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!
Comments
Comment by Mobile Raver on 2009-11-17 01:59:09 +0000
At least we know that it was you that wrote the Gnostic Gospels!
Comment by Zen Master K on 2009-11-17 02:01:31 +0000
And the complete works of Shakespeare….
Comment by msmarmitelover on 2009-11-17 02:19:17 +0000
Belle de jour wrote amputee sex didn’t she?
Comment by Michael Roth on 2009-11-17 06:13:04 +0000
Stewart (if that is your name??), I never knew that you were a fit bird, and a doctor to boot!
Comment by Michael Roth on 2009-11-17 06:14:31 +0000
I first heard accusations that you were the ‘Belle’ a few years ago. At the time, of what I knew of your writing/schedule/etc., the claim seemed quite ludicrous. Jump forward a few years and I was again dumbstruck to see the accusations pop up on this blog several months ago or so. If I remember correctly, these accusers really became enraged whenever you denied you were ‘Belle’, insisting otherwise. I must admit as a spectator, it was very entertaining. I would imagine their red-faced, foaming at the mouth, twisted expressions as they hammered on their keyboards, and laugh to myself. It’s these simple pleasures …
Comment by arse on 2009-11-17 11:07:56 +0000
You’d never have done it because of the aesthetics? Because it was bad prose? What, even if it made lots of money? Yeah right. Look at all the shit you spew out. Look at your unscrupulous readiness to play up to the respect your mug readers have for “news journalists” and “medical” researchers, which you know as well as any real radical does, are a bunch of pea-brained crawlers working for big business. Cancer research, my arse – generally funded by big tobacco and the food industry and government funding-distributors working for ’em. Magnanti is a shill. What were the international criminal and political allegations, by the way? Never heard of them. Wanted for sex crimes, fled to Scotland? No-one can say you don’t keep your image under attentive management. Magnanti is a shill… The prose has your fingerprints all over it…
Comment by Joseph Kessel on 2009-11-17 11:22:37 +0000
I already cured cancer!
Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-11-17 12:01:43 +0000
Look Michael, here’s ‘Arse’ back to entertain you, so you don’t need to go looking back at the Chris Gray blogs for a chuckle… And it seems ‘Arse’ hasn’t done his or her research properly because they don’t know about the idiots making those allegations in comments all over the web, all linking me to Belle. But perhaps “Arse” is just pretending, perhaps it’s all ‘a joke’, although if I had his or her mentality (fortunately I don’t), then I’d accuse them of being much worse than somebody’s useful idiot… Anyway, here’s fun for those that in the 18th and 19th centuries would have paid for admission to a lunatic asylum to be entertained by the crazies…. Sings sweetly: “Conspiracy theory it’s such a delusion, conspiracy theory there’s too much confusion…”
Comment by Mark Nugent on 2009-11-17 12:27:18 +0000
The amount of charlatans in society always makes me suspicious of people who claim “authorship” dubious. Good skewer Stewart.
Comment by arse on 2009-11-17 12:36:43 +0000
Just the claimers Mark, or the deniers too? God you must be sharp-minded and a man of the world, seeing through charlatans and stuff!
As for those claims, Stewart, so you didn’t have a hand in any of them then? Or in producing anything related to Sarah Hilton that even the foolish Andrew Orlowski managed to suss? You take your punters for mugs – and you’re right.
Comment by fi on 2009-11-17 12:48:40 +0000
I dyed my hair raspberry pink today, I looks quite nice actually
Comment by Cassandra Thomas on 2009-11-17 13:03:21 +0000
obviously you weren’t Belle. the money didn’t show 😉
Comment by Anne Pigalle Bis on 2009-11-17 13:13:16 +0000
no no… i am belle de jour ( bunuel style ) – i used to hang out in these gardens featured in the intro scene of the film – for real…x
Comment by David Flint on 2009-11-17 14:18:36 +0000
I’m Belle de Jour and so’s my wife!
Comment by Tania Glyde on 2009-11-17 15:07:51 +0000
I’m actually Belle de Jour and I claim five pounds off myself.
Comment by Sean Diamond on 2009-11-17 16:29:07 +0000
Funny how all the haters who pop up on here from time to time never seem to have the guts to post their real names. Could the likes of “b” and “arse” be will self in disguise ?
Comment by Kate Muir on 2009-11-17 19:17:47 +0000
Damn, I wish I was Belle de Jour!
Comment by Russell Brand on 2009-11-17 19:19:58 +0000
Oh I shagged Belle a few times, even though she’s a bit older than the chicks I usually go for.
