Maria Alexander News and Updates from TheHandlessPoet.com

Sorry, Jack, but you're not known "throughout both England and France," I'm afraid.

It's so strange to be somewhere that they don't celebrate Samhain at all. While commercialism is carrying Halloween to Europe from America, even with Disneyland Paris transformed to Halloween Land for the tourists, the French don't get it. Catholicism has strangled most attempts to spread the holiday, including a massive reaction to Orange's previous Halloween marketing campaign. (Because they're "orange," they felt it was a natural marketing fit and fun, too.) The Frenchman tells me that the Catholic Church played a key role in repressing the campaign through complaints and boycotts because they objected to the emphasis on the supernatural. Orange recinded. They have a very sedate campaign this year that nods to Halloween this season, but nothing like what they attempted before.

The Eve of the dark half of the New Year is here, like it or not. The Night of Nights.

Maybe here in France, where they have everything from the menhirs and tumulus of Carnac to Mont Saint-Michel, they don't need a night like this. In a place like this, where they have more spooks than cheese wheels, perhaps acknowledging the haints that quietly invade every niche of life is just too frightening. Hence, why they cling so to the Catholic Church.

Don't believe me? Here's little article in French about Halloween from our town Aix-en-Provence, reminding the French that the Celtic culture used to be a part of the Gallic culture. Note how the lady in the first post is complaining that "This is not our culture," that the culture of France is Catholic and that Halloween is a "degradation" of those values -- as if All Saints Day came before Samhain. It's like the Catholic Church is forcing open everyone's throats to pour in their special Jeebus Kool Aid, saying, "Forget...the...past..." Because, you know, Jeebus is the Reason for Every Season. Right? There were no other seasons before Jeebus. Not to single out Catholicism, though. The invaders always try to wipe out the culture and religious beliefs of the subjugated. It's worked well here, for sure.

Still, we have plans tonight -- special foods, like Halloween Riz and canard, followed by tarot. Today I'm finishing my revisions of "The Last Word." Soon, my agent and I will begin polishing Mr. Wicker. (Still waiting for G3 news, unfortunately, but we're hanging in there. One publisher was interested for a bit, but it turned out to not be a right fit. There are yet more to hear from.)

May you all enjoy this Night and the day after, however you spend it!

For those who care, Mercury officially went retrograde yesterday. As it's a great time to review and revise, I had The Frenchman read "Cold Hands, Cold Heart." He gave me some great feedback -- mostly confirming things I already suspected, which is always a plus. Last night and today, I reworked the story accordingly. I also went back to "In Her Mirrors, Dimly" and reworked that according to the other feedback I'd gotten. (I had shared it with The Frenchman, and he concurred. His Ph.D. is in literature, so I take his input seriously.) I have some firm ideas of where to send it next. Otherwise, communications have been painfully stalled already on some important matters. The next three weeks promise to be difficult ones.

That afternoon, we went on a staggeringly beautiful hike in Le Tholonet. The foliage was so breathtaking I had to create classifications of Green. For example, Vermont is Damned Green. Parts of California are, at best, Pretty Damned Green. Southern Ireland, that Emerald Isle, was Astonishly Green. But in Le Tholonet, the hillsides are awash with upswept brushstrokes of what can only be called Ridiculously Green, which is the highest grade of Green I could think of. Seriously. I nearly wept because I didn't have a camera to convey the Ridiculous Greenishness of the mountainsides. The trunks were steeped in somber olive shadows that surged upwards with strokes of sage for the bare under branches, then outward with vibrant bristles of pine and until the crowns glowed chartreuse.

No wonder so many celebrated painters are connected with this place. Today, after another hike, we drove past the castle where Picasso is buried, not too far from where we were yesterday.

Now I'm pooped. Time to drink wine and play games. (What kind of games, I won't say, but I'm sure it'll be fun!)

At some point towards the end of our tour de France, I was sleeping in the car as we drove towards Bayeux to see the magnificent Bayeux Tapestry. When The Frenchman realized where we were, he stopped the car and woke me up ever-so-gently. "Honey, I think you're going to like this place!" he said excitedly. I thought I was half dreaming as I got out of the car and looked up: We were at the hauntingly gorgeous L'Abbaye de Jumieges, what Victor Hugo called "the most beautiful ruins in France." The Abbaye had been destroyed twice: once by Vikings in 851, then rebuilt and again during the Revolution.

There are so many more pictures here.

It's October 25th and a gorgeous day in Cezanne country.

