Literature = Business… Big Brother Yahoo, Concord Festival of Authors, and the Concord Bookstore

Dear Henry: Interestingly, Big Brother Yahoo recently deactivated my website because of a single complaint lodged by an ex-cultural council functionary Ival Stratford-Kovner.  How troubling that free speech and expression nowadays must be subjugated to the hurt feelings of esteem-deficient citizens!  You’ll be happy to know I’ve put up another site (www.theamericandissident.org) and include my letters to you on it—the Concord Journal still, of course, refuses to publish them. On another note, the National Endowment of the Arts, which awards $1000s to nonprofit literary journals, finally responded to my October query. I wonder if “Literature Specialist” Amy Stolls finally reacted because I’d mentioned having contacted the “Honorable” Martin T. Meehan, as well as senators Kerry and Kennedy, the latter of who has been hogging a senate seat for nearly 50 years—some democracy, eh, Henry? I’d asked Stolls what the chances were for The American Dissident to be granted funding. “I am not in a position to predict the ‘chances’ of success,” was her snappy response.  In reality, the NEA seems to accord grants, like the Concord Cultural Council, only to those who can afford them. Go figure! On a positive note, I discovered the American Library Association possesses a Library Bill of Rights and states that "Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas."  I’ve requested meetings with directors of both the Concord and Bedford public libraries to discuss their categorical refusal to permit posting of my letters to you and flyers on their happy-face bulletin boards.  In vain, I’ve referred them to the following pertinent articles of the Library Bill of Rights:

II.   Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.
III.  Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.

IV.  Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.

Hopefully, the directors might open their minds and install a free-speech bulletin board. Pipedream, Henry? No doubt!  Their insistence that postings stem from official nonprofit organizations has really been nothing more than a form of censorship.  One must persevere for they constitute an impervious obstacle to logical argumentation in the same manner as the female bureaucrats of the Concord Cultural Council, who refuse to debate their smiley-face entertainment definition of culture, which seems to be the same limited definition used by the Concord Festival of Authors. Director Robert Mitchell responded to my query: “We don't feature resident Concord authors because the local bookstores and libraries do that year round. We do try to involve local authors as hosts/MCs of some of the programs.” What a load of half-truths, if not outright crap! The Concord Bookstore refuses to carry my novel, as well as The American Dissident, and so does Mitchell’s two stores in Sudbury. So, should I hold my breath and wait for him to designate me an MC?  How right you were, Henry. “You cannot interest them except as

You are like them and sympathize with them.”  Fortunately, the cultural bureaucrats have not yet bureaucratized the beauty of your burial site, where I walk and contemplate once again.

Best to you, Henry.
Yours, G. Tod Slone, todslone@yahoo.com, editor of The American Dissident (www.theamericandissident.org) 2/14/05

Alone in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Losing myself sauntering alone

amidst the glassy scintillations,
sparkling overwhelming
the entire visual field and mind
Gazing into the myriad miniscule
mirrors of nothingness
of self and society

Mulling over my battles, trudging

in several feet of snow

from sunshine into the
gray-blue shadow darkness

of looming trees
laden with white clumps
In the eyes, snow-capped gravestones

and the giant Celtic cross of bourgeois wealth

boasting, you see, my imprint is still here,

            while yours has long ago dissipated