To Foucault, A Daughter: Review By Mark Simpson

This is a review by Mark Simpson of my novella Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls. He took it down from his blog in a fit of pique so I am putting it here for safekeeping. And because, neither Metrodaddy nor anyone else, can erase the past.

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Reg­u­lar vis­i­tors to this blog will be famil­iar with the spir­ited, sharp, thought­ful, charm­ing, insistently-infuriatingly rea­son­able — and occa­sion­ally down­right can­tan­ker­ous — com­menter Elly, alias Quiet Riot Girl.

Elly gave me enor­mous encour­age­ment and sup­port in putting together Met­ro­sexy, which in all hon­esty prob­a­bly would never have seen the light of day with­out her. She also proved tire­less in spread­ing the word about it.

Elly is not only extremely enthu­si­as­tic about the con­cept of met­ro­sex­u­al­ity, she’s one of the few peo­ple to really engage with it and grasp its import. Per­haps more so than even Metro­daddy him­self, who remains some­thing of a dead­beat dad.

This is why Met­ro­sexy is ded­i­cated to her.

Now Elly has given birth to her own off­spring. A bounc­ing novella called Foucault’s Daugh­ter, about what might have hap­pened if the famous bald homo French philoso­pher had been a sin­gle dad, jug­gling cruis­ing Parisian S/M sex clubs with school runs. There is of course more than a lit­tle bit of QRG in Dr Foucault’s sprog, who scrib­bles all over his nice clean walls and then spends most of her adult life try­ing to live down and up to her father. Insist­ing that ‘macho fags’ (in QRG’s favourite phrase) acknowl­edge the (lit­tle) lady in their life.

It’s a fan­tas­ti­cally, pos­si­bly madly ambi­tious work that self-consciously nego­ti­ates her own highly informed, passionate-but-critical and ulti­mately highly ambiva­lent invest­ment in that very nearly extinct species: The Homo­sex­ual Intel­lec­tual. It won’t be giv­ing too much away to tell you that Foucault’s Daugh­ter, after pro­long­ing the agony of The Homo­sex­ual Intel­lec­tual with its inter­est in him (who else shows any these days?), comes very close to euth­a­niz­ing him.

Many pas­sages in it are beau­ti­fully writ­ten and breath­tak­ingly vivid. The scene, for instance, which rehearses the death of the famous cul­tural critic and QRG hero Roland Barthes in a traf­fic acci­dent stays with you. Even if you feel he is being ever-so-slightly, ever-so-lovingly pushed into the path of the oncom­ing laun­dry van.

So I strongly rec­om­mend you read Foucault’s Daugh­ter (which is free to down­load here). But if you do, you’ll also under­stand why, in the end, QRG and me, alas, had to go our sep­a­rate ways.

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http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2011/07/27/to-foucault-a-daughter/

http://marksimpsonmetrosexualarchives.wordpress.com/2012/02/21/to-foucault-a-daughter/

If You’re Feeling Sinister

‘Hilary went to her death because she couldn’t think of anything to say
Everybody thought that she was boring, so they never listened anyway
Nobody was really saying anything of interest, she fell asleep
She was into S&M and bible studies
Not everyone’s cup of tea she would admit to me
Her cup of tea, she would admit to no one’

- Belle and Sebastian

As some of you know, I am currently writing a book called Death At The Mall , based on the work of Mark Simpson.

Simpson’s most popular book is his ‘psycho bio’ of Morrissey, Saint Morrissey. But, now I have finally read the whole of Simpson’s oeuvre, I realise that Saint Moz is my least favourite.

The reasons for my problems with the tome are largely personal. I’ve already said I hate Morrissey because…

And also I have worked in the music industry, and one of the things I disliked about it most – the thing which makes it go round of course – is this reification of individual ‘stars’ to godlike positions. Obviously Simpson was interrogating that process but I think in the end, Saint Morrissey contributed to the ‘hagiography’ (which is still a macho fagiography) of pop music rather than dismantling it.