Really, you have no idea how radiant it is outside. When we left Paris yesterday morning, a tempest had hit. Paris had been especially gray and tasteless the last couple of days we were three. Monday night, we had dinner with The Frenchman's mother, who offered to buy us the insanely expensive tickets to Crazyhorse that night to see Dita perform. She was performing in Paris for only four nights, starting that night. It was incredibly tempting, but we were exhausted, it was late, and we had a day of driving ahead of us beginning early the next morning.

Dita. In Paris! Her show it turns out lasts only a few minutes. But still.

I can't say I was anxious to leave Paris, but I was certainly itching to escape that wretched, half-equipped apartment we rented. The bed was an iron skillet masquerading as a futon. Every morning I'd wake up because some part of me was screaming "I confess! I confess! I did it! Just make it stop!" Instead of calling it "the bed" I started calling it "the breadboard." It smelled like the alfalfa we used to feed Dancy the rabbit.

So, my bed felt especially glorious last night.

This morning between loads of laundry, I did a bit of writing and then finished Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, which I could hardly put down for the last two days. Since I left for vacation, I'd finished Cousin Bette by Balzac and Hell House by Matheson, but not since I read Pullman's His Dark Materials have I read something so completely absorbing. I doubt this was See's intention, but this book has left a disgusting taste in my mouth for Chinese culture. I can't tell you how much I hated every detail of these women's miserable, restricted, agonizing lives except for the fact that they had their own secret writing system called nu shu, which was kept from men. As I read, I began to despise Confucius as much as Jesus and his lot. What a huge wokful of horse turds is Confucianism. And what a fucking brutal, misogynistic world these women lived in, constantly told how worthless they are and how they're only worth was to get married and make a son. Not children, mind you, but a son.

Anyway, the book is brilliant. Don't let my Western moral supremism turn you away from it.

The Louvre is one of the worst places I've ever been to see paintings.

Just so you know.

It's so badly lit that quite often a painting is either too oily with glare or too dark. I'd forgotten how awful it is.

I was there today, snapping pictures of 17th century furniture and tapestries. Funny thing, and I don't know if this is indicative of 17th century French paintings in general, but there were almost no portraits of women. It looked like the only way a woman was ever painted was in a biblical or mythical setting. This clearly changed by the time I saw the 18th century French paintings. Please, someone smarter than me 'splain this?

Anyway, I bought a copy of Lisa See's Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. Yes, you're snickering, but I had to close the book on the Metro because her descriptions of early 19th century foot bindings and their deadly complications were so horrific, I started to get queasy. It helps that she's an amazing writer. I've heard Lisa See speak twice now. She doesn't look remotely Asian, so you would never known she's writing about her family and heritage.

Tomorrow we return to Aix. I'm sad.

I just finished writing this short story, which is a hip, modern version of "The Snow Queen" set in Los Angeles. I started it three years ago, but got interrupted by Paris and writing Mr. Wicker. Isn't it funny that it's in Paris that I'd finish it? It was blustery and chilly outside our Paris apartment today, so we stayed indoors. I wrote.

I had a dream about "Cold Hands, Cold Heart" two nights before. It was just after I'd gotten some similar feedback on two of my latest stories from editors I respect very much. Despite the positive qualities the editors listed, it seems I've been trying to write shorter stories so that they can be published, but the story always suffers from some missing element. I know that, by necessity, the stories have to take longer breaths, longer walks, or else they lose something vital. This means, however, that fewer magazines will publish them. I've been fighting it. And losing.

When I first started writing, I never thought this was a problem. I read a great deal of Clive Barker who has many a brilliant 5,000+ short story. So, it never occurred to me that 7,500 was unpublishable. And it isn't; of the two stories published last year, one was over 8,000 and the other around 7,200. But it's a damned hard sell in a shrinking market where everyone, especially my favorite markets, strongly prefers stories under 5,000 words or even under 4,000. With these requirements, it can take years to find a publisher above and beyond the usual maturity period and search.

And then the dream: I was visiting my grandmother. I never knew my real grandmothers, and this grandmother was a woman with a generous waist, an ash blonde beehive and spectacles. She rubbed her eye under the specs as she spoke. She said, "You have to buy a house with me in the country. The EM is up. It's the highest it's ever been. You have to buy now."

I said, "Grandma, that makes no sense. If I buy a house in the country, how can I get to work? It's too far. I can't make a living."

She continued rubbing her eye. "It doesn't matter. The EM is high. You have to buy now!"

I pictured the house in the country and despaired. Beautiful, but so far away.

