1. Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James.
This isn't a Jane Austen novel, or a Jane Austen-plus-zombies novel, but a murder-mystery sequel to a Jane Austen novel. In other words, it's fan fiction. When is "Stone Cold" Steve Austen gonna write a WWF-meets-Pride and Prejudice mash-up and get paid?

2. This is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl, by Paul Brannigan.
I saw Dave Grohl standing outside of the Black Cat once in the early aughts. I was driving past the Black Cat with my bandmate and was, like, "Hey, dude, that's Dave Grohl." And my bandmate was, like, "Stop the car!" I was, like, "I can't stop the car in the middle of the 1800 block of 14th Street NW." And my bandmate was, like, "Dude, don't you know that Dave Grohl was one-third of the band that changed the course of rock-and-roll forever?" And I was, like, "Yeah, I guess you're right." So I pulled the car over on the west side of the 1800 block of 14th Street NW, and my bandmate looked at Dave Grohl, who was still standing in front of the Black Cat on the east side of 14th St. NW, for a few minutes. Then, he said, "OK—we can go now." And we did.

3. That Is All, by John Hodgman.
I think this is some kind of metafictional, postmodern encyclopedia of made-up facts. I know it's not a memoir by Ann Jillian.

4. The Danger Artist, by Wyatt Mason.
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese dissident and artist who courageously stared down forces of repression in his homeland in the name of art; in other words, the perfect gentleman to be profiled by Gentleman's Quarterly in this unique GQ ebook.

5. The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1, curated by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
Just because Joseph Gordon-Levitt "curated" this melange of art and text doesn't mean it's bad. Then again, just because Joseph Gordon-Levitt curated this melange of art and text doesn't mean it's good. Joseph Gordon-Levitt isn't irrelevant to said melange; because Joseph Gordon-Levitt is attached to the melange, the melange will be paid more attention that it would if, say, the guy who played Vinnie on Doogie Howser, M.D. curated it. Nor is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's impact on said melange limited to publicity; he's the one who made the melange! If it's good, praise him! If it's bad, damn him! If it's mediocre, damn him with faint praise or praise him backhandedly! But don't for one minute think that Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Joseph Gordon-Levittness is the gasoline that makes this melange go. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is, after all, just a man, and it is a man—yes, a mere man!—who makes this melange go. However, in the case of this melange, the man that starred in Third Rock From the Sun and Inception is what would Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas would call the prime mover (please excuse the Wikipedia link). But that's not relevant to the melange! Or, at least, not all there is to it ("it" meaning "the melange").

That part is intentional: “My songwriting is like extending a hand to the listener,” Dave Grohl told The Washington Post recently. “One of the greatest feelings is standing onstage singing a song like ‘Best of You’ or ‘[My] Hero’ or ‘Everlong’ and hearing 80,000 people sing it with you, for 80,000 different reasons.”

The Foos have been an excellent arena show for over a decade, so this makes sense. The problem is the universal functionality of the new batch stands in stark contrast with its rising narrative: Wasting Light is the important 21st century Foo Fighters album. Butch "Nevermind" Vig is behind the boards producing. Pat Smear is back as a full-time member for the first time since 1997. Bob Mould guests on “Dear Rosemary.” Nirvana alum Krist Novoselic drops nonessential bass lines. A well-timed documentary reminds the audience that Sunny Day Real Estate drummer William Goldsmith enlisted in the war on Foo for a two-year stretch. The album was recorded on analog tape, in Grohl’s garage.

Yet for traveling rock royalty with firm roots in the late-'80s/early-'90s Seattle and D.C. scenes, Grohl remains aggressively complacent in his songwriting: Here’s a halting melody about a girl, or John Kerry, and it’ll idle on a riff while the words rhyme broken with stolen. All of this is a disappointment, except that it’s subtly fantastic that such a learned smartass hogs the arena spotlight—going blow for blow with Linkin Park and Kings of Leon.

Wasting Light—the seventh Foo LP—burns its memorable rockers early, carrying on a tradition of frontloading the gems that began with 1999’s excellent-for-the-first-four-songs There Is Nothing Left To Lose. If Wasting Light was a Verizon Center concert happening in real time, drunkard calls to play something good would start around track six.

The first song is great. “White Limo” recalls the mosh-pit energy of 1995’s “Watershed,” the hardest-hitting of the Foo's early cuts. “Arlandria” exists to live on the modern rock charts. But the back five is familiarly bland, weighed down by static ballads like “I Should Have Known” and sucky retreads like “Back and Forth.” “Walk” closes the 11-number album with a built-for-lights power ballad that combines dignity with (at last) a modicum of autobiography: “I think I lost my way/getting good at starting over.”

