My Weekly Book

Here’s an article written by Louis Theroux for the BBC News website talking about his series Weird Weekends and trying to define what makes a person odd.

I read the book in which he revisited some of the people he met in the series more or less in a sitting last year. It turned out to certainly be in my list of the top 15 books that I had read. So this was an interesting addition.

[Buy The Call of the Weird from Amazon] [Search on eBay]

Weird, or just wanting?

…The truth is, like beauty, weirdness is in the eye of the beholder. Often, something is weird not for any intrinsic reason but simply because not many people are doing it. A practice that is considered eccentric or taboo in one time and place is quite normal in another.

“Madness is a rare thing in individuals,” wrote the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, “but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule.”

And I think this is what he was referring to - we may find, say, ancestor worship quite odd and racism deeply repellent, but in days gone by, these were both part of “normal” belief. Read full article here…

• Weird Weekends (not very informative) website

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 3:32 pm and is filed under 2007 - Ephemera. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.