My real passion for Mark Simpson’s work revolves round his theories of metrosexuality. And whilst Saint Morrissey contributes to those theories, particularly in its discussions of the narcissism of its subject, it does not really have metrosexuality as its central theme.

When it comes to pop music I think it is most illustrative of metrosexual culture when it is shiny, trashy, transexy,  in your face exhibitionist.

Morrissey, however much we reveal him to be a ‘tart’ or a showman, or a narcissist, or a gender bender, takes himself, his music and his words seriously. If he had have had a talent for literature I am sure he would have rather have been a poet or a novelist than a popstar, even though those activities would not have satisfied his ‘need to be loved’ as much as his pop career has.

I love this song (see above) by Belle and Sebastian ‘If you’re feeling sinister’, because it satirises that self-absorbed, ‘gothic’ attitude that characterises Morrissey and his fans. Why don’t you just get over yourself it seems to be asking. Well, because then we wouldn’t have such gems as Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now or I Am Hated For Loving.

Maybe I can’t cope with Saint Morrissey because I see too much of myself  in it. I certainly haven’t quite got over myself yet. But I think I’m trying.

I’m not sure where Simpson’s only ‘mainstream’ book is going to fit in my appreciation of him. I am not going to spend ages pulling it apart. It’s obviously a great piece of pop culture history. I noted recently, that it also might well have been his last work, if a certain quiet riot girl had not come along and encouraged Metrodaddy to release his Metrosexy thesis.

Perhaps I just didn’t want Morrissey to have the last word.

Foucault’s Daughter is going to have the last word.

Letters From An Alien -Facts and Fictions

‘In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in “The Golden Bowl” that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have no reason to doubt him or to wonder whether Maggie is “overreacting” to what she sees. James’s is a true report. The facts of imaginative literatures are as hard as the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist’s and the playwright’s and the poet’s word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer’s or the autobiographer’s or the historian’s or the journalist’s. In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios — there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.’

from Janet Malcolm, The SIlent Woman (Granta UK 1996), 155

I don’t know if  Foucault’s Daughter  would agree. In my novella I documented the ‘death of the author’ and I deliberately left many stones of the narrative unturned. I think there were alternative scenarios to the one I suggested. But none I guess beyond the reader and the text. Nobody could come back from the dead, or from ‘real life’, even if I’d mentioned them or used their words in my book, and tell me I was wrong. They were figments of my imagination.

Whereas in non-fiction, some people  will have a different  story to tell, and a contrasting  version of reported events. They will be able to refute the contents of the work. In fiction you can only read it differently.
http://daviddobbs.posterous.com/janet-malcolm-on-truthiness-in-fiction-v-nonf

A Home for an Orphan Girl

 

Foucault’s Daughter has found a home! She is going to be residing at the rather chaotic, exciting and a little bit dirty House of Zizek. Zizek press is the future!

I am not going to sell the book on Amazon due to the fact it is a copyright legal case waiting to happen. So it will remain on smashwords for free, but as a Zizek Title.

All she ever wanted was somewhere to call home.

‘SOFW mashes up the conventions of the novel but unlike, say, Cloud Atlas it doesn’t do it just to show off: it has run into a question that requires a novel to be butchered and splayed open and its entrails read to get the answer.’

http://zizekpress.com/2011/07/21/zizek-press-to-publish-scribbling-on-foucaults-walls-by-quiet-riot-girl/

http://zizekpress.com/2011/07/20/camera-lucida/

 

Letters From An Alien: Trick

 

There is this trick (you will have played it on yourself) where a writer writes something very personal and somehow manages to convince him/herself that on finishing it, it will magically turn into just another book. That is detached from the personal things it refers to. But that is the point when it becomes even more personal. How do we manage to pull that one on ourselves?

And there is another trick. This one is where I convinced myself that finishing the story would mean the story would be finished. It feels like now, it has only just begun.

Quel con!

Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls #1 Madness Is Childhood

I could not keep my patient QRG readers waiting any longer. So here is the first of three-parts of Foucault’s Daughter, aka Scribbling On Foucault’s Walls.