Due to warm adolescent memories, I often think about the band's legacy. It was always cool to see the skate kids drop in The Colour and the Shape alongside Pennywise, NOFX, and Busta Rhymes: a shared edge that stemmed from Grohl’s punk sensibilities and punishing drums. I’ve seen the Foo Fighters six times and on only one of those occasions was I there to see the Foo Fighters. The Foos lurk around festival campgrounds, heisting occasions to plant rock flags by way of dispensing visceral chords that implore one to respond in sustained “oh yeahs” when the brain recognizes specific licks.

There are certainly worse things than being the most air-drum-able rock band ever.

Radio Free Burma: Local indie rockers Deleted Scenes have a new album out this year, and they went on Radio CPR's Dissonance program to spin some tunes. The shout-outs to bands from D.C. and its environs are cool; the inclusion of some Burmese psych-pop is much, much cooler; the new Deleted Scenes tracks are by far the coolest.

A Final Shutdown Poem: Well, we tried to prepare you for the shutdown by highlighting its arts implications, but then there wasn't a shutdown. Here's a post-almost-shutdown Haiku:

Glad the Metsu show
opened. Phillips, I still want
my Arnold Palmer!

Today on Arts Desk: What Robert Redford taught me last night at Ford's Theatre.

I cheated on Washington City Paper this week. Last night Sir Paul McCartney performed in the East Room of the White House and collected the Library of Congress' Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, and I filed this report for Rolling Stone.

Based on the lineup—McCartney performed, as did Stevie Wonder, the Jonas Brothers, Emmylou Harris, Jack White, Corinne Bailey Rae, Herbie Hancock, Lang Lang, Elvis Costello, and Dave Grohl—I didn't walk in particularly excited. (I am cynical and like insular indie rock! I admit it!) And there was nothing thrilling, in theory, about watching 90 percent of the show from the White House's briefing room. (We got into the East Room for remarks by President Obama, and McCartney's performance of "Michelle.")

But despite a couple of missteps—someone misplaced Wonder's harmonica and he had to restart his "We Can Work It Out," other performers had some shaky vocals—the concert was a treat. If you'll indulge me, my favorite moments: Bailey Rae and Hancock's alternately breezy and impressionistic "Blackbird," Grohl's electrified "Band on the Run," White's aberrant, outsider-bluesy "Mother Nature's Son." Oh, and McCartney's final comment, in which he thanked the president and the Library of Congress, and then said: "After the last eight years, it's great to have a president who knows what a library is."

The day before, at that very library, McCartney answered journalists' questions: Some scribes asked great ones, others not so much. The first question—the first!—boiled down to "Will you sign my LP?" Later, a Fox News reporter declared that five days earlier he'd given his newborn son the middle name McCartney, and then asked two very specific, very boring questions: The first about a line in McCartney's John Lennon tribute "Here Today," the second about when McCartney began thinking up his verse in the Beatles' "A Day in the Life."  “I’m not sure. I’m not counting, you know," McCartney said. "Don’t ask me about Beatles history, I was too busy doing it.” There were a few policy questions (the BP oil spill, the Performance Rights Act), and few painfully rote ones (about McCartney's favorite song to play, and his advice for the other performers at the White House event).

He also answered my question, about whether there's anything to be taken from the fact that all three recipients of the Gershwin Prize (McCartney, Wonder in 2008, and Paul Simon in 2007) are performers as well as songwriters, and in what ways the role of popular songwriters has changed. "What used to happen before we came on the scene, people used to have writers, so someone like Elvis would have people writing his stuff for him, Leiber and Stoller, people like that," McCartney said. "We kind of upset the boat a bit. We came along and we were writing our own stuff, so we came along and put some of those people out of work, which you know was OK for us, not so good for them."

At the end of the press conference, journalists mobbed the dais like so many eager teenagers, pecking for autographs.

Good morning, kids. It’s Wednesday, and the day looks kind of gorgeous on the other side of my curtains.

What a wonderful day to skip work, run to the nearest pool with headphones, a book you actually want to read, and live away. You never know. You might run into Dave Grohl, Sir Paul McCartney or a Jonas Brother around town today. One second, poor journalist, another, someone bequeaths a million dollar inheritance on you. It could happen to you.

The District is officially where movies come to life. James Cameron, director of films such as Avatar and the Titanic, met with the Environmental Protection Agency, scientists, engineers and technical officials to discuss ways to plug the hole–yes, the hole that BP’s “top kill” wonder failed to plug. Cameron to the rescue! The Titanic sunk though.

