I've also been diving into JFK assassination conspiracy theory vortices, along with reading articles about how the mind is pretty easily capable of creating false memories, so sometimes I start to feel like the little kid they call "Postal Weight" in Infinite Jest who's just wailing in the locker room, "NOTHING'S TRUE" and has to get comforted by Pemulis.
The novel I'm working on has a lot to do with memory, nostalgia, sentimentality...all that good stuff. I think I'm attacking it pretty well, but really who knows. Then I found another author I love who had a character say some really lovely stuff that hit home, and thought I'd share:
"Perhaps history this century...is rippled with gathers in its fabric such that if we are situated...at the bottom of a fold, it's impossible to determine warp, woof or pattern anywhere else. By virtue, however, of existing in one gather it is assumed there are others, compartmented off into sinuous cycles each of which comes to assume greater importance than the weave itself and destroys any continuity. Thus it is that we are charmed by the funny-looking automobiles of the '30s, the curious fashions of the '20s, the peculiar moral habits of our grandparents. We produce and attend musical comedies about them and are conned into a false memory, a phony nostalgia about what they were. We are accordingly lost to any sense of a continuous tradition. Perhaps if we lived on a crest, things would be different. We could at least see."