Comment by Christopher Nosnibor on 2009-11-17 19:22:44 +0000
What? You’ll be telling us you didn’t write ‘Stone Circle’ or any of the Harry Potter books next!
Comment by The ghost on the coast on 2009-11-17 22:10:35 +0000
“Ask not for whom the Belle tolls; ask what you can do for your country.” – J.F.Hemmingway, Secretary of the Inferior, 1939-85.
Comment by Paul ‘Poland’ Rogers on 2009-11-17 22:38:41 +0000
I wasn’t feeling myself when I left the comments above as Arse, who is one of my 666 multiple personalities. I meant to write Lisa Hilton not Sarah Hilton… but then all posh totty looks the same to me, I mean him, my other personality Arse. Also I’d like to point out that I, I mean Arse or should that be Richard Hunt, made a mistake when they suggested Mobile-Home might have left the comments about having fled to Scotland himself… people might jump from that to the conclusion that perhaps Mobile-Home left the comments from Arse and B too, except I know he didn’t coz I did in one of my many split-personalities, or I think I did anyway, and if I didn’t it must have been Mobile-Home what done it! Oh and I hate Ford Prefect too! And look, I’ve used my real name, except I’m not really Paul Rogers, I’m, I’m, I’m, well I’m not sure who I am but I know I hate all you mugs who ain’t nearly so clever as a conspiracy theorist like me who has seen through all the lies. It’s all lies, lies, the media it’s all lies!
The Gemstone File proposes that Aristotle Onassis, Joseph P. Kennedy, and other prominent figures were involved in various schemes to forward a vast global conspiracy, involving the Mafia and corrupt politicians, brutal oil and drug cartels, rogue military operations, and more. It also posits that early in 1957, Aristotle Onassis had Howard Hughes kidnapped from his Beverly Hills Hotel bungalow; that Hughes suffered a massive brain injury during the forcible kidnapping, and that Hughes was subsequently a virtual prisoner of Onassis on Skorpios and injected regularly with morphine, while Onassis took over the operation of Hughes’s considerable financial affairs, including airlines and U.S. defense contracting. (At the time, Onassis had a permanent suite rented at the same hotel, along with his many other residences around the globe. Thus he was a “neighbor” of Howard Hughes, and in a position to conceive of, plan, and have the kidnap executed more readily.)
In order to cover up Howard Hughes’s sudden disappearance from public view, including his career as a ladies’ man among Hollywood’s leading ladies, a phony “marriage” to actress Jean Peters in Tonopah, Nevada was arranged, with the help of Paul Laxalt. Laxalt later rode this assistance to a career as Governor of Nevada, and later, a U.S. Senate seat. A series of doubles played “Hughes” whenever necessary.
“Hughes” (i.e., Onassis acting as “Hughes”) suddenly became a major purchaser of Las Vegas casinos, in line with Onassis’s previous gambling operations in pre-Castro Cuba and in Monaco. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute was created to serve as a major money-laundering money funnel (tax-free, private, not subject to any monitoring by anyone.) Its true purpose was covered up by generous donations to medical research and also to cultural institutions, but only a small percentage of the amount of money drained from the U.S. economy.
One controversial aspect of the Gemstone File is its portrayal of Onassis as the main force behind the election of John F. Kennedy as President, and subsequently, Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. According to Bruce Roberts’ Gemstone papers, Lee Harvey Oswald was a participant in the JFK assassination plan. He was linked to the CIA, and to Mafia connections in New Orleans. However, the role he was destined to play in the assassination was as the patsy. The Gemstone File names Jimmy Fratianno, Johnny Roselli, and Eugene Brading as the real shooters.
When Robert F. Kennedy decided to run for the Presidency, Aristotle Onassis ordered that he be assassinated. A hypnotized Sirhan Sirhan was allegedly set up to be the ostensible shooter. His wild shots peppered the room, but none of them hit Kennedy. According to the documents, the real shooter was Thane Cesar, a security guard at General Motors, which was secretly owned by Onassis, who was “lent” for the occasion to act as Robert Kennedy’s bodyguard. Cesar was walking right behind Kennedy as they entered the Pantry area. While Sirhan Sirhan’s shots flew around the room, Cesar lifted a small palm gun and shot Kennedy behind the ear. “The Second Gun,” a documentary by Ted Chirach, covers this scenario.
Roberts’ Gemstone papers also detail the involvement of Joseph P. Kennedy with the Mafia, and with Onassis. John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy attempted to break away from Onassis and the Mafia, and the CIA, and that is the basic reason they were shot.
