Books - What are you reading?

I just finished reading The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley. What a fucking ride. Ostensibly it's about a historic case of demonic possession of 17 nuns in an Ursuline convent in Loudun, France, circa 1630. NB: this really happened.

The priest of Loudun was a guy called Urbain Grandier, who was a serial shagger and all-round bastard who had managed to worm his way into the graces of the French nobility and figured he was untouchable. He ruined the reputations of all the pretty ladies around town and made himself lots of powerful enemies in the process, but they weren't able to get to him until one day the local Ursuline convent got a new Prioress. This new Prioress (also an all-round bastard, though less of a shagger) heard about Grandier's antics and developed this intense sexual obsession with him. She tried to get him to come to the convent so she could fap over him or whatever. But Grandier wasn't too interested in nuns (surprise!) and he refused to meet her. So she apparently decided to become possessed, and somehow the whole convent ended up possessed along with her by various demons, and they blamed Grandier for it, saying he was a sorcerer and in league with the devil. Holy shit, it's nuts. He got burned at the stake in the end.

The book itself describes everything that went on, but Huxley has surrounded it with this incredible rambling narrative that also takes in all his thoughts about politics, propaganda, drugs, spiritual enlightenment, buddhism etc etc etc. I've never read anything quite like it. Huxley lived through two world wars, and he's got a lot to say about how political narratives shape hysterical, violent, and barbarous behaviour.

Everyone now knows how to read and everyone consequently is at the mercy of the propagandists, governmental or commercial, who own the pulp factories, the linotype machines and the rotary presses. Assemble a mob of men and women previously conditioned by a daily reading of newspapers; treat them to amplified band music, bright lights, and the oratory of a demagogue who (as demagogues always are) is simultaneously the exploiter and the victim of herd-intoxication, and in next to no time you can reduce them to a state of almost mindless subhumanity. Never before have so few been in a position to make fools, maniacs or criminals of so many.

Oh, mate. Sort of wish you'd lived long enough to see Facetwit. Anyway, I give this book 10 writhing, shrieking nuns out of 10.