Yesterday I was telling the dream to my boyfriend as we rode the Metro to his friend's apartment in outer Paris for a birthday party. As I told him the dream, I realized what it meant. "Em" is the nickname of Miranda, one of the characters in "Cold Hands, Cold Heart." The grandmother in my dreams is usually my wise self. My crone goddess, if you will. "Buying a house in the country" is the longer story that tells what it should, rather than the apartment in the city that's "close to work." So, I decided that, instead of pinching and pinning the hems of my stories, I would write the way I used to, let my stories take the time they need, not the time I need.

"Cold Hands, Cold Heart" weighs in at 6,473 words. It might take a while for anyone will see it, but I have a feeling it will be worth the wait.

Last night, we went to one of the richest areas in Paris to have dinner with The Frenchman's father, whom we call Papa Loup (that is, Papa Wolf). He was a very successful engineer in his day who worked on such high-level projects as the TGV, many highways, and Charles de Gaulle airport. Like The Frenchman, he is a Knight but he's also a member of The Legion of Honor. Still, he manages to be very silly and fun. I met the remaining relatives there for dinner, including The Frenchman's darling step sister, her gorgeous daughter and The Frenchman's nephew who is living upstairs as he attends the University of Paris.

We were eating dinner and chatting when the subject of astrology came up. The young folk were asking all the questions. "Tell me about Scorpio. Tell me about Libra." And finally, "Tell me about Virgo."

In French, Virgo is "Vierge" (pronounced vee-air-zhe). I started in my best French to describe "Vierge" but accidentally pronounced it as "verge" (vair-zhe). As soon as I said it, The Frenchman and his nephew smiled. Everyone else politely listened. But after a moment, The Frenchman could no longer keep the joke to himself.

"Cherie," he said, "verge in French means 'cock'."

I felt a deep flush in my forehead and cheeks, and burst out laughing. At that moment, everyone felt comfortable enough to laugh. "Excusez-moi," I said, and made like I was crawling under the table. They all assured me no harm was done and that it was all part of learning the language.

So, yes, on one hand I embarrassed myself silly in front of Papa Loup. But, heh, I know "cock" now. Look out!

Since it seems we'll be here in Paris until Tuesday morning, I've taken some time to upload photos.

This is Mont Saint-Michel...



Probably one of the scariest and most impressive places you will ever visit, this medieval city on an island in the salt lands inspired the Lord of the Rings artists when they designed Minas Tirith, except it looks more like a dark Minas Tirith that has been conquered by Sauron. This is the place you see in your nightmares, the place you might have been imprisoned and tortured in a past life. This is Mont Saint-Michel, built for the angel Michael who slays the dragon of Satan. But you've got to wonder who is slaughtering whom...

And here is Carnac.



These are photos of the Neolithic menhirs and a "tumulus." The set starts with some legit "ghost orb" photos I took from our apartment of the spooky old rubble house in the parking lot where we stayed in Brittany.

And finally, a little of Carcassonne...



Where the Cathars were slaughtered in the Crusades. Strangely enough, this was the most cheerful place we visited. I had this explosion of geek glee when I saw the castle, remembering the time when "all things medieval" was cool and everything was somewhat sanitized through the SCA and other groups I was involved in. I fell in love with a statue of Joan of Arc there.

And now I must get back to shopping...

We arrived this afternoon to retrieve the keys to our fantastically ill-equipped apartment from a nice professor of 20th century French literature. (We have no garbage pail, no towels, no toaster, no heating...only an Internet connection which, frankly, is the only thing saving this place.) We then spent a little time with The Frenchman's mother and eventually with some friends of his who are keeping our car for the week. I'm insanely excited about being here, so I don't know how much I'll update until I get back to Aix.

But I will say that I've seen more incredible places this week than I've seen in the last 20 years of my life lying nose to toe. France is profoundly magical. (Pictures are forthcoming.) And now I've met almost all of The Frenchman's family. I'm happy to say they're all incredibly wonderful people, all of them.

More when I can!

Tomorrow we begin a one-week tour de France that will end in Paris on October 15th, where we'll be staying until the 22nd. The Frenchman will be working, as he has duties there every couple of months. I'll be writing, visiting the Bibliotheque Nationale to research for my La Maupin novel. Friends of the Frenchman there who work in the art archives will hopefully be able to provide me a gander at period artwork depicting the Opera House and other important landmarks.

I'm insanely excited. I've got that mental twitch where I'm constantly ticking off what I need to see, sketch, photograph. I have a list of French books I need to look at, but first I need to see what I can download from the Bibliotheque in advance because photocopying there is extremely expensive. Like, $.60/page. Yeah. And that's if the document is in good shape. Otherwise, no copying at all.

