Yeah, I think Notes is pretty much essential, especially now that you don't have to pay $500 for it.

Disagree about the nature of the judge
I believe the judge's connection to the idiot is a little more straightforward. McCarthy's earlier book 'Child of God' is a wry play on words: it was once used as a term to describe someone who had been 'touched by God' or in other words was disabled or mentally deficient. I…

Good call on ID. I think he suffered from RZA being sick and tired of being in the studio. In RZA's AV Club interview around the time Kill Bill dropped, he talked about being in the studio for something like two years, coming out and realizing he had money. At that point, RZA probably wasn't ready to sit in the…

Saying that you assign letter grades based on whether or not the film set out to do what it was supposed to is one hell of a slippery slope. A slippery slope you folks navigate extraordinarily well, but there are some misses here and there. I stopped paying attention to the letter grades after A Scanner Darkly got…

Other PA books
I found a high-quality reprint of this a while back at the used bookstore and it is very impressive considering when it was written. Some other favorites of mine in the genre:
ALAS BABYLON, Pat Frank
ON THE BEACH, Nevil Schute
HIERO'S JOURNEY, Sterling Lanier (Really fucking weird)
SWAN SONG, Robert…

What's next?
Hopefully, God will show himself by having her appear in a new Red Shoe Diaries series. B-Porn will save your career, LiLo. I guarantee it.

Theories
First off, great work on this. I watch both shows religiously, but I don't have any friends that watch both. To see them compared and contrasted by folks with brains makes me extraordinarily happy.