Maria Alexander News and Updates from TheHandlessPoet.com

My friend and fellow writer Cindy Bailey came to our San Francisco reading for Sins of the Sirens. She just posted about the reading in her LitRave blog. (You teh awesome, Cindy!) I give her major props for attending the reading given that horror is very much not her thing. (Not even a little.) I'm pleased we could give her a new perspective on the genre.

I'm currently in a maelstrom of ick with The Opal, the hotel I stayed at in San Francisco. I've discovered on my credit card a $150.00 charge for "incidentals" that the man at the front desk cannot itemize for me. I never even turned on the television, so I can't imagine what the $50 a day charge is supposed to cover. And it's an even $50/day. No more or less.

ETA: This might be fixed. Might. We'll see!

I'm also pretty sure the guy who checked my luggage while I was having lunch with my brother and sister-in-law on Sunday also stole the branch of white sage out of my suitcase that Livgren gave me. It was grown in the garden of her circle mate and bound with twine that Livgren herself spun. I can't prove it was either them or the TSA, but I have a feeling it was one of their dumbass employees, thinking it was a giant splif or something.

I'm sitting in the Oakland Airport, thoroughly wiped out from too much fun this weekend and wishing someone would throttle Anne Rice before she writes a fucking Christian Lestat book. Seriously.

I enjoyed riding the bus (so many characters!), wandering around the Haight on Friday, reminiscing about a time 11 years ago when I used to spend a great deal more time haunting the second-hand shops in this neighborhood. I dove into Buffalo Exchange on a nostalgic whim and came out with a vintage, peach-colored 1930s CAMP corset girdle with garters and a fanned lacing across the low back. $14. How crazy is that? That night, I had dinner at Kyoto with my very dear friends Livgren and her husband B, who drove up from Boulder Creek. After I drank a good amount of hot sake (it doesn't count if you have it with sushi), I went to O'Reilly's with The Grey Masquerade and had a martini and sidecar. I was feelin' mighty fine, as this was the first alcohol I've had in a while. The Grey Masquerade says that I continued to speak quite eloquently, which I find very funny.

Saturday was equally delicious in every way. I met up with Ducklord and the completely charming Maul for a vegetarian lunch. We then walked to Borderlands, where Loren Rhoads and I enjoyed a well-attended reading and signing. I was thrilled to see my friends. I met many cool folk, including the very lovely Lilly part of the Paramentals. I read the first seven pages of "The Last Word," and was horrified to realize I'd written the phrase "black abyss." Straight from the Department of Redundancy Department. I never printed out that story, as I didn't have a printer in France, so I couldn't catch things like that. Let that be a lesson to you kids out there. It's the only way to avoid embarrassing adjective leakage. Anyway, the Q&A afterward was a blast.

Several of us then went to Luna Park and debauched. It was the best.

Today, I had lunch with my brother and his wife, lamented the weirdness that is our family, and came to the airport where I sit, groaning and shaking my fist at Anne Rice. Dude, I don't even want to know what's happening on the Oscars. I want to be sober when The Frenchman comes home tonight from Miami.

Thanks to everyone who came to the reading, hung out, whatever. I so miss S.F.!

Labels: reading, san francisco, signing

I awoke to find a very cool review and SF reading plug from the one of my favorite roguish writers, Thomas Roche, for Sins in my mailbox, sent by . He writes:

"Sins of the Sirens is the third release from John Everson's Dark Arts Books, a small press specializing in horror. Featuring the talents of Morbid Curiosity publisher Loren Rhoads, Mehitobel Wilson, and Money Shot author Christa Faust as well as Eros Zine contributor Maria Alexander, it's an unhealthy dose of fourteen dangerous tales of dark desire. Featuring both reprints and originals, it collects three to four of the best horror stories from each of these members of the horror-noir-goth underground,each one laced with liberal doses of eroticism and a sucker-punch of wicked imagination."

Just what I needed after a night of vivid, especially wild dreams that left me ragged.

