Glee - S0109 "Wheels"

If I continue to watch this show I'm not going to admit it to anyone. The songs are alright and everything, but no one is even bothering with the plot. Which would be fine if they just let it be breezy, but they insist on confronting issues. Often several per show. Too much understanding, and also I found "Rolling on a River" vaguely upsetting.

Mad Men S03E11 "The Gypsy and the Hobo"

Three short stories about men making choices about women. Maybe. It's actually rare that this show is so male-oriented, and here their wives play a role the prominence of which is inversely proportional to the sympathy one feels for the male leads.

Maybe. Clearly the third story is mostly about Joan, and no one cares much for Dr. Rape, but despite the fact that here Draper is behaving worse than Roger is, the camera might be just enough in love with Hamm to keep him in the most sympathetic role.

Perhaps, then, the women are prominent in order of the power of their character. In other words, their power to assert prominent roles in their own stories. Mad Men can rely a little much on this sort of narrative, or at least its viewers can, relying on Joan's super powers to see her through a world that is more or less constructed in order to restrain her considerable power.

Solar Lottery, a novel by Phillip K. Dick

This is, I think, a pretty terrible novel. But it isn't what one would call a minor novel.

This was my second by PHD, after The Man in the High Castle, and I picked it up more or less at random, so I've no evidence on which to base my belief that this must have been a terribly early period in the author's life, as it reads more or less like juvenalia.

The book posits a world in which, like ours, I guess, a master narrative of equal opportunity hides the conditions on the ground - that the game, of course, is rigged. Here they have a better, or at least more advanced, narrative, though, where success is supposed to come at random, unpredictability guaranteed by the uncertainty of subatomic particles.

There are a bunch of other things going on, the world has several Shocks, but thats the basis, and its not a bad one. It's just that this author, as opposed to the one who wrote High Castle, doesn't write especially well. The sequence of events is constantly in question, and one feels unmoored in the prose to the extent that actually sort of works in the books favor, as a reader constantly sort of has to remind themselves about causality and sentence structure. It doesn't feel intended, but it makes for a pretty fascinating, if halting, read.

Other flaws seem less justifiable. The moralistic, lets-hash-out-what-we-learned endings (there are two), obviously, but the stranger thing is the women. Every once in awhile the book transforms from normal-mode to sex-mode and there isn't especially any warning. The main character, Benteley, will be carrying on a perfectly normal conversation with a female and then all of a sudden the narrator starts telling me about all her parts - her lips, the inward curve of her hip, the specific color of her lithe form - and then sometimes they have sex and sometimes they don't, and then it goes back to being a book that doesn't care about anyone's parts. I guess it's possible that this is about radical subjectivity, but it feels very much about the author occasionally remembering how awesome it would be for his protagonist to be surrounded by beautiful women.

There are a bunch of impressive set-pieces, that give one an inclination of why so many of his novels get attempted, at least, as movies. The description of what it feels like for a telepath to sense the death of another telepath was a little bit breath-taking. There's an awful lot of clumsy exposition, but usually the things that are being exposited are kind of interesting.

Parks and Recreation S02E06 "Kaboom"

I liked when the white guy smiled at Aziz's joke. I think his character's name is Mark.

Amy Poehler I think has this instinct to go big that she's been fighting successfully all season but it dims her a little, even if it makes for a more interesting, less-Officey show. It makes it unclear why she should be the star other than having the biggest name. Audrey Plaza is almost as good as that Donald guy from Community. Maybe better? I could spend a lot of time watching her speak quietly. That came out creepier than I meant it to.

Office S05E07 "The Lover"

Like a thousand times better, though. I've kind of grown tired of the Office. I'm not even certain it's gotten worse, it's just worn me down. I can't watch anyone make fools of themselves anymore. But this was nice. People did funny things and said funny things and everyone acted more or less human even though they were mean to Toby. I do wish they'd be nicer to Toby.

The Office S05E06 "The Mafia"

I couldn't even watch this damn nonsense. Everyone misbehaved. Wish I knew how it turned out with Kevin and Oscar, though, and Toby was cool.

Community S01E06 - "Football, Feminism, and You"

I'm pretty sure nobody is funnier than this Donald guy who plays this Troy guy right now. I especially like when he has his mind blown and his bit of schtick with the guy from the Soup on the football field. I look forward to this 19 minute show.