4/20/24
There are a few more readers for this blog--up to maybe 10 or a little more, from two. Most of those are still back in March--they haven't figured out that my blog is worth keeping up with on a daily basis. Sounds grandiose even to me, as I write it. But it's the truth. If the real value of this work is a 10, meaning, a world-class discovery, and "1" is ridicule, then these people--the cream of the crop--are at maybe a 3.

Utilizing Academia.edu and Google Scholar search functions, respectively--especially, "Advanced search" in Google Scholar (which my AI co-pilot told me how to access)--I've been very precisely targeting the people I write to. For example, if I want to find someone who has specifically called Edgar Allan Poe's essay, "The Philosophy of Composition" a "hoax," I can combine Poe's name--or the title of the essay--with the word "hoax." Or if I want to specifically target papers which quote Dickens' daughter, Kate Perugini, saying that Dickens was a "very wicked man," I can put the phrase, "very wicked man" into the "exact phrase" field, and then "Dickens" and "Perugini" into the "all of these words" field.

Actually, I haven't tried that one--something to do when I get finished with this.

I also specify a date range from 2012 to 2024, because these authors are most likely to still be alive. There is nothing more discouraging than finding an author who's a very likely candidate, only to learn that he or she has died two years ago.

Those people know I'm right--but they're out of the game.

Recently I got two "live ones," which is to say, one professor emeritus, and one lay scholar like myself. The professor pleaded "not my area of expertise" and passed me on to a publisher friend. I'll bet he regrets it, now! Because in my initial query letter, I summarized my outrageous results ("claims"), but I left the reincarnation part out of it. Not so with the letter I wrote his friend, which I copied back to the professor. I haven't heard from either of them, and I don't expect to.

The lay scholar had actually studied Mathew Franklin Whittier. This is only the third scholar in the world, other than myself and one doctoral candidate in 1941, who I'm aware of having done so. Same scenario. I was candid with him about what I had discovered--at least, as regards his particular focus on American humor--but then in my follow-up letter, I mentioned reincarnation, i.e., that my research began with an attempt to prove that I'm Mathew's reincarnation.

That was early this morning. We will see if I hear back. I don't expect to.

So it simply means that people's credulity--their "boggle threshold"--is like a rubber band. Stretch it too far, and it breaks. The important point is that logic and evidence have absolutely nothing to do with it. When that rubber band stretches too thin, the lizard brain takes over to prevent the person's world view from snapping. All the evidence, and all the logic in the world, won't stop the shut down at that point. It's an instinctive self-protection mechanism. Sort of like a gag reflex. It could possibly be that Mathew and Abby Whittier were literary dark horses of the Victorian era. It could possibly be that they were responsible for several famous works which have been misattributed to a series of plagiarists. The rubber band, however, is getting perilously thin at this point.

But if I claim to be Mathew's reincarnation, that's it. Shut down. Throw it out. "Did he say he had evidence? Did he say that reincarnation did not play a direct role in his literary evidence? I think I vaguely remember he might have said something like that. But I didn't stick around to find out."

Years ago, when I was a young man, I was running (for some reason) through the underbrush at Lighthouse Point State Park (as I recall the name) in Miami, Florida. Suddenly, ahead of me I heard a rattling sound. I didn't stop to see whether it was a rattlesnake, or what it was. I turned around on a dime and ran back the other way.

That's what these scholars are doing. Indeed, they are probably laughing--but given everything else I had shared with them before they cut me off, I'm guessing it was nervous laughter.

Best regards,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.

Audio opening this page from "A Charlie Brown Christmas"