It is available FREE on smashwords:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/70119

I am busy trying to get an e-publisher at the moment, so if I am successful the whole novel/la (it is quite short for a novel) will be available to buy online soon!

Thanks everyone for your interest in this project. A reader is a valuable, and sometimes a dangerously powerful thing! As Foucault’s Daughter knows all too well…

Cemetery Gates: #Foucault’s Daughter On Youtube

Foucault’s Daughter is probably not made for the big screen. I think my novella is very much for reading. But, it does contain some choice clips from some wonderful films. I won’t give the story away by putting them in context, except that I think you may be able to see a common thread running through them… Lost Children? Alienation? ‘ Desir’?

From Bicycle Thieves, to 400 Blows, to Gone With The Wind, to Cemetery Gates, I think Foucault’s Daughter is stood at the cemetery gates of the 2oth century, feeling locked out of the new world and alone.

Foucault’s Daughter Exists!

I have just completed the first draft (Hopefully nearly the last one) of my  novel about Foucault’s Daughter.

Imagine for a moment, if I was one of those writers who got interviewed. And the interviewer asked me how Foucault’s Daughter came into being. I would find it a very difficult question to answer.You may realise why if you read the story.

But I am afraid, dear long-suffering QRG readers, that part of my answer would involve a one Mr Simpson. I don’t know what you know about Foucault. But he worked in a period and a place when intellectual discussion was not treated as weird, abhorrent even. He was surrounded by ‘peers’ with whom he developed long and lasting, sometimes turbulent ‘dialectic’ relationships.

If you had been interviewing or reading Foucault in the 1960s and 1970s for example, it is quite likely he would mention and refer to the work of Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan, just as much if not more than I talk and write about Mark Simpson. And, I do not know for sure, but I don’t think people then told Michel to go and ‘bum’ Barthes. Or marry him. Or ‘get a room’. Because that is what people who had ideas did. They discussed them with other people who had ideas in the same field.

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no

clothes. ”  — Michel Foucault

 

One of my papers from my Phd research was called ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. I did not know then that Foucault had made this statement. But I remember the stony silence when I gave my paper to a conference seminar. And I remember how the chair of the session ignored me and took questions from the floor to all the other speakers. I remember being ‘rejected’.

So, for those of you who are still interested in some kind of dialogue, and who are not put off by my ‘intellectual practice’ here is a blogpost by Mark Simpson from last year, which was one of the ‘key texts’ that set me off on the quest for Foucault’s Daughter. I don’t know if you will see what Lady Gaga and Alexander McQueen have to do with Foucault. Or if you will be moved as I was by some of Simpson’s words, or if you will glean any clues from my comments or his below the line, as to how it may have led to a germ of an idea. About a girl that did not or should not exist.

But I thought it would be one way of introducing her anyway.

http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/02/18/long-live-lady-gaga-and-the-mcqueen/#comment-11992

Letters From An Alien: The Queen Is Dead, Boys

http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/queen_is_dead.html
Dear Misters Simpson and Zeeland,

I haven’t finished with you yet.

One of the things I loved about The Queen Is Dead was the way it was written as if nobody would read it.  The letters you wrote read to me like intimate missives between two friends, as if they were meant for your eyes only. I felt at times a kind of flush of shame, reading that book, as if I was eavesdropping on a very private conversation, or reading someone’s personal diary, despite (or because of?) the sign on the front in red marker pen: PRIVATE! KEEP OUT!

The Queen Is Dead could in one sense have been the correspondance between two historical literary homos. It has that air of lost narratives, of  untold stories, hanging over it. The love that dare not speak its name. It might have been discovered after their deaths and published posthumously, without their consent or indeed their knowledge. I was flushed with another feeling on reading your words, gentlemen. I cannot describe it precisely except as a physical sensation- a tightening in my throat, and a heaviness in my heart. I suppose the nearest I can get in words is ‘loss’.

I have my own losses, that I heard echoing through  yours. I can’t pretend I didn’t transfer them a little, onto you. I have also been involved with a man who loved men, the kind of love you described, despite yourselves, so poignantly. And reading your letters, I felt a familiar stab of pain, that I used to feel with him, when I knew that he got something from his love for his brothers, that he could never get from me. I felt left out. Isn’t that queer? How can a reader feel left out from a story? But I did.