Comment by The ghost on the coast on 2009-11-17 23:03:07 +0000
I thought the law. Can’t say it did me any favours.
Comment by Half-Baked Moron’s B-hind (AKA Arse) on 2009-11-17 23:39:05 +0000
And Mobile-Home wrote the Old Testament and The Koran, so we should impeach him now. And also he doesn’t eat regular meals, or go to church! He has also engaged in fornication out of wedlock. What’s more he smells. And he’s a nerd. He’s a loser. And a wanker! I HATE him, but most of all I HATE him for being so much better than me and for causing me to be obsessed with him. Also he’s stupid!
Comment by Raymond Anderson on 2009-11-18 00:01:57 +0000
One of the greatest put downs I ever heard was: “sorry, that’s about as interesting as Charlie Drake’s last fart.”
Comment by Laxative on 2009-11-18 00:23:32 +0000
@arse. I though you were supposed to be the bozo with verbal diarrhoea. What’s the matter? Do you need an enema or have you finally realised you’ve made a complete tit of yourself?
Verbal diarrhoea: a serious disease which, once it has control of a person, causes them to spew forth incoherent babble from the bowels of the voicebox. Often extremely frustrating for the victim and extremely hilarious for the observer.
An enema (plural enemata or enemas) is the procedure of introducing liquids into the rectum and colon via the anus. The increasing volume of the liquid causes rapid expansion of the lower intestinal tract, often resulting in very uncomfortable bloating, cramping, powerful peristalsis, a feeling of extreme urgency and complete evacuation of the lower intestinal tract.
Enemas can be carried out as treatment for medical conditions, such as constipation and encopresis, and as part of some alternative health therapies. They are also used to administer certain medical or recreational drugs. Enemas are also used for erotic purposes, particularly to prepare for anal sex, and as part of BDSM activities.
Comment by Poop Report on 2009-11-18 00:27:53 +0000
i have the shits big time, i came on this blog and worked my mouth off on the comments and i felt really poorly the following day and i’ve had the shits ever since. …
Comment by This Is Not Murray Bookchin on 2009-11-18 10:35:09 +0000
Have you ever wondered which hurts the most: saying something and wishing you had not, or saying nothing, and wishing you had?
Comment by Dr Brooke Magnanti on 2009-11-18 13:03:30 +0000
We don’t need to be clever to learn your lies
We only have to listen, open up our eyes
Try to be honest, get kicked in the face
But if you cheat you’re just a rat in the race
I’m an upstart
Hey whatcha gonna do
I’m an upstart
Listen I’m talking to you
Seek out an identity
You alienate society
Face the facts, why not admit it
How can you be outrageous when your mother won’t allow it?
Comment by Belle de Jour on 2009-11-18 13:28:58 +0000
If Brooke Magnanti isn’t Belle de Jour then Michael K must be the Queen of Sheba!
Comment by Lisa Hilton on 2009-11-18 13:42:05 +0000
No, I’m Belle de Jour and Dave Kelso-Mitchell is the Queen of Sheba!
Comment by Frosty The Snowman on 2009-11-18 14:05:03 +0000
Aristotle Onassis didn’t really die, his death was faked, and he wrote Belle de Jour. Onassis is Mister Big and he’s behind everything including the complete works of Shakespeare!
Comment by The Queen of Sheba on 2009-11-18 14:34:40 +0000
I’ll buy that for a dollar.
Comment by fi on 2009-11-18 14:35:23 +0000
I think I’ll become a Christian. I already look like one.
Comment by dave kelso-mitchell on 2009-11-18 16:12:29 +0000
For any American friends reading this, the word ‘arse’ is a British word roughly equivalent to the American ‘ass’ (as in ‘asshole’).
But you’d probably figured that out from the comments being left.
Comment by oldrope on 2009-11-18 16:48:12 +0000
Hey, Trip didn’t write the blog or the books, but he did spend 14 months around 2003 having sex for money whilst working as a high class call girl.
By weird and ironic coincidence he also spent the time between 27 September 2007 to 15 November 2007 pretending to be Billie Piper.
Which is another weird coincidence since Trip doesn’t even write this blog, Billie Piper does.
All of which is a weird coincidence since I don’t believe in coincidence.
Comment by Christopher Nosnibor on 2009-11-18 18:57:00 +0000
…and I couldn’t possibly comment on the rumours that I in fact wrote much of the work credited to ‘Stewart Home’ (apart from that penned by Richard Allen, of course).
Comment by dave kelso-mitchell on 2009-11-18 19:31:29 +0000
Ha – but I’ve just realised that Nosnibor spelled sideways is ‘Nibonosr’.
