A 34 year-old Bristol based research scientist called Dr Brooke Magnanti has outed herself as the ‘real’ author of the Belle de Jour blog and books. These texts ‘documented’ the life of a high-class London call girl. Dr Magnanti claims her writing is an authentic record of the time she spent working as a prostitute to fund the final phase of her PhD research. I haven’t looked deeply into the various proofs that Dr Magnanti is Belle, but plenty of news journalists have and they seem convinced by them. So while I can’t say with absolutely certainty that Dr Magnanti is Belle, it seems to me to be rather unlikely that she isn’t.
One thing I am absolutely certain of is that I didn’t write the Belle de Jour blog and books despite the claims to the contrary made by various conspiracy nuts. Although the media (most notably The Evening Standard and The Guardian) ran with this story, it didn’t originate with them and I was never under the impression they believed it to be true; they covered the claim without taking any very strong line on it because it made a good story. I benefited from the publicity and sold books as a result, while the journalists in question were paid and generated profits for their bosses.
Curiously, it appears that the majority of those who made and repeated the claim that I was Belle de Jour as if they personally believed it, did so out of spite and malice. It is therefore ironic that their activities helped rather than harmed me. The endless conspiracy theories propagated by these bozos were so ludicrous – involving as they did interminable and utterly fantastic international ‘criminal’ and ‘political’ outrages – that no one took them seriously. It was even claimed that when I temporarily took the position of writer-in-residence at Strathclyde University, I’d ‘fled’ to Scotland in a vain attempt to avoid arrest by the cops. Despite the linked assertion that my incarceration for endless heinous sex crimes was imminent, I remain at liberty…
In fact, beyond a handful of nutters, no one who’d looked into the matter ever believed I was Belle de Jour. You only had to compare my prose to Belle’s to see that I couldn’t possibly have written the tedious shit ‘she’ spews out. My view of Belle’s work is that it is mindless bollocks aimed at middle-class airheads. Had I not been publicly accused of having composed this garbage, I wouldn’t have bothered looking at it, and so it shouldn’t be necessary to add I would never have bothered writing it. That said, if Dr Magnanti is indeed (as I think likely) Belle, then hats-off to her for evading detection for so long and doing something useful in the area of cancer research. Since her prose is so unappealing, she should quit writing and stick to medical matters instead.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Belle de Jour, Brooke Magnanti, cancer research, conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theory, Diary of a London Call Girl, Dr Brooke Magnanti, Evening Standard, Guardian, prostitutes, prostitution, Stewart Home
Yeah sure, we’re complete nuts. But why would cops want to undermine Home’s efforts? And who cares whether someone who’s not interested in the content of what we’ve posted thinks we’re cops or not? We certainly don’t. They’re not our intended audience either. Obsessive, yes, we often are and on many things. Incidentally, dig your language skills – the only sentence that wasn’t a double-insulter was your last. Anyway, the hell with you if you’re not interested in content, Mr Knows the Ropes. “If you talk about psy-ops, paranoids will think you’re a cop” is the most ridiculous thing we’ve heard all day. What else shouldn’t we talk about? So you know all about psy-ops, right, but are so suss you don’t talk about it? What do you talk about? Practical history in the fucking night-clubs?
Having gone to such great lengths to detail who your intended audience isn’t, care to share as to precisely who are your intended audience (bearing in mind where you’re posting)?
We can’t allow anyone to be as cynical as Home, if we do he will undermine all the moral foundations underpinning capitalist society… and besides he might even trick some dim-wit counter-revolutionaries into extending the comments on one of his blogs to page three! You’d have to be a real idiot to fall for that one, so we won’t!
PAGE 3!
Page 3, that’s me! But don’t forget: “Home wrote the complete works of Shakespeare”. Keep repeating it and if you’re a nutter you’ll start believing it, but most people won’t just as they don’t believe he is Belle de Jour….
Some of the comments here look like they come from the Principia Dialectica corner — yawwwwnnnnnn……
The Home ‘critics’ here seem to think they have all rights to how Debord et al are understood and percieved by ‘history’, and that everyone else who has their take on it is somehow a ‘phony’ or a lackey or a fake of some kind. But it’s boring. And their ( apparent ) stagnation,ossification and deification of people like Postone is boring too.
And no, I am not a “Stewart Home groupie” as you characterise those who like his books.
Home seems to have a far sharper, funnier, more interesting take on the absurdity and redundance of all right wing schools of thought and left wing schools of thought than many — that clearly annoys you. He can also see , like many of us, how the two ‘extremes’ end up being as vacuous, sinister and banal as each other.
And don’t forget that Home wrote The Complete Works Of Shakespeare in the evening, when he was taking time out from being Sir Francis Bacon and writing up the experiments that become the foundational works of modern science. And, of course, Home also wrote the Oxford English Dictionary.
Now Wombat 92 has been told the score, they’d have to be a real idiot to take it to page 4; Wombat is a nutter but are they enough of a nutter to do just that?
But page 3, PAGE 3, it’s the place for me!
Well, speaking plainly now, the image of a frozen reality that nevertheless is caught up in an unremitting, ghostly movement at once becomes meaningful when this reality is dissolved into the process of which man is the driving force — That can be seen only from the standpoint of one who sees the complete breakdown of any semblance of what we understood, and perceived the left/right dialectic to be, because the meaning of these tendencies is now laid naked within the ‘phantomic’ presence of globalization in the early 21st century.
Dialectica Principia and Postone, in their ‘unremitting seriousness’ fail to comprehend that.
[...] on, if you believe what you read in The Standard, you may well have been hoaxed into thinking I wrote the Belle de Jour blog and books, so it isn’t exactly surprising their Nigel Wingrove and Redemption Films story is [...]