Joshua Wolf Shenk, Black Mountain Institute

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Sent Oct. 7, 2015

To Joshua Wolf Shenk,

As a new board member of PEN, might you actually be open to criticism against PEN?  Probably not.  If so, please do read my two essays on PEN:  

http://globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3415-pen-an-ethical-consideration

http://globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3825-pen-an-ethical-consideration-part-ii

Also, check out the front cover of The American Dissident which featured PEN associates as wielders, not of pens or swords, but of cocktails:  

http://theamericandissident.org/orgs/pen_new_england.html

Yes, I know, I’m a nobody and you’re an everybody.  I’m a go-against-the-grain, you’re a ladder climber.  Any possibility of “getting together”?  Likely not!  

In any event, your P&W interview will probably inspire me to satirize you in a new P. Maudit cartoon, which will then be published in a forthcoming issue of The American Dissident.  After all, what other literary journal would publish such satire?  The answer to that question sums up the sad state of American literature today.

That said, why not get your University of Nevada, Las Vegas library to subscribe and be the only institution in Nevada to do so?  After all, where else might we’re-doing-such-a-great-job writers, poets, and professors find satire with their regard??? 

PS:  SILENCE is always the best response of those in power--political, literary, cultural, academic et al --when criticized with the sledgehammer of truth.