The Personal Equation

I wrote to this site’s official Art Director and Latinist (he wears both hats), commending his idea of having prepended a personal commentary to Detective Murphy’s vocal performance of a passage from  Murphy on the Mount.  in the following video

©2012, Lingua Sacra Publishing

He responded:

> Having my own face intro is part of my theory that people ultimately love...people. Any human contact these days should have a response.

What follows was to be a personal private letter in response to that hypothesis, to someone  who, for security reasons, I shall refer to only as “Dr. K”.   But as he is at present out of comms, deployed deep behind enemy lines and taking some pretty heavy incoming, the only way to get him this message is to post it up on the Internet for all to see -- everyone has connectivity these days, even people in caves and trenches.  (My mother, now in her 90s,  is the sole known exception to this rule.)

So, if you’re not Keith, don’t read this, as it reveals our Secret Plans.

~ ~ ~ ~

Yes.  Just as a corporation needs a logo or (better yet) a mascot, so as to fix itself simply and indelibly in the public mind (witness the brilliant Mr Peanut), so the public presentation of an (ultimately-unknowable) person  requires a Persona.

The Persona that is slowly developing at WDJ -- I mean, not as a writer, but as a character in my own occasional soties -- seems to be that of a donnish, bemused naif, given to self-ironic grandiosity (a delicate pose to maintain, since in real life I am more like Bernard Riemann and Jack Bauer rolled into one).   You too have been cultivating a Persona: professorial, patient -- again quite a feat to pull off, since in reality you are a compound of two warriors, John Henry Newman plus James Bond, with the cocktail replaced by the wineglass.

Murphy, meanwhile, with time on his hands since hardly anybody is buying his BOOKS (hinthinthint), is developing into a sort of Forest Gump of early-20^th-century American labor history -- hanging out with One-Tooth Scully, reliving the great strikes, and watching our nation evolve and devolve, more in sorrow than in anger (though with a healthy dollop of Wrath).  Coming up:  Murphy chilling with Bob La Follette, back in their hobo days, in preparation for your upcoming novel.

The ultimate result of all this, a child could predict:

(1)  People start to follow the adventures of such characters as Dr J,  Dr K, and MXM, for their own sakes, the way you’d follow TinTin.

(2) Their interest piqued, they buy tons & tons of our books, mugs, sweatshirts…

(3)  We become very, very rich.

(4)  World Domination.