HILGART RAISES HACKLES

Dear Mr. Codrescu,

Since I couldn't find the appropriate link on your site for responding to the article by Art Hilgart, I decided to bother you.
      What kind of nonsense is the sentence about Israelis treating the Palestinians as the Germans had treated the Jews. This is really a bit much and if it didn't have the potential to cause real harm in the world, I wouldn't bother to write about it.
      The fact is that although there are many honest criticisms to be made of Israeli policy, Mr. Hilgart's is not one of them. This ridiculous statement of his feeds into many a big lie.
      Since I believe in free speech, I can't get too mad about the article's publication, but since the topic was about shame, he should feel a bit of it about his own words.

Marilyn Kirsch

ED NOTE: I agree with you. I usually disagree with Hilgart on almost everything, but his remarks sound particularly hollow now. AC



AUTHOR'S PRICKED EGO CRIES OUT

When I submitted my story "A Feast For Vipers" to Exquisite Corpse in Sept., it was to have you review the story for possible publication in your magazine, not to have my name plastered up on the web in a feeble attempt to get laughs at the expense of others. You never E-mailed me to say you couldn't use the story and instead used my name as part of what appears to be a huge rejection list. I've been a professional writer since my first book was published in 1978 and have been working steadily as an author/freelancer/journalist since then. In all that time, I have never seen an editor behave in such a callous manner toward writers. This page is not clever, it is cruel. I've been writing for a long time and am used to rejections, but I feel sorry for the poor bastards who have only just gotten up the courage to send out their work, sent it to you, and now find themselves held up to ridicule.
      Instead of listing places where my books are being sold (Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Greene Bark Press, iUniverse, Bibliofind, etc.), my own web page, and/or the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, SFWA, or the Author's Guild (all places where I'm listed as a member with hyperlinks to my site) a search of my name on some search engines now shows the following in the #2 spot on the list that appears:

http://srd.yahoo.com/goo/Mary+Vigliante+Szydlowski/2/*http://www.corpse.org/issue_8/cyber_bag/Exquisite Corpse - A Journal of Letters and Life
... your bumper, so move it buddy), Carla Schwartz, Jennifer Macaire, Mary Vigliante Szydlowski, Sonya Reeves, Vishal Khanna, Stephanie Irvine, Charles Allen Wyman ...
http://www.corpse.org/issue_8/cyber_bag/

      You were not given permission to use my name or post it on the web without my permission. Perhaps there are other authors who submitted their work to you who don't mind having their name up on your site, but I do. Remove my name from your web site immediately.
      Does Web Del Sol know you are doing this to the writers who submit their work to you? How about Writer's Digest, The Writer, or Poets and Writers?
      I expect a timely response to this e-mail.

      Mary Vigliante Szydlowski.


Wary Mary,

Apparently you aren't too familiar with the history of the Corpse, which has been doing this for years. Also, apparently you didn't read the guidelines when you submitted, which warns readers about the Bag. Next time, better do some more research before indiscriminately submitting, if you can't handle the criticism.

Thanks much,

      Mark Spitzer
      Assistant Ed.

WOULD-BE PARIS CHEFS THREATEN CADAVRE

We are a secrete society at a catering school in Paris. One of us buy Thus Spoke the Corpse vol 2 when we were to london last week with school. We like it very much. It's better than the shit we do all the time. We like the fuck parts better. We show it to the english teacher and she said discusting! Booo! She's a fat ugly bitch. But we want to corrige something. Maybe your editeur and 'everybody else' he fuck the sheep but we fuck the chickens. Friday afetr we fuck them we cook them with cubed pork, onions, mushrooms and some cognac. After that the others served it and carve it for our teachers at the restaurant d'application. Poulet Cocotte Grand-Mere Ladies and Gentleman!
      The sheep is for the sheep! Also we want to say to Bob Black we look very handsome. Two ends! when we do 69 with the chickens. And we surprised he can count so far and we don't take the shit from noboby.

We have warned you,

      NPOTM.


WILLIE ENJOYS BLOWJOB; REVEALS SECRET GOVT. SECRETS

Thank you so much for the blowjob! It was everything a good blowjob should be. It was enthusiastic. It was sloppy. It went on for a long time. Occasionally, it actually hummed. And the best part was, when all was said and done, nobody had to swallow any of it.
      I have been working 40 hours a week in a Welfare office these past six months, so time is at a premium; so is brain amperage. OK, so you're here to apply for food stamps?
      Do you purchase and prepare separately? How many members in your household? How many vulvas? Waht is the blue book on your car? Do you agree to let investigators drop by your apartment to snoop around and see if you've been eating too much, dealing drugs or maybe lying to the Government? Where have you been shitting all this free lunch you been getting from the United States Department of Agriculture? Now, how you gonna verify all them dumps? You been shitting too much, you ain't eligible. Walk your ass back to California, boy -- this country wasn't built on no free lunch.
      That's basically my interviewing style. Gotta protect the taxpayer. Don't wanna bankrupt the USDA. If you ask me, there'd be hell to pay if we let every poor asshole and his toothless momma eat all the food they wanted. Kinda makes ya puke to think of all them Welfare bums eatin their fill, don't it? My God, if we let 'em eat for free they chew the topsoil right offa Kansas. Have that effect, I mean. Say... lemme have another look at that ID. You got a green card? Well, ya wanna eat today, you better hightail it back to the jungle under the bridge and fetch me a reasonable facsimile, or your sorry ass is like metaphor up the holy river of sacred Kafka bullshit.
      So, briefly, latex gloves are advised. Tongs optional.

      Deep in a crypt of Dr. Morgagni,

      Willie Smith.