Sprunggg!
Comment by The ‘Fake’ Lady Black of Crossharbour (Isle of Dogs) on 2009-11-18 21:24:43 +0000
Actually I’m Belle de Jour…and I’m also once, twice, three times a lady, even if stuck up toffs think I’m no Lady at all! And just wait until Conrad proves that the Chicago trial was a stitch up, gets out of jail and we sue the arse off every stuck-up fucker who told lies about us and called me an Anglo-Canadian Amalda Marcos… Tossers!
Comment by Therese on 2009-11-18 22:14:33 +0000
Next you will be trying to tell us you did not write Sarah Palin’s book you rich shady crawling little grub…
Comment by I Was Paris Hilton’s Double on 2009-11-18 22:30:16 +0000
…or telling us that airheads are like so last year!
Comment by Joseph Kessel on 2009-11-18 22:44:36 +0000
And don’t forget that the real reason I wrote Belle de Jour is to prove that you can’t fool all the people all the time! This appears to be a lesson that Conrad Black has yet to fully learn despite being jailed!
Comment by Stephen Hawking on 2009-11-18 22:50:36 +0000
Did you know that William Shakespeare is in fact the author of the works of Shakespeare? That said, we do know that others sometimes revised the texts and that Thomas Middleton in performing such work on Macbeth contributed the witches scene to the Scottish play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shakespeare
Comment by J. Edgar Hoover on 2009-11-18 23:12:29 +0000
I’ve had my men investigate Stewart Home and I have no doubt that he is both a red and a subversive, not to mention the real author of the Belle de Jour books and blog. Home can do anything but he can’t do everything, and since he was born several hundred years after the works attributed to Shakespeare were composed, my men have concluded he did not write Macbeth or any of the other plays by the same hand. He is, however, a master of disguise and I was so jealous of his collection of dresses that I had my men steal them. I’ve destroyed them all trying to get into them since they are way too small for me. So forget Henry, stick with J. Edgar, a hoover name you can trust! And if you have any spare dresses lying around, don’t forget to send them to me at FBI HQ!
Comment by That Boy Owen on 2009-11-18 23:24:34 +0000
Come, Brooke, come feel my love muscle!
Comment by Hugh Grant on 2009-11-18 23:46:58 +0000
I wrote Belle de Jour to prove I could have been what I always wanted to be – A WOMAN!
Comment by Divine Brown on 2009-11-18 23:53:15 +0000
He could have been… could have been… whereas I have been an actor among other things……
Comment by Jude Law on 2009-11-18 23:56:29 +0000
Actually I wrote the Belle de Jour book and blogs to prove I’m a consummate actor, and I could sustain something like this over 6 years!
Comment by Dr Brooke Magnanti presents The National Lottery In Drag on 2009-11-19 00:04:58 +0000
Belle de Jour – it could be YOU!
Comment by Eddie Izzard on 2009-11-19 00:06:25 +0000
I’m a transvestite, get me out of here!
Comment by The Singing Nun on 2009-11-19 00:09:47 +0000
My dick is so big, it was overthrown by a military coup. It’s now known as the Democratic Republic of My Dick.
Comment by The Cross-Dressing Ronald Reagan on 2009-11-19 00:14:19 +0000
Three vampires walk into a bar. One orders a blood on the rocks. Another orders a double blood. The third simply asks for a mug of hot water.
“Why didn’t you order blood like everyone else?” asks the bartender.
The vampire pulls out a tampon and says, “I’m making tea!”
Comment by Victor Grayson on 2009-11-19 00:19:05 +0000
I do not believe that we are divinely destined to be drudges. We must break the rules of the rich and take our destinies into our own hands.
Comment by jim seventies on 2009-11-19 00:28:32 +0000
I didn’t read any of the above posts
Comment by Clyde Tolson on 2009-11-19 00:31:21 +0000
“Stewart Home is my alter ego. He can read my mind.”
Comment by fi on 2009-11-19 02:27:59 +0000
‘I think I’ll become a Christian. I already look like one.’
I didn’t write this.
Comment by Leo Tolstoy on 2009-11-19 04:23:53 +0000
Chumley, why didn’t I know sooner? You could have written friggin’ War and Peace and saved me alot of time, I coulda been sexting…
Comment by fi on 2009-11-19 06:25:24 +0000
‘I think I’ll become a Christian. I already look like one.’
i didn’t write that
Comment by The Singing Postman on 2009-11-19 07:20:26 +0000
I’m a high class prostitute but I’ve had to subsidise my income by working as a research scientist. It’s just not possible for a girl to earn enough money at an honest profession any more.
