12/17/25
I'm going to blow off some steam, very carefully and making sure not to identify the person in question.

I think it was about two years ago--definitely over one year--that I started communicating with the head of a poetry website. I had asked if he had a place for a paper about Edgar Allan Poe having falsely claimed authorship of "The Raven," along with my evidence that the real author had been Mathew Franklin Whittier. He equivocated, and there were months'-long gaps between his replies. When, after several months, he did reply, he would open by apologizing for the delay--as though it had been a matter of days or weeks, rather than months. I was beginning to feel like Rip Van Winkle. In fact, I would completely forget about him in-between e-mails.

Finally, like a bad penny he showed up again, and seemed amenable to a paper of a certain length. Well, I explained that I can't prove the case within that limit, but I could adopt a more modest goal--that of explaining how I became convinced. In other words, my personal discovery and research process.

That "hung in the air" for a very long time, and recently, he came back offering, instead of posting my paper as he had originally offered, to let me post in his forum. Well, I know how that goes. I've posted in a number of forums. What happens, is that a few people who think they're clever make snide remarks, the thread is "frozen" for further comment, and it sits there like a fossil on the internet. So, I said, "No, you had offered to post the paper."

I then suggested that if this shorter paper wasn't acceptable, because it doesn't prove the case, he could link to the full-length papers, where they've been posted online.

And I forgot about it. Back he comes again, either misunderstanding--or pretending to misunderstand--that I wanted him to post the papers that I had already posted to Academia.edu. And he said that somehow Google would be confused, or give dual results, if he did that. I had said he was welcome to post the longer papers if he wanted to. But that wasn't my primary suggestion. My primary suggestion was to post the paper I'd written specifically for him--and had never posted--and then link to the longer ones, if he wanted to.

He wrote back pretending to still misunderstand me, and saying that the discussion was closed because he could not post any paper which had already been posted. He then set down the utterly absurd policy that he could not publish any topic that had ever been posted anywhere, before.

I told him I know sophistry when I see it, that his isn't particularly clever, and not to ever write me, again.

I don't do that unless I'm absoutely certain that someone is deliberately jerking me around. I wait to give such people every possible opportunity to be on the level with me.

This is the "lizard brain." He's terrified. He got hold of something which would ruin him, if he dared post it, as he had naively agreed to do. I think my work looks harmless enough when I'm just a crazy conspiracy theorist. Fine, people can laugh at me, and the website owner can write a disclaimer and present it as sheer entertainment (which I actually suggested he do, i.e., write a disclaimer).

But the instant someone "gets" it that I have extremely strong evidence, it's another ballgame.

Oops.

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.