****

And in the car on the way to work, I called Waxman, Boxer and Feinstein to urge them all to use their Superdelegate votes to support the will of the people -- that is, the popular vote. Waxman's office was sweet as usual. Boxer's voicemail was on. They're both uncommitted in the Superdelegate race. And Feinstein's office, while open, was immediately defensive. As soon as I said, "I know the Senator is using her Superdelegate vote to support Clinton, but..." the guy cut me off and said, "We can't discuss campaign issues on the phone."

"But this isn't exactly a campaign issue. This is a broader comment."

"Oh?"

"Yes," I continued. "I'd simply like to encourage Senator Feinstein, when it comes down to the wire, to use her Superdelegate vote in support of whoever has the popular vote, be it Clinton or Obama."

"Oh, okay," he said. He sounded vastly relieved. "It's just that we get a lot of calls from people wanting to debate her position."

I'm thinking we totally have the right to challenge her, but I don't say it. "Well, thank you for taking my comment. That's really all I'm asking for."

"Okay. Thank you for calling."

When did we not have the right to call and challenge our Senator's position on campaign issues? This is disturbing. I understand not wanting to sit on the phone and argue with someone, but I have the right to call and say, "Please support someone else." Maybe they think it's separate from her position as my Senator. However, she wouldn't even be a Superdelegate if she wasn't my Senator, if I hadn't voted her in. Geesh.

Labels: politics, review

The only way to start the week is with NPR talking about my favorite masked man of all time. Thanks for the belated Valentine, NPR!

Speaking of insane attractions, The Frenchman and I watched an amazing documentary called Crazy Love this weekend that left me with my jaw dragging on the carpet. Holy shit, what a nightmarish couple. Early on I kept wondering why didn't she sue him for personal injury. That would have given her the money she needed. But then, by the documentary's conclusion my question was answered: both people are clearly certifiable.

Very little writing happened this weekend for reasons that escape me -- probably because I was wrapped up in all kinds of correspondence -- but much love happened and the writing did resume last night at last. And, to end the Bengal debate, The Frenchman found a very silly video that features three Bengals, two of which look almost exactly like Robie. He then went on to unearth a jillion Bengal videos and a great article on play aggression that mainly managed to affirm everything our friend Lisa has been saying. (We're working on it! Honest!)

As we all gear up for ObamaDay tomorrow -- er, I mean the next round of primaries and the Hawaii caucus -- do read the brilliant (and infuriating) article entitled, "Christianizing America" by the columnist for The Villiage Voice and The Washington Post, Nat Hentoff.

Amid the hostile stirrings in the audience, I also told them to check out Article VI, Section 3: “. . . no religious test shall ever be required as Qualification to any Office of public Trust under the United States.” For the rest of the day, I was the pariah in the room.

Of that I have no doubt.

Labels: darth vader, politics

Tonight, The Frenchman and I went to a special screening of Persepolis where Marjane Satrapi gave a talk afterwards. She was such a powerful, vivacious, funny woman. Her assessment of modern Iran is that, with such a huge youth population now that is not only well-educated but exposed to the world via the Internet and other media, she feels hopeful that the country will make major changes for the better over time. I loved what she said about education, about the right to non-belief, about the importance of women's voices. It was fierce, sensible rhetoric after watching what had happened to her in her youth.

I'd brought our Persepolis compendium, so after the Q&A I hunted her down outside because she announced she'd be first having a cigarette. Being the pushy broad that I am, I worked my way to her side quite quickly. I butted in sideways on a conversation in progress. When that person was through, I apologized and asked if she was signing yet. Her wrangler said no, that she'd be signing inside. So instead I chatted with her. I then told her I was a published author and that her voice has inspired mine with her honesty and strength.

After listening to my small speech, she looked at the book in my hand. "I would like to sign your book," she said with sudden softness.

Something about the change in her voice moved me profoundly. I handed her the pen and thanked her. "Merci mille fois!" She was quite gracious.