Comment by fi on 2009-11-19 07:24:25 +0000
‘I think I’ll become a Christian. I already look like one.’
I didn’t write that. At least, I think I didn’t. It’s hard some days to remember exactly who I am…
Comment by The totally real Tom McCarthy on 2009-11-19 08:05:43 +0000
Everyone knows I wrote Macbeth; it was even in Frieze Magazine.
Comment by Macbeth on 2009-11-19 09:26:29 +0000
What bloody man is that!
Comment by Alf Garnett on 2009-11-19 09:27:29 +0000
What bloody man is that!
Comment by arse on 2009-11-19 09:29:41 +0000
I am paranoid that a bird will shit on my head someday and I don’t know why…
Comment by Alf Garnett on 2009-11-19 09:31:16 +0000
If a bird shat on my head I’d slap the dirty cow. You should be more careful about who you’re going out with my son!
Comment by Charles Atlas on 2009-11-19 09:49:14 +0000
I was a 97 pound weakling until I wrote Belle de Jour: memoirs of a high class London call girl (although actually we call them hookers in The States, and in reality I was being punked out as a rent boy….)
Comment by Friends of Lucie Blackman, The Real Belle de Jours on 2009-11-19 10:26:06 +0000
Turning tricks is my favourite activity. I can’t go a day without turning a trick because I need the money to feed my drug habit!
Comment by This Is Not Xaviera Hollander on 2009-11-19 10:29:01 +0000
But I’m a “Happy Hooker” and I wrote Belle de Jour…..
Comment by We Are Not The Barclay Brothers! on 2009-11-19 11:19:37 +0000
Whoring may be one way to earn a living, but it is not the best way to become seriously rich. What have we got? A reclusive billionaire life-style in London, Monaco and the Channel Islands. A media portfolio – we own The Telegraph Group, and we’ll use it more sensibly than a criminal idiot like Conrad Black! Not to mention all our other business interests – we own the Woolworths name now too, and Littlewoods, both bought from bankruptcy!
Comment by Duncan Webb on 2009-11-19 11:53:11 +0000
Actually Dr Brooke Magnanti didn’t write the Belle de Jour book and blogs, isn’t it apparent to everyone that only Martin Amis is capable of writing prose that bad and that tedious? However, Magnanti did work as a high class prostitute when completing her PhD and the list of her clients is a lot more interesting than the ‘real’ identity of Belle de Jour. I tell you the stuff I’ve got on Magnanti’s men is dynamite – top politicians, clerics, gangsters, spies and enemy diplomats, all at the same time. Once we get this past the newspaper libel lawyers you’ll witness the greatest scandal since the Profumo Affair! Heck, she even slept with Jack Spot, Billy Hill, Ablert Dimes and me!
Comment by The Other Margaret Thatcher on 2009-11-19 12:21:32 +0000
Are you all stupid? I wrote Belle de Jour. I needed something to keep me amused after I retired from politics!
Comment by Mary Whitehouse on 2009-11-19 12:28:46 +0000
Actually I wrote Belle de Jour to expose the evils of prostitution. Have you all forgotten about W. T. Stead and his crusading articles in The Pall Mall Gazette entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Maiden_Tribute_of_Modern_Babylon
Comment by Jilly Johnson on 2009-11-19 12:30:38 +0000
They are all lying. I wrote Belle de Jour as a way of making cash once I was too old to work in the front line of the glamour industry!
Comment by The Fake Sammy Marshall on 2009-11-19 12:32:53 +0000
Actually I wrote Belle de Jour and I’m still working the front end of the glamour industry, as well as moving into the back end!
Comment by Tina Small on 2009-11-19 12:38:48 +0000
they’re all claiming to be Belle de Jour coz they got breast envy, they’re all jealous of my 84 inch boobs and crave the kind of attention I get!
Comment by Hugh Cornball on 2009-11-19 12:43:44 +0000
Got 32-28-84 tits!
Comment by Michael K on 2009-11-19 12:44:50 +0000
I could have sworn somebody else said that!
Comment by Gary Bullshitter on 2009-11-19 12:49:16 +0000
Strangled? Leave it out Charlie, it’s a geezer wearing make-up! And what I say is earn a ton from off-the-books night work and then when the Giro arrives lie back to enjoy another SE7 dole day! There’s no place like Charlton for knocking up the fake memoirs of a tart with a PhD in complete fakery!
Comment by Gary’s Gang on 2009-11-19 12:55:05 +0000
Keep on dancin’….
Comment by Gary Glitter on 2009-11-19 12:56:10 +0000
I’m the man who put the bang in gang….