SPIDERWOMAN SLAMS SMITH STORY

Willie Smith's story "Spider Fuck" was an atrocious chunk of disgusting prose, no wonder his audience walked out on him! I heard that he actually drove 30 to 40 people away when he read it at Naropa. I wasn't there, but I would've left too. I couldn't even finish reading it, it was in such bad taste. Please, Corpse, in the future, spare us the sordid, pornographic details. Spiders are beautiful creatures. They should be respected!

     Nancy Arachnidski.


ANOTHER CORPSE FICTION BOOED

Chum is the worst [thing] I've ever read. I [read] it hoping for some redeeming value. None! I related to my students that they should write to educate, influence or entertain. What was the purpose of this creation?

     Beverly Kinney.
 

BURK PROCLAIMS END OF OLD AIDS POLITIKS

SCOUNDREL TIME! That is the phrase that came to me as I looked out he window and watched the 2001 Candle Light Vigil go by. It was as if we were all frozen inside some block of ice called AIDS. All of us gripped by a catastrophe that happened twenty years ago what is no longer happening. Why should I be forced to mourn those gone fifteen years ago? Why must we re-enact this morbid minstrel show every year and be burdened by something that no longer weighs us down as it did then? Thanks to AIDS, San Francisco has been changed into an uptight, sex-repressed, crank-driven facsimile of what it once was, a haven for artists and poets, a place for gay men and women to come and find tolerance. Now gay men attack other gay men for not "believing in AIDS" i.e. not believing that HIV causes AIDS. Never in my life did I think when I moved here in 1990 that I would leave like I left Texas with a lynch mob at my door lighting fires, dragged through court and cross examined for wearing an anarchist logo on a t-shirt, questioned over my allegiance to Pancho Villa, my art deemed dangerous and threatening. There were moments during court when I blinked my eyes to make sure I was not having a bad dream. The way I blinked my eyes in the first ensuing years of AIDS as if I might be able to shake off the nightmare and return to what I remembered as a free loving world, but that is exactly what has happened. So when I saw those poor traumatized souls parade by for the umpteenth time, a new Republican administration in office with a Supreme Court ruling hostile to pot smoking sick people hanging over our heads, I realized it was what our friend Lillian Hellman spelled out in the decade of my birth, the fifties, come back to bite us in the neck like some sexless bloodless vampire. Yes! that's what it is, it's scoundrel time! And I took it as my cue to split and so I did.
     Here I am! Incredible as it seems, I left SF for NY to regain sanity and pursue a cheaper, more accepting existence and find a place less stressful than SF. Who would have believed NY would fit such a profile? No one in their right mind! All I want to do is write poems and make collages. And I'll be damned if I am going to let a cabal of "mofo's" dissuade me from anything other than the creative! Fuck em! Is what I say, may they rot in Hell! And may the love that will transform the world continue for ever and ever!
     So mote it be!

     Ronnie Burk.


CANADIAN HEAD: HOW GOOD IS IT?

Natalia Sliskovic and Sara Marie Jones both e-mailed submissions to your
prestigious journal less than two weeks ago, so it may seem overzealous,
even annoying, that these foul-mouthed young ladies would be submitting
more poems, but they find that they have no choice. Immediately after
sending off their previous submissions (yes, girls go to the bathroom
together and they also e-mail poetry together. It's all very erotic.),
they started berating themselves for not taking advantage of your
generous submission quota. In other words, these desperate girls want to
improve their odds of getting published in Exquisite Corpse. Surely if
we have a forum, this is it! If not, you can't blame a couple of
Canadian girls for trying.

     Natalia Sliskovic and Sara Marie Jones.

     P.S. We give great head!!

NO REVENUE BROTHER SPEAKS

I don't like the idea of advertising.
      It can only be about going broke. If you don't spend it on the Corpse the bastards will get it in the old-age home. Might as well let the government pay for it then, if they can. If they can't, Fuck You! Try saying that with pabulum dripping into your crotch.
      I also run a free site. No revenue. No hope for any. I support the whole mess by getting up at 4:45 and cutting code (not as elegantly as you I might add) until my day job. Then I spend the rest of the day being a husband and a father. Someone said, "If you want freedom, get up before everyone else." It's true.
      None the less, I like your site so much I'm going to make a small non-tax deductible donation. Wasn't it Holden Caufield who said, "Money, it always ends up making you blue as hell."? I think so.
      Here, there, everywhere...

      Rory Donaldson
      Chief Brain.


RADICAL OPTION

I would rather have advertising beamed directly into my brain twenty hours out of the twenty-four than read another poem by Robert fucking Bly. But that's just one man's opinion.

     Doug Gray.


YOO HOO:

The new issue looks great. I'm really enjoying it--even from the rotting fumes of "the bag." So glad "the corpse "is back!

      Best wishes,

      A-S. Kartsonis.


NOW SEE HERE:

it is fundamental to the political (and poetic) nature of your existence to not advertise.
      i say this knowing of the paradoxical position you find yourself embracing.
      i have no money yet i will send what i can (my own paradox) in order to continue feeding my selfish appetite from what abounds on your virtual pages. and, possibly, if i can render the courage, i will send some accounts of a rather mundane and completely fictional life from the water's edge.
      warmest regards and thanks -- for the fish and other delectable musings from the sea --

      paul robinson.


CORPSE USED LIKE A CIGARETTE

Keep up the good work guys, the Corpse is a great place to visit before lunch, during product review meetings, and after sex. And it's saved my life on many occasions (ask me about the dining-car incident someday).

      Darby McDevitt.


Ed's Note: We just have to know about the dining-car incident!