From a free book that you can read online in .pdf, The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer.

But I also discovered that if you ask subjects to rank the importance of various values in life, authoritarian followers place “being normal” substantially higher than most people do.

It's quite interesting and I do think well worth the twenty or thirty bones that you might pay for it in paperback, but with this curious wrinkle: you can read it for free.

A bit more about Dr Altemeyer at Wikipedia.

Labels: Books

Everyone really hates allegories but they're afraid to say so. It always sounds like a big selling point for any of the books and movies that come out. “It's a clever allegory of blllllbb ...” I know what that means. It means it's going to be all dull and predictable like some old folk song that has a million verses to it. But I believe people are afraid to say they hate it because it's supposed to be good for you, like wheatgerm or flax oil. That's, of course, their own mistaken analogy, because there's no way that books or movies that you don't enjoy could be any good for you. It doesn't work that way.

If you don't like what you are reading, then stop reading it. It will turn you into a jumby.

Labels: Books

With a degree of relief everyone can go ahead and buy the new book about Sheila Watson, Always Someone to the the Something What Some the Kill the Doves. Okay, the correct title is, apparently: Always Someone to Kill the Doves. You have to wonder about people who have a knack for difficult wording like that. They usually teach English literature, I believe. Certainly it's one of those titles that sounds like the Eng. Lit. section of a book catalogue.

Watson is chiefly known for Double Hook, an interesting prose work about incest and murder. It is, of course, not a “novel”, in the conventional sense, but a large “turd”, very much in the conventional sense, floating in the English departments of Canadian universities.

This book has a lot of pictures in it. There are also forty pages of a diary Watson kept in the 1950's while living in Paris, practically a model of self-involved dullness. It must have been a huge challenge to live in Paris and yet maintain a perfect air of studied discontent and peevishness. There are a few passages where she runs the risk of almost talking about something interesting, but she usually redeems herself at the last moment with a good disappointment. Highly recommended.

Labels: Books

Lots of people know Maurice Pons as the author of the story on which Truffaut's Les Mistons is based. But of course he wrote some other things, among them Les Saisons (1965), which appears to have a sort of cult status.

It's a very odd book, and makes me think of the early Martin Amis's Dead Babies, but that's probably just because of its treatment of the lighter side of decay and corruption. In reality it cleaves more to the European tradition of legless peasants cackling raucously through rotten teeth as they drown in mud.

It opens with a man coming into a barren, rain-swept valley where nothing but lentils can grow. He finds lodging in a featureless room, reached only by ladder, above an inn that sells only lentil soup and some sort of alcoholic drink also made of lentils. Our hero, however, has apparently come from the desert where he was locked in a cage and made to witness executions, so this new-found abundance almost makes him weep with gratitude. He decides to write wondrous books to help the people, as he happens to have some lovely paper and pencils in his backpack, his only possession.

I think any reader can see where this is going. Suffice it to say it goes there. Nevertheless, it's compelling and simple. Readers of fantasy might be intrigued and then disappointed, as there seems to be no system at bottom, no allegory or general metaphor. Instead it resembles a visceral impression of something, almost the sensation of a dream reduced to a fairly reasonable sequence of events; motivation is always clear, and only the unimportant things fail to make sense. For example, it is said to be so cold in winter that birds fall from the sky frozen, yet hardly anyone in the village has a stove, or bundles up properly, relying instead on slumbering animals tied to their bodies for heat. But that's neither here nor there. The big question remains: what to do? This short novel offers a few disheartening answers.

Labels: Books, Mud, Rotten Teeth