Our Gothic and terribly romantic vacation will take us first to the amazing Carcassonne for lunch, then to the Pays Basque. We'll make our way up north to Brittany for a couple of days, then Normandy, where we'll see the D-Day beaches and meet The Frenchman's sisters and their families. In Normandy, we'll stay for a night at Mont Saint-Michel in L'Hotel Mere Poulard. This place is so haunted I can hear the haints wailing all the way from here. It's the castle that inspired the design of Minas Tirith in Peter Jackson's Return of the King. After that, our romantic getaway will peak in the Norman fairytale village of Honfleur.

This is going to be a fantastic two weeks, but overall I'm dying to return to Paris. I can't tell you often I've been teased by French people about being the reincarnation of La Maupin. I have no illusions that that's the case here, but I do know that I have an intense connection to the birthplace of my lover that is pretty incomprehensible. (Although Les Catacombes are pretty rockin'. Do I need another reason?)

You can read about my previous adventure in Paris starting here (I landed on January 22, 2004), then continuing here and here.

Yesterday, I wrote 1500 words, but for Cold Hands, Cold Heart. That's my modern version of "The Snow Queen" by Hans Christian Andersen, where Kay is a woman instead of a little boy. When I started the story last year, I named the lead demon Rezendi after my friend Jon Evans. Yesterday, I had a blaze of inspiration to finish, complete with a scene where the demons find themselves on Hollywood Boulevard getting their pictures taken by German tourists in front of the Chinese Theater as they plot murder. First draft is almost done. I'm hoping to have it out in the publishing rounds by next month.

Back to planning and writing...

Recently, I was asked to write a paragraph for the David Reilly Lives slide show on MySpace. David Reilly was the lead singer and songwriter for God Lives Underwater who died last year on October 17. GLU is one of my all-time favorite bands. I was completely ripped up when I heard the news about David's death. David was under-appreciated as a musician. While David had struggled for recovery over many years, he died clean and sober. There are a couple of crazy variations on the explanation of his death (like the one in the GLU Wikipedia article), but he essentially died because his stomach ruptured in his sleep from the pain meds he was taking for a tooth abcess. The internal bleeding went to his lungs and he rapidly slipped into a coma. Years of addiction had ravaged his body to such frailty.

Addiction (also known as dependence) is a chronic medical condition similar in many ways to diabetes that, if not arrested, is always fatal. And sometimes even when it is arrested, as in David's case, it still steals lives through the back door by destroying one's health. If we could cure alcohol and drug addiction, our world would be a very different place.

But addiction is a close sister to poverty, a sure way to keep people down and out of competition. I suspect there's been so little progress in the research because no one with money seriously wants to cure the surest way to ensure a large percentage of people just don't get a piece of the pie. Let's not forget the huge amounts of money being made, as well. It also allows people to feel morally superior. They don't get it that it's a disease, not a moral problem. But for some reason people feel more comfortable with the notion that addicts are destroying their lives and everyone's around them on purpose. That doesn't make much sense to me. Maybe they don't want to look at their own lives to see why they let addicts take advantage of them...over and over...

Someday the right physicians will grow so weary of losing great talents like David and other sweet souls that there will be a breakthrough. At least, that's my hope.

So, last night I blew a gasket.

The Frenchman took me to see The Science of Sleep. It's a cute but not great British film with lots of French in it. Of course, all the English was subtitled with French and none of the French was subtitled at all. Even though I learned great new dirty words like "nichons" for boobies and "pipe" for blow job, reading the French subtitles made me despair that I would ever learn to speak French like a normal person. I understood a lot of it, enough to realize that I would always try to force English idioms into my speech that a French person would never think of.

This is not why I blew a gasket.

We got there just as the movie was starting, after I basically got to his office late. (Reasons too numerous to mention.) As a consequence, I put off using the restroom until we got to the theater, which was around the corner and down the street.

When we arrived at the theater, I discovered that their toilets were broken. All of them. The whole restroom had been locked up with a vague sign on the door. There were no other toilets in the entire theater. Just the one.

That's when I lost it.