Comment by People Of The World on 2009-11-19 12:57:20 +0000
Rot in hell you stupid nonce!
Comment by The (Un)real Henry Kissinger on 2009-11-19 13:08:25 +0000
You’re all a bunch of asses, or arses as you limey’s say, I wrote Belle de Jour. You can kiss my ass. Kissinger by name and kiss and tellin’ yer by nature. I survived Tricky Dicky’s administration and being on the board for Conrad Black when he went down, so I’m more than capable of faking the confessions of a London call girl!
Comment by The ghost on the coast on 2009-11-19 13:21:29 +0000
“Dr Brooke Magnanti” is an anagram of “RTD ER Mangina Book”. A thinly veiled hint that Russell T Davies and the Queen are the true co-authors of the Belle De Jour writings. Obvious when you think about it.
Comment by arse on 2009-11-19 13:33:39 +0000
Having read through the comments on these pages, any sane person can see that Mobile-Home has all the big hitters covering up for him, from the Barclay Brothers via Margaret Thatcher to Henry Kissinger himself! It must be obvious by now that Mobile-Home is Mister Big! He controls the conspiracy to destroy the world, and is in fact an alien from outer space. Unless Mobile-Home is stopped now it could be the end of life on earth as we know it!
Comment by I Was Paul Gilroy’s Double on 2009-11-19 13:48:41 +0000
In fact I wrote Belle de Jour to explore W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double-conciousness:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_consciousness
Comment by Valerie Solanas on 2009-11-19 14:01:06 +0000
In fact, I wrote the Belle de Jour books and blogs in 1966 as a sci-fi satire of a future society in which capitalism and patriarchy had not been defeated.
Comment by Tuesday Kid on 2009-11-19 18:15:04 +0000
You’re known for your art pranks Home. This could still be a double bluff.
Comment by arse on 2009-11-19 23:05:33 +0000
Having read through the comments on these pages, any sane person can see that Mobile-Home has all the big hitters covering up for him, from the Barclay Brothers via Margaret Thatcher to Henry Kissinger himself! It must be obvious by now that Mobile-Home is Mister Big! He controls the conspiracy to destroy the world, and is in fact an alien from outer space. Unless Mobile-Home is stopped now it could be the end of life on earth as we know it!
oh – I said that already didnt I?
Comment by Le Comte de Saint Germain on 2009-11-20 00:38:08 +0000
Everybody knows that I am immortal. Over the centuries I have taken on new identities and one of the more recent was Belle de Jour. I used my knowledge gained over many centuries to compose the books and blog attributed to Belle. When you think about it, she could only be me! Don’t be fooled, Brooke is just my patsy!
Comment by Christopher Nosnibor on 2009-11-20 22:58:08 +0000
dave kelso-mitchell says:
November 18, 2009 at 7:31 pm
Ha – but I’ve just realised that Nosnibor spelled sideways is ‘Nibonosr’.
Sprunggg!
– Damn, you got me, Dave. The fact that my name contains letters that can be used to spell ‘bono’ is no coincidence, either – every song ever recorded by U2 was in fact written by me also. Unfortunately, I was using Leonard Cohen’s accountant and have been forced to start writing books under my own name, and supplementing my income by working as an assassin. I’ll come clean: I killed Michael Jackson, and kanye West is just another of my pseudonyms….
Comment by I’m Mandy Fly Me on 2009-11-23 23:23:58 +0000
completely quaaluded
Comment by Howling Wizard, Shrieking Toad on 2009-11-24 09:58:56 +0000
Rather than being a 29-year-old lady of the night, ‘Belle de Jour’ is in fact the male writer Stewart Home, 42, known under his own name for the novels in which he interweaves lurid pornographic descriptions with high brow literary and cultural criticism [1]
- Stewart Who?
Theorist of multiple name use [2], radical cultural provocateur [3], ‘art terrorist’ [4], self confessed strategic ‘liar’ [5], veteran of numerous literary feuds [6], skilled self publicist, and above all an arch wind-up merchant [7], Home has previously written both under his own name and under the invented female moniker Karen Eliot [8]. Whereas his non-fiction concerns have remained in the world of culture theory, his fictional themes over the past 20 years have moved from political extremism to occultism to, in his most recent two novels, prostitution considered from the point of view of the female prostitute.
His referencing, often unmarked, of previous cultural works [9] — mainly avant-gardist but also popular — began at the start of his career in the early 1980s, and continues in his latest effort, supposedly the ‘authentic’ diaries of a prostitute writing under the name ‘Belle de Jour’. This was the working name of the prostitute protagonist of the 1968 film made by Spanish director Luis Buñuel, a leading Surrealist [10].
