like Waters's films and presumably the man himself. Here we've culled five nuggets of wisdom from within the pages of "Role Models", each addressing a crucial topic.  read more »

Daisy Hay's new book "Young Romantics" explores the intertwining lives of Shelley, Byron, Keats and their cohort, detailing "a web of lives, within which friendships fade, allegiances shift, and nothing remains static for very long." In honour of this tremendous work of scholarship, we've plucked five tidbits from the pages of Hay's tome—a few things you might not have known about your favourite poets and thinkers of the 19th century.

1. At age 22 Shelley insisted on a diet of bread, butter and "a sort of spurious lemonade" until a friend, Thomas Love Peacock, convinced him to start eating meat again. Shelley's complexion improved.

2. The writer John William Polidori developed a serious crush on 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft and "jumped from a wall in an effort to impress her, spraining his ankle badly in the process." A few days later she told him that she thought of him mostly as a little brother.

3. Lord Byron enjoyed singing Albanian songs consisting of "strange, wild howls" while boating with Shelley in order to exacerbate their "contest with the elements."

4. Upon his release from Surrey Gaol for libel charges, Leigh Hunt, a critic and writer, created for himself a new study "which bore a startling resemblance to his prison bower." His books, busts, flowers and piano were all carefully transported from his prison cell. "His new room was lily- rather than rose-themed, but in all other respects it was similar to his prison accommodation."  read more »