More books

I tend to read multiple books at a time. I don't know why - perhaps my attention span just makes it so I need to switch it up a bit. Anyway, besides The Private Lives of Puppets, I'm also reading Vincent Bugliosi's Four Days in November, an account of the Kennedy assassination.

I don't know why the Kennedy assassination is such a big fascination for people like me. Conspiracy theorists, apopheniacs, they tend to latch onto the Kennedy assassination. Studying it like an insect pinned down under a glass.

It sort of reminds me of Alan Moore's From Hell. In the epilogue of the comic, "Dance of the gull catchers," he talks about Ripperologists, people who study Jack the Ripper's murders. Each one looks for new and different theories, but each one still studies the same spaces, the same timeline. Moore compares it to Koch's snowflake: you start with a normal triangle, then add smaller triangles onto that. You add smaller and smaller triangles onto each side, making a more and more intricate snowflake, until eventually there's no more room for you to draw. "Likewise," Moore writes, "each new book provides fresh details, finer crennelations of the subject's edge. Its area, however, can't extend past the initial circle: Autumn, 1888. Whitechapel."

But sometimes we can't help it. Sometimes we become so fascinated by a subject, we immerse ourselves in it. We become so wrapped up in conspiracy and murder, we become mummies buried in tombs of thought.