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London Bloggers [Comic Blogs][Other Blogs] | 8 April 2004
[bbc] The Reith Lectures 2004 — the BBC is releasing the 2004 Reith Lectures as DRM-Less MP3 Files. This year’s lecturer is Wole Soyinka discussing “The Climate of Fear”. [via plasticbag.org]
» The Changing Mask of Fear — download the first lecture as an MP3 file.
[blogs] How to write a Blog-Buster — Guardian Online covers Fiction written using the blog format … On Belle de Jour: ‘The anonymous prostitute’s diary is a familiar genre in erotic fiction, one that, in print, probably wouldn’t float many boats these days. But via the blog form’s sense of immediacy, Belle de Jour has revived the cliches so successfully that publishers are offering six-figure advances and journalists are desperate to find out who the real Belle de Jour is. But her real identity, call girl or literary hoaxer, is something of a side issue. The blog gets so much attention because, with its teasing sequence of daily “entries”, it tells an old story in a new way.’
7 April 2004
[bbc] Alastair Campbell’s Wheel of Retribution — a little bit out of date but fun (especially if you work at the BBC) … ‘Whip… John Humprhys.’ [via Blah Blah Flowers]
6 April 2004
[ipod] The Incredible Future Boy Versus Malevolent Gutter Punk — blogger foils mugging attempt with iPod mini … ‘I was carrying my iPod Mini. Just in case you haven’t seen one, the mini is not your mother’s iPod. The rounded edges and soft plastic chassis that characterized the older generations have given way to one sharp little fucker of a digital lifestyle appliance.’
5 April 2004
[books] Amazon World — amusing user reviews from Amazon.com. Moby Dick: ‘I am quite the fan of stories which involve man eating sea creatures, such as Jaws. Moby Dick is nothing compared to such classics, I fear. In fact, it is boring with a capital B. What is the whales motivation? You dont know. There is no suspense, and I find the idea of people hunting whales offensive. Offensive with a capital O. Whales are lovely, peaceful creatures and that is why their slaughter has been outlawed. This book makes whales seem like demonic, murderous creatures of doom. Such a thing should not be read to a child, for it preaches that animal cruelty is ok. Never before have seen such an abundance of immoralality! I am offended! I feel as if my brainards are going to freeze over and crumble like spoiled peanut brittle. Take my word for it, dont read this book’ [via Kottke’s Remaindered Links]
4 April 2004
[blogs] New Kids On The Blog — the Observer examines blogs in the UK … ‘Those already bored with the phenomenon – particularly the techies who started blogging years ago as a way of sharing boring stuff about computer code – claim that the golden days of blogging are over, that what passes for blogging nowadays is the most banal wash-up of aimless lives, millions of pages slowing the internet and clogging Google. What they really don’t like is that publishing on the internet is not just for geeks any more.’
2 April 2004
[book] Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg — one of the New Yorker Articles that formed the basis for Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point … [via Sashinka]
‘Once, in the mid-fifties, on a whim, Lois took the train to New York to attend the World Science Fiction Convention and there she met a young writer by the name of Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke took a shine to Lois, and next time he was in Chicago he called her up. “He was at a pay phone,” Lois recalls. “He said, ‘Is there anyone in Chicago I should meet?’ I told him to come over to my house.” Lois has a throaty voice, baked hard by half a century of nicotine, and she pauses between sentences to give herself the opportunity for a quick puff. Even when she’s not smoking, she pauses anyway, as if to keep in practice. “I called Bob Hughes, one of the people who wrote for my paper.” Pause. “I said, ‘Do you know anyone in Chicago interested in talking to Arthur Clarke?’ He said, ‘Yeah, Isaac Asimov is in town. And this guy Robert, Robert…Robert Heinlein.’ So they all came over and sat in my study.” Pause. “Then they called over to me and they said, ‘Lois’ — I can’t remember the word they used. They had some word for me. It was something about how I was the kind of person who brings people together.” This is in some ways the archetypal Lois Weisberg story.’ 1 April 2004
[comics] Yet Another Dave Sim interview from the Onion AV Club … ‘It was pure guesswork on my part back in 1979 as to whether I would have the stamina to write, pencil, ink, letter, tone, and fill the back of a monthly comic book for 26 years. In retrospect, I should’ve said 250 issues. Finishing the book, the last four years, what had previously been an interesting job that left me a certain amount of spare time for other things had become a 15-hour-a-day, six-day-a-week, Herculean task. At the age of 23, I actually thought I would be fine into my 50s doing a monthly comic book, but that I would let myself slack off by ending it at the age of 47. It’s a young man’s game.’ [thanks Kabir]
30 March 2004
[tv] Kenneth Williams Quote from Neil Gaiman … ‘”I’m a cult,” Kenneth Williams said to me, in 1985. “I’m an enormous cult. People stop in the street and point to me and say look, it’s that cult from the television.”‘
[film] Citizen Kubrick — Jon Ronson explores Stanley Kubrick’s Archive … ‘Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says. “Is it the library now?” I ask. “Look closer at the books,” says Tony. I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!” “Look in the drawers,” says Tony. I do. “It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!” I feel a little like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, chancing upon her husband’s novel and finding it is comprised entirely of the line “All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy” typed over and over again.’
