obsessions

One of my two or three readers may remember--fondly, I'm sure--my obsession with Mormonism after having visited Orem, Utah, and feeling as though I'd been kidnapped and brainwashed overnight. I listened to Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven and ate up every single word. And I love dooce's commentaries on growing up Mormon. Well, don't you just love it when your research and your obsessions collide? This is not to say, of course, that I don't firmly believe that we research what we do because of obsessions in the first place. But now that I'm reading up a little bit on forgery, I'm realizing that I can nurture my Mormon obsession at the same time. Mark Hofmann, perhaps the most successful literary forger of all time, began his career forging Mormon documents because he understood what people wanted to believe. He understood the power of suggestion.

To think, all that time I spent in Syracuse, and I never made the pilgrimage to Palmyra, birthplace of Mormonism.