This morning, I'd been listening to the radio about how the Pakistanis have their election on Monday yet no one is excited about it. They interviewed Bhutto's niece again, Fatima, and damn but that young woman is incredibly sharp. She rained hellfire on the whole political system. "Why bother voting? It's all the same. Musharraf holds all the cards. Why risk your life for this?" She was referring to the 60 public bombings that have happened in the last year, a totally new phenomenon for Pakistan.

I felt queasy when I heard this. And then I turned off the radio and felt grateful. Like, crazy-grateful that I could walk to the polls and not worry about a suicide bomber driving by. We have serious problems, but we can vote. And maybe you're one of those people who don't think there's any real difference between our candidates -- maybe not -- and that we need to destroy the electoral college -- we do -- but we can fucking walk into a polling station and cast a vote without fear of death. And I don't think we realize -- like really know in our bone's marrow -- how lucky we are.

Time for bed. I wonder what kind of dreams I'll have.

Okay, although I'm still reeling from the discovery that co-Siren Mehitobel Wilson and I share the same birthday, I'm now urging you to check out David Niall Wilson's thorough and thoughtful review of Sins of the Sirens. It's quite awesome. Thanks for the valentine, Dave!

He's also just posted an interview with the most blasphemous Siren: me, of course. There will be interviews with all four Sirens, so stay tuned.

There have been two other reviews so far. I'm ambivalent about posting links to them. One is largely positive, but it's clear the writer didn't know the meaning of the word "theme." He hadn't read all the stories in the book, either, as he accused my story "The Last Word" (and others) of being about "fetishes, sexual dominance, sadomasochism and drugs." While there's certainly a common thread of dark desire in the stories, I can name three stories off the top of my head that don't have even a hint of these elements in them. If you don't count alcohol as a "drug," then it's much higher. ("The Last Word" has alcohol and clove cigarettes, so maybe he thought that was too druggy?) That's at least 20-25% of the book. It also didn't go through fact check and mixed up two of Bel's stories. So you can't really take what he says very seriously.

As for the other review, it was so juvenile, it's barely worth mentioning. Despite the few good words in it about my work (he and David both liked "The Last Word"), it seethed misogyny. I was really hoping the more professional reviews would get out there first. Oh well!

But if you're just dying of curiousity, Lisa Morton ripped Dude #2 several new ones with her knitting needle, and Bel discusses them all with her usual flair. Enjoy!

Labels: review, Sins of the Sirens

My longtime friend and mentor, Randy Farmer, was one of the executives let go today. A virtual worlds pioneer, he was their Community Strategy Analyst. Randy, here's hoping you land on your feet, my friend.

Dear friends and stalkers,

I'm trying out the fledgling "live blogging" technology via Yahoo! Last night a friend in Chicago helped me work out some bugs, but I'd like to do a bigger run if you're available.

Drop by around 5:00pm PST tonight if you're so inclined and let me know how it looks and sounds.

I'm thinking that every week (until I get bored) I'm going to do a mock "advice to the lovelorn" column but from the point of view of a crazy, dominatrix goth girl. The advice itself might be tongue in cheek, but it delivers a grain of truth, nonetheless.

So if you want, send me some goofy questions and I'll try this out, either tonight or next week.

Thanks!

Labels: humor

While Robie is doing fabulously well these days, we're continuing to have behavioral problems (ahem) with biting. Dr. Doolittle gave us some excellent suggestions: rattle a can full of pennies or whack him on the nose with a roll of magazine paper. Well, he thinks both are a game and doesn't get it that he's being disciplined no matter how harsh we are with him. And when we try to discipline him by being "alpha cats" -- holding him aloft by the scruff, hissing in his face or thumping him on the nose -- he gets seriously pissed off and retaliates by running away, then dashing back to smack us on the leg or runs off to destroy something he KNOWS is forbidden.

He is, in short, diabolically smart.

The doctor's last bit of advice was to use the spray bottle on "stream" instead of "spray" because even our toilet-loving jungle cat will find that annoying. We just started this last night and it seems to work.

