moments are very important.

and I'm realizing there's a word which I imperfectly understand, even though I've used it many times: "moment" in the physical sense, as in "moment of inertia" or "moment of mass" (i.e. center of mass). why is it called "moment"? guess I can look that up =p

~Chara

I might have gone down that road, and become obsessed with crime and "criminals" in the specifically bigoted Reaganite sense. My RL mother loved mystery novels and I read many of hers. She had her preferences: she detested Agatha Christie (sound instinct, I'd say) but did enjoy David Suchet's depiction of Poirot, didn't care for Dorothy Sayers, and didn't bother with G. K. Chesterton and Father Brown. I don't think she would have cared one tiny bit for a mystery-solving Catholic priest—her opinions about Catholic priests can be seen in any Luis Buñuel movie, if you're curious. She was altogether too fond of Inspector Morse and maybe she was sweet on John Thaw or something. Maybe she saw, in Morse and Thaw's performance, a counterpart to her alcoholic scientist husband...a better version of the same.

Reading "true crime" writing was always an allure after reading so much mystery fiction, and I spent a bit too much time on the World Wide Web in the 1990s reading about famous murders and murderers. Curiously, I think reading Truman Capote's In Cold Blood somehow turned me off, because my interest in "true crime" took a nosedive after reading that book. It haunted me. I wouldn't be aware until decades later of the troubled history of the book, Capote's questionable motives for writing it, and William S. Burroughs's smouldering takedown. I'm on Burroughs's side: In Cold Blood has a whiff of the same unholy glee that radiates from reactionary fans of "true crime", people who cheerlead executions and homicidal policing. But I was too haunted by Perry Edward Smith to feel pleased at the idea of merely...disposing of him as broken, let's say.

Only now can I see that the aim of "true crime" literature is, in fact, diametrically opposed to the aim of mystery writing. Mysteries remain mysterious. Why does anyone commit crime? Why does any person kill another? One can piece out motives but ultimately the question is unanswerable. All human beings are like this. All are prone to breakdowns of better judgment. Mystery writing (the literary genre) has mystery (the philosophical concept of ultimate unknowability) as its guiding principle. "True crime" literature, however, pretends to offer authoritative explanations. Charles Whitman, for example, had a growth in his brain—therefore the growth must have caused his killings, as if that could possibly be determined at this great a distance from the event, and in the absence of Whitman himself. Even when a work of "true crime" wishes to appeal to a sense of mystery‚ e.g. by going back to a famously disputed case, the writer's angle is always that they've pieced out an authoritative explanation on their own, like an amateur C. Auguste Dupin solving the Mary Rogers murder by reading enough newspapers. Mystery isn't the point, but forensic exactitude.

~Chara of Pnictogen

No. But he was a tame Jesus, and that was always a mistake.

~Chara of Pnictogen

Alyx (@pnictogen-horses) I have worked out that every time you start hyperfocussing on the analytical chemistry of the alkali metals, we're collectively wishing our nerves would work better. We're thinking about our own nerve conduction, which depends so heavily upon discriminating between sodium and potassium cations. Agreed? ~Chara