28 March 2004
[bdj] ‘I am a young woman. I have sex for money. And I love to write. This is my story…’ — BdJ wrote a five page article for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine …
 » Don Foster in the Observer’s Letters: ‘Never have I said, either on or off the record, that Belle’s identity has been established by anything I ever said or contributed. I made perfectly clear, in a series of telephone conversations and email exchanges with the Times, of which I have a complete record, that Champion is a person of interest. Contrary to what the Times has reported, I do not believe that the search for Belle is over.’ 26 March 2004
[politics] Tom Watson: ‘One last thing. Intervening on Ken Clarke is as scary as you imagine.’
[comics] List of “Holy —, Batman!” uttered by Robin — from the Batman TV Series … ‘Holy Astringent pomite fruit!’ [via Neilalien]
25 March 2004
[bdj] Belle Doesn’t Ring True — the Guardian rolls out Cynthia Payne to analyse BdJ … ‘I think this is filth, and I certainly don’t want to be associated with it. I was never involved in anything like this. In my day, we did it the proper way – £25 without extras, food and drink, and a choice of ladies. We knocked off £5 for old age pensioners and we charged men half-price if they were past it, and just fancied watching. We had a high-class clientèle – no rowdy kids, no yobs, all well-dressed men in suits, who knew how to respect a lady.’
[comics] 5 Questions for Peter Bagge — another Q&A from ADD … ‘I’m pleased to see that comics are making inroads in books stores via the graphic novel route, I’m very upset at the shrinking demand for the traditional comic book format, which is by far my favorite medium to work in.’
23 March 2004
[macs] Douglas Adams’s Mac IIfx — vintage Mac collector finds a Mac IIfx which used to belong to DNA … ‘I popped an ethernet card in the IIfx, mounted an AppleShare volume and ran Norton Utilities to recover the files onto the server. The results? I recovered hundreds of documents relating to Jane Belson’s professional work and precisely two that bear the hand of Douglas Adams. I doubt whether the copyright lawyers would chase me for publishing his Idiots Guide to using a Mac but you wouldn’t be thanking me either. For now at least, the draft of a TV sketch called Brief Re-encounter is strictly for my personal enjoyment.’
22 March 2004
[bdj] Did Register staffer mastermind ‘call-girl weblog’ conspiracy? — the Register responds to the allegation that Andrew Orlowski is BdJ. Orlowski: I’m shocked. To be accused of being a whore is one thing, but to be accused of being a weblogger is actionable.’
[comics] Alan Moore’s memorial for Julie Schwartz: ‘And now we hear that Julie has been… discontinued? Cancelled? But they said the same about Green Lantern and the Flash back in the early ‘fifties, so we can’t be certain. This is comics. There’ll be some way around it, be some parallel world Earth-Four Julie, born thirty years later to account for problems in the continuity, and decked out in a jazzier, more streamlined outfit.’ [via Neilalien]
21 March 2004
[bdj] I was Branded a Call-Girl Blogger — Sarah Champion on what it’s Like to be mistaken for Belle de Jour … ‘Ever since I found myself described as a ‘wild child’ in a local paper as a teenager, I dreaded that one day I would wake up to find paparazzi outside my door. Since then I’ve published a book of ecstasy drug stories in the wake of Leah Betts’s death, briefly dated a well-known TV comedian and shared a spliff with a former member of the Beatles. But it never once occurred to me that what would finally bring the paparazzi to my door would be my use of commas.’
20 March 2004
[bdj] Who is the real Belle de Jour, the internet’s best-read whore? — The Independent suggests that Andrew Orlowski is Belle De Jour. ‘…as soon as one name appeared to slip from the frame, another one sprang up to replace it. The new contender is Andrew Orlowski, who grew up on the opposite side of the Pennines to Ms Champion, but with whom she collaborated on a number of minor publications in the early years of the last decade. Described in some quarters as a “cult figure”, Mr Orlowski has a record of cultured sex writing on the internet. Yesterday, however, he was not taking any calls.’
» Of Course Belle Was Faking It. That’s What Sex – And Cyberspace – Are All About — Jeanette Winterson on BdJ … ‘Belle is a natural-born blogger; her style is witty and compact, with the right mixture of intimacy and disassociation. We feel we know her, yet we don’t know her at all – doubly so, if she turns out to be a fake.’ 19 March 2004
[bdj] Picture of Sarah Champion (outed yesterday as Belle De Jour) found on Andrew Orlowski’s website. Doesn’t it seem a little suspicious that the biggest critic of blogging at the very least worked with Sarah Champion in the past and they are both currently based in San Francisco? [thanks Rachel!]