After accidentally slamming open the glass door to the theater, I ran back to The Frenchman's office, where his assistant was locking up and started screeching at her that I needed to use the toilet without even saying "please." Between busted toilets, lack of reliable Internet connection, the fucked up washing machine episode, the front door problem, and our hot water going on and off all day for two weeks now, I'd lost my temper and certainly all of my manners. I was gritting my teeth saying, "I...HATE...THIS...PLACE," steam blasting out of my ears like a cartoon bull. It seemed unfathomably insane to have broken toilets in a theater and not offer any alternative to patrons. It was even more insane that The Frenchman couldn't get through to Orange technical support. (The Net is now stable, but extremely slow. The issues might not resolve unless we move into downtown Aix. )

Why doesn't anything fucking work here?!?

Last night The Frenchman calmly but firmly explained to me that I had to stop judging the country that way. The French people have a higher degree of tolerance for inconvenience. That's not how they judge their quality of life, and that I can't judge them by my own standards. Even in the U.S., things are fucked up, just in different ways. Sure, some of the things here drive him crazy, too, but I have to recognize what's a cultural difference and what's not.

One of the only truly funny things to come out of The Science of Sleep was something the main character invented called "Disastrology." He had a series of calendars with a different major disaster for every month. I think the only way I'm going to be able to cope with the clashes -- cultural and otherwise -- is to use my own disastrology. You know, like today the Sun is in Stuck Front Door and the Moon's in DSL Crashes with Busted Toilets rising.

Actuallly, the front door's fixed. I'll have to come up with another sign...

It's been a for-real, gosh-darned hair-puller of a day, I tell ya.

But first, the good news: The Frenchman had me drive. It was my first time driving in a foreign country, and it's been a very long time since I drove a stick shift. Despite this, I apparently shift like a race car driver. However, the roads are very narrow and roundabouts are, for the moment, a tad terrifying. But I did it, dammit. I droves with the crazy French drivers! Woo!

Onto the not-driving madness.

Ye Olde Internets have been up and down more times than any dirty joke can do justice. The week days seem to be fine, but weekends and nights are now a horror. We're constantly rebooting the modem. I've practically been making The Frenchman cry with my worries about this and potential Internet problems on our two weeks away in October. He was thinking that I write offline and then go online just to blog and send email. I told him that I'm constantly online to research, as well as to use the dictionary and thesaurus. I might have problems, then, in Paris later this month. But we'll see.

Then, Ye Olde Laundry was as fun as a puke and a holler. My spider senses said to do laundry today while The Frenchman was around. The Landlady had put a sign on the usual machine saying not to use it but instead the other machine, which normally sits unplugged. Long story short, it didn't work. We couldn't contact the Landlady, whose phone was down, and wound up hauling all our wet, sudsy laundry to the laverie automatique.

(Yes, we're both having nasty Mercury transits today. Why do you ask?)

And I have hives. I suspect I have them in response to what we were eating last night because my roseacea is acting up, too. At first I thought they were mosquito bites, but then more appeared spontaneously on my arm as I was writing this morning. Go me! I suspect it's because I indulged in a bowl of butter- and garlic-smothered mushrooms. The Frenchman guessed it was the large shrimp, but my money is on the fungus.

I did, however, manage to finish the timeline for Out of Body up to the present point in the book. I've found some weird gaps that were relatively unnoticable in the script (which is what I'm adapting from), and I'm already pretty sure of how to fix them. I had to do one of these timelines for Mr. Wicker and am very happy with the results. It's sort of a somewhat less anal version of what Tim Powers does when writing his books, where he envisions where every character is and every single thing they're doing every moment of the day. I do the same thing -- eating, sleeping, main chunks of action -- but not quite as detailed.

Just to pique your travel envy, I also managed to upload photos from yesterday's trip to Arles, where we saw the medieval Cloister of St-Trophime and the Church of St-Trophime. We then continued onto Les Baux de Provence, which was largely a tourist trap with bad crepes and an "armor" store that would thrill any SCA fighter. However, it had a spectacular view of Hell's Valley. If I were a medieval duke living there, I'd feel pretty damned posh overlooking that valley with the crows soaring between the peaks and towers. Oh, yes.

We even saw Daudet's windmill. This is the famous landmark of Daudet's collection of short stories entitled, Lettres de Mon Moulin, published in 1869. The Frenchman says I should read them. I see they're on Project Gutenberg, although they're in French.

The most spectacular thing we saw all day I couldn't get photos of. It was Le Cathedrale d'Images, a massive cave wherein they were projecting Cezanne's paintings on the walls as they played various deeply moving classical pieces. Supposedly it was 12C inside, but I never felt cold, just awed by the beauty of his work and the artistry of the projections. Some of the photos were static, but a lot of them were projected as moving pieces on the walls. To think, Cezanne was a "failed" artist...