Finally, I was chatting with a coworker yesterday who has three Bengals (five in her lifetime). She was looking at a picture of his face and exclaimed, "He's a Bengal! Look at the marks on his face!" I had decided long ago that he was merely a mutt, but it helped me start to reframe Robie's aggressive behavior. He's insanely energetic (way beyond any of my other cats at this age), far more companionable (when he isn't biting) and if he didn't have Softpaws, our house would be one big shaggy, shredded hovel. My coworker told me that bizarre health issues are a lot more likely with pure breeds.

I tried this theory on Dr. Doolittle and he agreed. Apparently, if a Bengal has "flaws," breeders typically put them down. If a rescued Bengal doesn't have paperwork, the shelter has to give it the label "Bengal Mix," which is what they did. I felt ambivalent about that label because of the white patches on his toes and under his chin. But now that I think about it, who knows? Maybe a female got loose and mated before she could be fixed? Lord knows they're crazy smart and capable of pretty much any kind of mischief. That brood would be worthless to both a breeder and an owner. My coworker said his ears are exactly like a Savannah, which is true, too. Obviously something kooky happened on the DNA front to make a cat -- a herkin' cat! -- allergic to meat.

So, we're dealing with this in a whole new way. We've decided to play with him a lot more, to use only toys and not our hands to play, and to use the streaming gun when he's seriously misbehaving. Someday, we'd love to get a pedigreed Bengal. Hell, now we know what we're in for.

And, just so you know, he's been sleeping in my lap the entire time I've been typing this. Sweet little weirdo.

Labels: cats

Apparently, the animated pieces I scripted that were played for the Major Mouse Meeting yesterday were an outstanding success. There was not only general applause, but very large amounts of money shall be now earmarked for the projects we were pitching.

Nice.

My colleague Steve Tatham's hilarious rant about Superdelegates on his political spoof show, The Ointment.

So true, it hurts us, precious.

Labels: humor, politics

So, I did get to participate in the talk today, but only early on. If you want to hear it, just go to the WHYS site and download today's podcast. (You'll see it easily enough.)

The problem that plagued the last show I was on continues: the guy who is hosting the show now is not very good at balancing the speakers. Today he let a gushing 20-year-old in Minnesota talk three times, but me only once. He interrupted me at one point and then came back saying -- to her -- "Oh, I'm sorry. I interrupted you." She had nothing to fucking say except "Oh, it was sooo exciting!" over and over. And over.

Do you want the "opposing view" or not? Do you want a balanced show?

I wrote to Ros, the producer, thanking him for having me again but this time I complained. I don't mind spreading around the talk with the two radio guests who really had something to contribute. And sure, it's nice to hear a young voice express some enthusiasm. But to let a young girl with virtually nothing to add speak three times wasn't their finest moment in programming, especially when I could have contributed information about the French, which would have addressed the actual comments coming in on the blog and SMS about money affecting our democratic process. Or even spoken to other important problems.

And while I have you, I'll speak to that point: The French hava a law that says every candidate must be given equal time in every medium -- radio, TV, newspaper, etc. This keeps the playing field level for poor people who run for office, since they can't afford TV ads and all that. So what they typically do is hold tons of these town halls and debates to get the candidates on TV and radio. This works because France isn't nearly as big as the U.S. The candidates can travel around, participate in these town hall discussions and put up political posters.

It doesn't work for the U.S. because we're so damned big. We have to have major media to reach everyone. We also have a capitalist society. Making money is part of our culture, but at least it's transparent (that is, we have to know where the contributions come from).

The part, though, I really wanted to say (knowing that time was short) was that it's legal here to lie in these media ads. That's the part that's so incredibly wrong and broken.

But, gee, I'm glad the world instead knows it was all soooo exciting. Because that was the focus of the show, obviously.

Labels: BBC, politics

I just finished reading an article in the Stanford Alumni magazine called "Seeing Is Believing" about the research going in the laboratory of psychological researcher Jeremy Bailenson on how avatars can change our real-life behavior and make us better people.

