Roundup: Weeds, Stephen King on Harry Potter, Philip K. Dick

Leah and I devoured Weeds Season 1 in two nights last week and are addicted.



And since Season 3 premiered Monday, Mary-Louise Parker - "the thinking man's sex symbol" - is receiving a lot of press. For example, Adam Sternbergh wrote a nice piece on Parker for New York Magazine.

Like many people who appear on TV, Mary-Louise Parker doesn’t watch a lot of TV. This makes sense, if you think about it; if you worked at a circus, you probably wouldn’t spend much of your downtime going to other circuses. But a few weeks ago, at the house in L.A. where she’d been staying while filming the third season of Weeds, she was feeling a little under the weather, and her 3-year-old son was safely in someone else’s care, so Parker decided to kick back in front of the tube. And then something embarrassing happened. She couldn’t figure out how to turn on the TV.

I read three Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows reviews this week, and all of them, despite their differing views, were convincing and well-written. And I think a mash-up of the three opinions conveys how I feel about the book - a fun novel overall... exciting at times... in need of 150 pages of editing... with a pretty good ending... and a cheesy, unnecessary epilogue.

Harry Potter and the Ignominious Cop-Out by Sam Anderson for New York Magazine.

I approached the book with some fear. For one thing, despite the charm and immersive power of Rowling’s magical world, despite her solid instinct for broad, mythic narrative strokes, she’s always had trouble with the basic mechanics of plot. Even by pulp standards, her storytelling is ridiculous. Exposition happens almost exclusively via overheard conversations. Narrative logic falls apart at crucial moments. Every book ends in an orgy of coincidence and revelations and arbitrary switcheroos.

J.K. Rowling's Ministry of Magic by Stephen King for Entertainment Weekly.

The clearest sign of how adult the books had become by the conclusion arrives — and splendidly — in Deathly Hallows, when Mrs. Weasley sees the odious Bellatrix Lestrange trying to finish off Ginny with a Killing Curse. ''NOT MY DAUGHTER, YOU BITCH!'' she cries. It's the most shocking bitch in recent fiction; since there's virtually no cursing (of the linguistic kind, anyway) in the Potter books, this one hits home with almost fatal force. It is totally correct in its context — perfect, really — but it is also a quintessentially adult response to a child's peril.

The Boy Who Lived by Christopher Hitchens for The New York Times.

Most interesting of all, perhaps, and as noted by Orwell, “religion is also taboo.” The schoolchildren appear to know nothing of Christianity; in this latest novel Harry and even Hermione are ignorant of two well-known biblical verses encountered in a churchyard. That the main characters nonetheless have a strong moral code and a solid ethical commitment will be a mystery to some — like his holiness the pope and other clerical authorities who have denounced the series — while seeming unexceptionable to many others. As Hermione phrases it, sounding convincingly Kantian or even Russellian about something called the Resurrection Stone:

“How can I possibly prove it doesn’t exist? Do you expect me to get hold of — of all the pebbles in the world and test them? I mean, you could claim that anything’s real if the only basis for believing in it is that nobody’s proved it doesn’t exist.”

Adam Gopnik wrote Blows Against the Empire regarding Philip K. Dick for The New Yorker.

Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fuelled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three. His reputation has risen through the two parallel operations that genre writers get when they get big. First, he has become a prime inspiration for the movies, becoming for contemporary science-fiction and fantasy movies what Raymond Chandler was for film noir: at least eight feature films, including “Total Recall,” “Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” and, most memorably, Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” have been adapted from Dick’s books, and even more—from Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil” to the “Matrix” series—owe a defining debt to his mixture of mordant comedy and wild metaphysics.

And that's the roundup.

Downloads:
Architecture in Helsinki | Heart it Races [MP3] | From Polyvinyl
Travis Morrison Hellfighters | As We Proceed [MP3] | From Barsuk
Largehearted Boy | Lollapalooza 2007