So last week, I tried to Facebook friend my future husband–a random half-Vietnamese-half-Korean-German YouTube sensation. Tragically, he declined, albeit having almost 5,000 friends. Then I learned Facebook apparently caps friends off at 5,000! Makes me feel a tad better that it was a Facebook flaw that prevented this meeting. Anyway, according to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar our brains are only capable of handling 150 “stable interpersonal relationships” i.e. friends. I’m 500 over–it’d be an interesting purge. The last time I defriended people, I ended up receiving angry Facebook messages.

In other news, a Spice Girls reunion! But Posh may be too busy with her hot husband and maintaining her almost non-existent human form. The Queen wants a raise–7.9 million pounds is simply not enough, while the Duchess of York files for bankruptcy. She should borrow some dough from Kirsten Dunst, who’s packing serious cash. And of course, Jersey gets another reality TV show! I have nothing to say about that.

All right, this is where we part. Do something new today, anything away from the mundane.

By all rights, Dave Grohl should have faded from public view once Nirvana ended in a final, irreversible decision by Kurt Cobain 15 years ago.

At most, he should have either squeezed out a brief, increasingly irrelevant solo career or found another group where he could pound away in the background while someone else claimed the spotlight. He was a vital member of a seminal band but ultimately a secondary one who didn’t write songs in Nirvana until it was too late to matter and never got a single vocal as prominent as even Krist Novoselic’s mocking refrain of “Get Together” at the start of “Territorial Pissings.”

For crying out loud, Grohl was the drummer. There’s a whole field of jokes devoted to drummers. (For instance: What was the last thing the drummer said before getting kicked out of the band? “Hey, guys, I wrote these songs….”) There was no reason to expect him to do much more than coast on his past association.

Things didn’t work out that way. In the wake of the sudden end of his iconic band, he formed a merely very, very good one. Unlike, say, George Harrison, Grohl didn’t chafe under the yoke of being a sideman to Nirvana’s resident genius. He simply transformed himself into a frontman, something toward which he’d previously shown no aspirations, to such a successful and odds-defying degree that there might not be any precedent for it in the history of rock ’n’ roll. In terms of Foo Fighters’ longevity and consistent popularity (though not, of course, musical style), it’s as though Mitch Mitchell had followed the Jimi Hendrix Experience by forming Queen.

Both sides of Grohl’s career are captured by the simultaneous release of Nirvana’s Live At Reading CD/DVD (Geffen) and Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits (RCA) on Nov. 3. One offers a fleeting glimpse of a generation-defining band at its impossible peak, just before the experience began to sour; the other is a survey of a more or less uninterrupted run of solid work that shows no signs of flagging after 14 years. For those keeping track, that’s three times his tenure in Nirvana. More sobering, it’s also more than half as long as Cobain’s lifespan.

Unsurprisingly, the focus of Reading is more on Cobain than Grohl (or anything else, really). It’s a stark reminder of just how much Cobain was blessed with: surfer-boy good looks, a feral intelligence, unquantifiable charisma, immeasurable talent. All he truly lacked was a way to deal with the world. Music worked for a while, but only a while. He tried family, which came too late to fully take. And he tried drugs, which would eventually backfire in the worst possible way.

On Aug. 30, 1992, though, with steam rising up from a massive festival audience, Cobain gritted his teeth, smiled (so it would appear) exactly once, spattered blood on his pickups, and solidified his band’s stature so thoroughly that he would spend the rest of his life trying to bring it back down to earth (that his efforts had the opposite effect demonstrates how complete the apotheosis was).

The piecemeal From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, released in 1996, might be a more comprehensive live album, but Reading has the advantage of being all of one piece, each song building off the energy of the last. Cobain’s raging antipathy is so entrancing that neither the camera nor the lights can seem to be bothered with Grohl, but he’s crucial to the performance: Steady and firm, he held back the chaos that Novoselic gleefully pursued and that Cobain couldn’t fight by giving them something to which they could tether themselves.

On Foo Fighters’ Greatest Hits, the chaos is gone, replaced by a controlled intensity (control being necessary for a project that began as a one-man band). It confirms how sharp Grohl’s songwriting, singing, and guitar playing—all things he largely kept under wraps while in Nirvana—truly are. While none of it is quite as soul-shattering as what Cobain was capable of (the guitars, in particular, are harder and more hammer-like, as opposed to corrosively acidic), the upside is that Grohl, unlike Cobain, could walk away with his soul intact.

That doesn’t devalue a catalog that includes excellent songs like “This Is a Call,” “Monkey Wrench,” “Times Like These” and “The Pretender,” which span a decade and a half without any discernible drop in quality or ferocity. It just means that Grohl found a way to remain at the forefront of mainstream rock but at a less headlong, more manageable pace. It means that he figured out something Cobain could never handle: how to sustain a career at the top.