And onto that loss I/you/we have to add another. The loss that we all know is encroaching upon us. Death comes to us all, thankfully, as an everlasting life would probably be a grim affair. But no I mean the death of the homosexual. That man of letters, in breeches and boots. Who would write to his dear friend Sebastian,  pen poems to his lover, when he was supposed to be doing his accounts, or minding his children, or listening to his wife. You two meat chasers, as much as you have dragged yourselves into the neon lights of the twenty first century, you’re the last of a dying breed. You’re like two fine examples of a rare endangered species of bird, fluttering and chirping for dear life. And I am the ornithologist, in sensible shoes, cataloguing the demise of this poor, doomed creature that  she has come to know and love.  So spare a thought for me.

‘Be careful Steve, if gay studies are like murder novels then you’d better watch out for the final plot twist in which the hunter becomes the hunted, the analyser the analysed, the deducer the deducted.’ – Mark Simpson said.

It is too late Steve. The hunter has already become the hunted, the analyser the analysed, the deducer the deducted. You are not going to get away with it that easily.

There is a chance, too, that you may find my investigations irritating and intrusive. But as you know full well, queer theory has always been about intruding on the establishment:

‘David Halperin talks in Saint Foucault about ‘queering theory’ and this suggests to me that queer theory has always been about, in a way, gaining erotic pleasure from theory (and that if it is to have a future it needs to be fisted); indeed, Ed Cohen, with double entendre intended offers the motto for queer theorists: “we fuck with categories”.

http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2007/03/fisting-and-other-gifts-for-graduate.html

There was one point in reading QUEEN that I began to count the number of women you mentioned in your letters. I wasn’t bored of all the bumming, I promise, I just started to wonder. That is what I do. Anyway, you mentioned Judith Butler (the most masculine dykiest dyke I can think of), Camille Paglia (who is probably actually a man), Lady Ferry (a M to F trans woman) and a porn star whose name I have forgotten.  Oh, and some nameless faceless ‘mothers’, the ones you have all spent your lives trying to escape, and ended up becoming. I am not citing these examples as an indication of a weakness in your story. I love cock as much as the next homo. But I think it is a subject that warrants further investigation, don’t you?

That was a lie. I do think it was a weakness in your story. Especially from the literary point of view. How can I fully trust a treatment of queerness, of homosexuality in literature, that does not even mention Goblin Market by Rossetti, or Nightwood by Barnes, or Sexing The Fucking Cherry by Winterson? Walt Whitman is all very well, but stood out there alone on the beach in his birthday suit in the cold, singing his ‘body electric’, he looks a bit naked, a bit limp, a bit emasculated.  It is something that ‘macho fags’ the world over never realise, and what you of all people should know – that all this obsessive focussing on the ‘masculine’, it actually makes you seem so very … faggy. Your version of homosexuality, my dear homos, in emphasising the importance of the phallus, that which makes you ‘men’, it ignores something that only a cockless cunt can truly know. It fails to acknowledge  the fact that queerness is as much about what we are missing, as what we have dangling between our legs (not to mention where we put that which dangles.  But you don’t need me to tell you about that).

‘Nobody knows what I lack’ wrote Plath.  Except she did know, didn’t she?.  And so do I.

Maybe think of it as it being time for you to take a taste of your own medicine, boys. Foucault’s Daughter is here to ensure the dosage is correct (we would not want to make a fatal mistake), and to make sure you both swallow.

I haven’t finished with you yet.  And anyway, you’re asking for it.

With love from QRG (on behalf of Foucault’s Daughters everywhere).

Metrosexy, Mark Simpson’s latest book, is out on May 24th on Amazon Kindle.

http://metrosexy.wordpress.com/2011/05/14/metrosexy-coming-soon/

Letters From An Alien: A Search For Courtly Love?

