A note on Belle de Jour. posted by Richard Seymour

Look, before we go any further, Belle de Jour is not a fucking call girl. A call girl takes a man's manky cock in her mouth while resisting the urge to throw up on his balls. This helps pay the bills, even if it carries the risk of rape and syphallus. She doesn't go home and write perfumed, tart little missives with occasional literary reference and jokes about the punters. She doesn't have her posting dates in French in a dilute gesture of sophistication. She doesn't stack up Buñuel DVDs in her sitting room. She doesn't wax ironic about her middle class background and her middle-brow literary proclivities, or exude faint lefty doxa. Belle de Jour is a man peddling male fantasies for guilty liberals - the moral masochists who like to be told what bad boys and girls they are for having politically incorrect indulgences.

Second, Belle de Jour is not even very interesting. It is dilute tittilation for the prurient sophisticate, the urbane masturbator who likes to wind up a satisfactory wank with a crepe and copy of McEwan's latest. It is not merely shit, but infrequently updated, reminding one of the joke from Annie Hall, about two old women eating in a restaurant: "What terrible food they have here!" "Yes, and such small portions!"

Thirdly, this colossal anus, this epic non-entity, this vapid Middle Mind with a gap in his being that would amply accomodate the tackle of a blue whale, has a book out. I just saw it in the bargain bookshop today, where I occasionally malinger in the hope of finding something cheap and tatty - I found it alright. Blogs shouldn't become books, because books cost money and if you're that interested you can always go to the internet cafe and scan the archive for fifteen minutes, which is about as much time as it would take. Still, at least by taking money for this drivel Belle de Jour has finally proved to be some kind of whore.

A ruse and a hoax, that terminal blog has to be the most hateful practical joke ever played on the gullibility and narcissism of bloggery, particularly the gossipy Guardian-scanning section of it. No, I'm perfectly well, why do you ask?