Few would deny Home’s skill at getting into character. His back-list includes works of skinhead, gay, and occult fiction. For a time, he has had cult followings among those who have taken his attitudes at face value in each of these areas. In actual fact, he has never been a skinhead, and he has never been either gay or an occultist — any more than he is a Jewish call-girl with traces of a Yorkshire accent. The Belle de Jour diaries are the latest, greatest success in a career that began more than 20 years ago.
All of his novels have contained copious quantities of pornography, usually sadomasochistic, interspersed with cultural theory and criticism, usually arcane. Titles include *****\*, No Pity, 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess, and ****. He also distributes Necro Cards, for those who want to allow the use of their bodies for sexual gratification after death. Fifty thousand were handed out in Soho in 1999.
Not known for personal modesty, he publishes a website in the name of the Stewart Home Society [11]. This august-sounding body is his own creation. So were Praxis, Neoism and the Art Strike, three art movements in which he was the sole participant.
Comment by Very Sunny Meadow on 2009-11-25 09:25:32 +0000
Did you see what the fools at Principia Dialectica wrote on this subject a week ago?
“For years some media pundits and rumour mongers went round claiming to know who was Belle de Jour; some even claimed they were Belle. What do you know…But they do not have her talent, all they can do is worship violence, speak of the fetishism of violence, it makes you sick, especially when that sort of material falls in the hands of vulnerable young people. Many youngsters worship their idols who earn alot of dosh kicking footballs or rapping the night away. But as work has dwindled many people are left with nothing to do, hence the gangs who roam the streets. Violence comes in all sorts of shapes. It is horrific. One cannot have illusions about lumpen elements. They invariably join a militia when things get worse. History teaches us that it is indeed what took place in Germany (the SA, SS), in France (the petainist milice) , the list is endless. Maybe Dr Brooke Magnanti will have to get a real critical dialogue instead of doing surface stuff. As for those who claimed to be her, we send them our fraternal greetings. So long suckers!”
Of course since as far as I know no one (not even Lisa Hilton) actually claimed to be Belle de Jour, you’re left wondering who on earth they could mean – unless, that is, you are already familiar with their obsessions. Naturally, I am, and I know how to wind them up and exploit them! Prigent is thus once again left looking like a right charlie!
Comment by Doris Stokes on 2009-11-25 16:46:33 +0000
You bois are all very silly. I think Stewart and The Real Monty Cantsin should get together for a proper package tour of the United Kingdom just like when Buddy Holly and The Big Bopper did it.
Now I’ll have my tea and then iron your uniform
Comment by shit on 2009-12-08 09:33:27 +0000
What do you mean, “Belle’s” prose is bad? If she were really someone other than you, Home, then that other person has made much more money than you, surely, by churning out some very well conceived and marketed bits of trash. Sounds right up your street, just more successful.
OK if she really weren’t you, you wouldn’t have so much chance of starting a feud with this other person than you might dream of having in respect of Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, John Cage’s estate, or others higher up the stink-of-shit literary career ladder than yourself. (I guess you were trying to hook Alice Debord with that stupid howlings film too). Or maybe with “Belle” that’s something you were holding a door open to getting around to, at some point, when you called this constructed person’s prose bad.
As for your cheap dig at the marketing of the works as “authentic”, this is just as hypocritical as the rest of your attitude. There are many many things you’ve written where you’ve attempted to portray your own bullshit as authentic, e.g. about the early years of Class War. You knew the “truth” and everyone else was stupid, right
You’re whole self-portrayal is as Mr Authentic the Artist – whatever self-descriptions you might use.
But of course many people really are so stupid as to judge people by self-descriptions. Oh no, Home isn’t “authentic” – he’s far too sophisiticated for that. Yeah, right.
Your basic right-wing attitude is that everyone’s either in it for the money or too stupid to know that being in it for the money is the only sensible reason for doing anything.
For decades you have presented your cynicism about everything other than your own career as being the only authenticity worth having. Just you haven’t used that word, because if you did your pigshit-stupid followers would have nowhere to stand.
I hope you like hospital food.
You’re a complete and utter cunt, you know it, and oh look, here are all your little followers and copiers coming along to say what they think might impress you.
Comment by Home wrote Wombat 92 on 2009-12-08 09:39:48 +0000
Michel isn’t perfect but he’s sincere.
For that reason, whatever he writes is far more useful than Home’s complete collected works.
Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-12-08 10:14:12 +0000
Haven’t you got anything better to do with your time than make a fool of yourself here? You must be the most boring person in the world. And while I didn’t write Wombat 92 or Belle de Jour, the name you’ve used here (“Home wrote Wombat 92”) is evidence of the tedious way you operate. Virtually no one believed the ridiculous lie that I wrote Belle de Jour and now that has finally become evident even to you, we see you switch to another boring lie (which, don’t forget, was also included in the original fraudulent document claiming I ‘was’ Belle de Jour). I’m sure you love being this deluded since it enables you to avoid dealing with the fact you could bore the pants off a corpse that has been lying in a grave for months…. A hundred years of sleep has got to be more entertaining than your endless drivel. If you actually got yourself a life you might stand some chance of ceasing to cut such a sorry figure.
Comment by Home wrote Wombat 92, Crown Against Concubine, Green and Brown Anarchist, Christ/Marx/Satan, etc. on 2009-12-08 11:31:17 +0000
For fuck’s sake, don’t tell us you’re opposed to the issuing of “fraudulent” documents! You prefer them “authentic”, then?
You’ve been issuing fraudulent documents for 25 years.
You’ve done it among:
anarchists
Leninists
neo-Nazis
greens
Satanists
Christians
right-wing conspiracists
pagans
artists
sex workers
cultists
druids
Of course you wrote Wombat 92.
The Magnanti ploy doesn’t get you off the hook. You wrote Belle too, but even if you weren’t the author and VSM got it wrong, don’t think you can get away with using that as “evidence” that you didn’t write W92. You can fool all the suckers most of the time, but you can’t fool everyone all the time.
Fucking curious that you don’t want to admit to W92 nearly 20 years later, even though keeping quiet about it doesn’t net you any money, and everyone knows you enjoy winding people up and boasting about afterwards – with the mentality of the right-wing cunt ex-public schoolboy that you have so clearly got even if you’re not one. So why did you write it? Why would you waste your ever-so valuable time, as a terribly interesting person and celebrity, winding up a bunch of soap-averse petty-bourgeois drop-out anarchists not one of whom you often even bumped into socially, unless you had a very clear aim?
Don’t think you weren’t rumbled years ago. The W92 allegation was deliberately put into the VSM material in order to get a response.
It was noted that even when you were in the middle of doing your postmodernist shtick to the Guardian (did I write Belle or didn’t I?), you took care to implicitly deny W92.
However, you didn’t bother to deny what we actually did invent that was wholly fictitious, namely the allegation that you wrote a document called Neither Ra Nor Osiris: Towards the Supersession of Freemasonry, which didn’t even exist.
We employed psy-ops, you see. We’re not as stupid as you think.
How scintillating your pathetic “media and standing in front of a mirror admiring your haircut before you go to parties” life must be. We met you once; you bored the shit out of us.
Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-12-08 15:54:53 +0000
Anyone who goes back and checks what I said to The Guardian will see you are lying and/or deluded (probably both). You send me to sleep. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz….
Comment by Home wrote Wombat 92 on 2009-12-08 17:30:44 +0000
Great – stay asleep – you’re not our intended audience here. Didn’t Home look a fool, he who’s issued fraudulent documents for the last quarter-century?
Comment by An Old Hand Who Knows The Ropes on 2009-12-08 18:43:25 +0000
You’re the one who looks like a fool and an obsessive too. You keep making ridiculous claims and there are paranoids out there who will think you are a cop with all this talk of psy-ops. Are you nuts?
Comment by Home wrote Wombat 92 on 2009-12-08 19:37:36 +0000
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?
Comment by CNN on 2009-12-08 20:36:20 +0000
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)?
Comment by Home wrote the complete works of Shakespeare on 2009-12-08 22:53:13 +0000
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!
Comment by The Polar Bear Who Came In From The Cold on 2009-12-08 22:57:37 +0000
PAGE 3!
Comment by Jilly Johnson (Page 3) on 2009-12-08 23:04:16 +0000
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….
Comment by Howling Wizard, Shrieking Toad on 2009-12-09 02:13:16 +0000
Some of the comments here look like they come from the Principia Dialectica corner — yawwwwnnnnnn……
Comment by howling wizard, shrieking toad on 2009-12-09 05:56:04 +0000
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.
Comment by Home Tricked Wombat 92 into taking us to Page 3 on 2009-12-09 07:54:15 +0000
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.
Comment by Home wrote the Oxford English Dictionary on 2009-12-09 08:39:18 +0000
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!
Comment by Howling Wizard, Shrieking Toad on 2009-12-09 09:56:52 +0000
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.