June 22, 2004

Fucking for a living, and then some.... This is one of my favourite blogs, if only it was updated more frequently I might have a sex life. ;-) Check out her archives and such. Ah, the vagaries of the publishing business when you are restricted to being an anonymous whore. Writing a book is maybe harder than sucking dick. On a long-term basis, that is.
  • The blog even won a Guardian Blog-of-the-Year award in 2004. I was amused when her book deal made her worthy of a DPS in the Times devoted to the salicious question of who she really was (as no one has met her), and if she was, in fact, a call girl at all, and not some American bloke with a hobby. Which lead to close-readings of her entries of the kind usually reserved for Eliot or Joyce: she uses up-inflections at the end of her sentences 47% of the time! Must be from the Midwest! The scandal!
  • It may be gratuitous, but NSFW. Also, that site is fabulous. The writing is superb. I hope she's the real deal.
  • Did anyone figure out who she was? There was a newspaper article about Belle du Jour here a couple of months ago and from memory the writer believed 'she' was really a published British male author. He matched the style and syntax from sections of the blog to segments in the author's books.
  • What it's like to have people think BdJ is you. I am Belle de Jour. Those people aren't me! I think a real writer would take the trouble to find out it ought to be du and not de, and that's proof enough for me /pedant
  • > it ought to be du and not de de is correct, as in 'during the day' and as in Luis Buñuel's movie.
  • Hum. I suppose I was thinking of her being the Belle of the day, like in a restaurant a soup.
  • Me too, PF. Plus I know no French.
  • Up inflections? The Mid-West? In London that's a far better indication that someone is a Kiwi, where I believe the whole linguistic feature more or less started in modern English, anyway.
  • Rodgerd, there was a whole wack of semantic tics in her writing that raised questions of her citizenship (not just the up-tones, I just couldn't remember the others although I think one was the use of "already" and "alright"). Her response to the accusations of Americanism was that she had spent some time in New York (I think), and picked up a lot from that and from movies/books/TV.