While his experiments are all fine and good about how to mess with people's real-life behavior by forcing them through avatar-marches of controlled virtual calesthenics, this is the opposite of the kind of research we really need. I'd rather they study why people become such ass wads when they have a shred of anonymity and engage in destructive behaviors. The worst part is that the article doesn't mention any kind of real insights or intelligent revelations from the former -- at least not to anyone who has a clue about VR. Some statements are as clueless as "...unlike donning a costume or putting on makeup in real life, in cyberspace your avatar is your whole self-representation, the primary identity cue that tells you how to behave socially." (Incidentally, the quote extends to not just how you behave, but how people perceive you.)

My response is: WTF? Only in cyberspace? Hel-lo. Our bodies are our primary identity cue in real life! Otherwise, why would we be so obsessed with looks? Either this article doesn't really explain the research being done in Bailenson's lab or these researchers live on Planet Fucking 9, where zillions of dollars aren't made every day marketing health and beauty products to an fat-phobic, global public. This statement doesn't make much sense at all. In fact it sounds, well, dumb.

I wish someone would please give me a bunch of money like they've done this guy so that I, too, can study a phenomenon I never fully experienced when it was in development pre-1999. If we take this article literally, these guys were involved with virtual reality back in the day yet didn't know about WorldsAway. I would think at some point in the interview he or one of the other researchers would have mentioned the 2D+ graphical virtual world available on Compuserve in 1995; if not that, then either Habitat (which was built for George Lucas in 1987) or Glass City, the Japanese version of WorldsAway pre-1994. If he really didn't know, then he missed a massive chunk of early development and experience in graphical virtual worlds that preceeds Second Life and WoW by at least a decade. The way the article reads, it sounds like he made it to a post-doctoral position without any experience in what he's studying, which is kind of scary. Otherwise, how do people go on pretending as if this major work was never done and that graphical virtual communities are the product of the last five years? It's mind bogglingly ignorant. I can't believe Bailenson didn't know about it; I mean, he probably did and the article choses not to mention it, instead prefering the following:

His interest in virtual spaces is less about the hardware, and more about the wetworks: what happens to your mind when you are living digitally. His work is partly inspired by novelists like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, whose cyberpunk fantasies he read while studying cognitive psychology at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University.

And if he was into Neal Stephenson back then to that degree, then he'd know that Neal took the word "avatar" from Randy Farmer, the creator of WorldsAway. The first editions of Snow Crash include Neal's acknowledgement the word's origins and his thanks. (Maybe future editions, too. I'm still kicking myself because my copy disappeared long ago.) Snow Crash was our required reading for WorldsAway development. Also, the very first paper ever written or presented at a conference on avatar behavior is "The Lessons of Habitat," which was presented at The First International Conference of Cyberspace held in -- wait for it -- 1990. That's 18 years ago, folks.

Putting aside this weird gap in his cyber-history, I like that Bailenson is exploring the therapeutic effects of VR on our day-to-day social behavior. Although, it seems like a narrow approach to VR and pretty obvious that, for the most part, in uncontrolled environments online interaction ultimately degenerates our ability to deal with face-to-face social problems. I think the opposite research -- that is, exploring how people transform behind their virtual masks -- is more beneficial to explore because it taps into the psychological ugliness that speaks to so many of our real-world problems, such as why it's easy to commit mail fraud and other faceless crimes. Avatar Therapy might be the next ultra-expensive wave of psychotherapy, but honestly I'd rather see research money like that poured into studying human psychology and dynamics in an uncontrolled environment. You know: the real world, but virtual.

But that's just me.

Labels: avatars, virtual reality

May you all have a blessed Imbolc and that the inspiration you have today guide you through the year.

Meanwhile, Phil says, "Six more weeks of winter!"

I'm going to do something active, as I'll probably be writing most of the weekend. And then I might spend ridiculous money on cosmetics. That sounds happy making.