Michel Foucault:

The experience of heterosexuality, at least since the Middle Ages, has always consisted of two panels: On the one hand, the panel of courtship in which the man seduces the woman: and, on the other, the panel of the sexual act itself. Now the great heterosexual literature of the West has had to do essentially with the panel of amorous courtship, that is, above all, with tha which precedes the sexual act. All the work of intellectual and cultural refinement, all the aesthetic elaboration of the West, were aimed at courtship. This is the reason for the relative poverty of literary, cultural and aesthetic appreciation of the sexual act as such.

In contrast, the modern homosexual experience has no relation at all to courtship. This was not the case in ancient Greece however.  For the Greeks, courtship between men was more important than courtship between men and women (Think of Socrates and Alcibiades). But in Western Christian culture homosexuality was banished and therefore had to concentrate all its energy on the act of sex itself. Homosexuals were not allowed to elaborate a system of courtship because the cultural expression necessary for such an elaboration was denied them. The wink on the street, the split-second decision to get it on, the speed w ith which homosexual relations are consummated: all these are products of an interdiction. So when a homosecual culture and literature began to develip it was natural for it to focuse on the most ardent and heated aspect of homosexual relations.

Q:

I’m reminded of Cassanova’s famous expression that ‘the best moment of love is when one is climing the stairs’. One can hardly imagine a homosexual today making that remark.

Michel Foucault:

Exactly. Rather, he would say something like: ‘the best moment of love is when the lover leaves in a taxi’… It is when the act is over and the boy is gone that one begins to fream about the warmth of his body, the quality of his smile, the tone of his voice. This is why the great homosexual writers of our culture (Cocteau, Genet, Burroughs) can write so elegantly about the sexual act itself, because the homosexual imagination is for the most part concerned with reminiscing about the act rather than anticipating it. And, as I said earlier, this is all due to very concrete and practical considerations and says nothing about the intrinsic nature of homosexuality.

I have been reminded of this passage in one of my favourite interviews with Foucault, recently. I think it sheds some light on two questions I asked. The first was about why homo literature often seems so ‘romantic’ about homo-sex, when homosex in reality tends to be  so ‘unromantic’: pragmatic, casual, ‘un-emotional’. Foucault’s response might be that this is because homo writers always seem to be looking back wistfully on the sexual act. The way it was conceived tends/tended to be rushed, illicit, snatched in a stolen moment, rather than the result of an elaborate and often public courtship, as a heterosexual sexual act might be.

The other question I asked, that it reminds me of, I didn’t actually ask. I am asking it now.  This relates to your stories of being a ‘straight-chaser’, of those men for whom ‘it is my first time, mate. I’m nervous’ might be a common refrain. About the questions you may ask yourself about why you are so intrigued by their nervousness, even more than the actual act of sex with them. If it arrives. I wonder, if straight chasers are in some way chasing that ‘courtship’ that in modern times has been denied gay men (who have had to spend some of their time skulking in bushes, quite literally, in order to have sex with other men). The way that maybe more ‘traditional’ gay men might also be chasing  courtly love, by chasing the ‘rights’ and rituals of straight people, such as dating, engagement, marriage (divorce).

I feel more sympathetic to those ‘straight’ gays after hearing you and reading this interview with Foucault. Though not to the fundamentalist verve with which they pursue their aims, at the expense of those whose version of ‘romance’ is a little more dark and mysterious, dappled as it is with the shadows of illicit sex and unexplored sexualities amongst seemingly straight men.

Just as Genet and Baldwin created and reported on the  romance of the sexual act that is gone, the warmth of his body and the memory of his smile, maybe you and other homo-romantics are trying to reclaim a romance that has been denied you, the  traditionally hetero-romance of ‘will she won’t she?’ the waiting, the hope, and sometimes the bittersweet disappointment of coitus not achieved.

Maybe the internet adds to and also takes away from that romance. It tends to in most situations, be both a promise of, and a desultory ruiner of all hope of anything resembling poetics.

I wish he was here, still, to look upon this world with wonder and horror and annoyance and laughter.  I wish I didn’t have to be always looking back at the memory of the warmth of his words.

2nd Image: Still from Genet’s Chant d’amour