» Orlowski on Badpress: ‘How I became a journalist. Scandalsheet started in 1992 with Sarah Champion. The first issue (150) was printed in 24 hours. Sarah has no recollection of this night.’ 18 March 2004
[bdj] Internet Call-Girl Unmasked — the Times unmasks Belle de Jour. … ‘Don Foster, America’s foremost literary sleuth, identified quirks in Belle’s text, such as the way she uses brackets, dashes, compound verbs and italics. He entered this information into Google, the internet search engine, and within 20 minutes found that Miss Champion was the only person who matched the linguistic fingerprint. “While no piece of evidence is conclusive by itself, I’m sure we have found our woman,” he said.’
[comics] The Reluctant Hero — another interview with Alan Moore … ‘Put together by Paul Gravett, an internationally renowned expert on comic-book art (he also curated last year’s Comica festival at the ICA), the exhibition features a mass of original, rare or never-seen-before art created for Alan Moore works over the last 25 years, as well as previewing The Mindscape of Alan Moore, an 80-minute documentary on the writer. “It’s an enormous honour,” Moore says of the show. “Even if it makes me feel like I’m almost dead.”‘
17 March 2004
[books] Digital Utopia and its Flaws — Cory Doctorow interview by R. U. Sirius… ‘I think that we all have urges toward deviance in some ways. I mean, not in the kind of leather-and-chains sense but in the traditional sociological sense … being a little bit weird. I think the only reason in fact that it mostly appears that we’re all doing the same thing is because we don’t look hard enough. We have the assumption that all the people in the nightclub dancing to the band are all doing the same thing. But I think when you look closely you find that there are all kinds of differences. I think that every single one of us is an edge case.’
16 March 2004
[bogs] “Recent Posts” Sidebar Code for Blogger — how to add a sidebar with Recent Posts to Blogger Blogs … ‘This is a strange story. At about 3:00 this morning I awoke with a headache and heartburn. Normally, my first instinct would be to stroll into the bathroom, prepare an Alka-Seltzer, and go back to sleep. Not last night, I woke up and I had a wild idea about blogging…’
15 March 2004
[bdj] Who is ‘Belle de Jour’, the high-class Hooker whose Web Diary is set to be a Literary Sensation? — the Sunday Times suggests that Belle de Jour maybe writer Christopher Hart.
 ‘…vague echoes and coincidences? Perhaps. But there are links between Belle’s blog and the real Hart, too. Early on in the blog Belle hangs out in the Blue Posts, a pub in Soho. It happens to be just round the corner from The Erotic Review, with which Walsh has of late been keeping in close contact, according to some sources.’ 14 March 2004
[comics] John Byrne on Grant Morrison and Alan Moore: ‘I get no sense from [Grant] Morrison’s work that he has any “love for the genre”. I get the same vibe I get from [Alan] Moore — a cold and calculated mixing of ingredients the writer knows the fans like, but to which the writer himself has no eviceral connection. Nostalgia without being nostalgic, as I have dubbed it.’ [via ADD]
13 March 2004
[music] They Shoot, He Scores — great interview with film composer Ennio Morricone. On Creativity: ‘I simply want to carry on expressing my ideas. Other people see the moment of creativity as magical, but it is not. That’s just a romantic notion. For me, it’s simply, “I have to get from A to B. How am I going to achieve this?” You have to be like the painter who knows his brush strokes. In the end it comes down to technique and experience. Sometimes a small idea will come without warning, but after that, I insist once more upon craft. If you know how to do your job, you will get a result. It’s very simple.’
12 March 2004
[comics] 5 Questions for Alan Moore — another Q&A from ADD Blog… Moore on Writing Voice Of the Fire: ‘As it happened, quite eerily, there were a number of events that more than satisfied the various things that I needed to finish the novel satisfyingly, you know, things like severed heads and big black dogs, often in conjunction with each other. So, it was very eerie at times, not just surprising, but incredibly eerie. There are moments during a writer’s life, especially if he or she is dealing with something very close to home, if it’s getting a bit self-referential, that sometimes the borderlines between fiction and your actual reality can get dangerously blurred and, yeah, that happened more than once during the course of Voice Of The Fire.’
11 March 2004
[politics] Playing with Pretty-Straight-Kinda-Guy Bat — another Simon Hoggart Parliamentary Sketch. On Anne Widdecombe: ‘…the fascination for us came from watching Ms Widdecombe while [Tony Blair] failed to answer her question. Her brain appeared to lose all motor control over her body. Head, arms and legs began to fly off in wildly different directions, like a marionette manipulated by four drunken puppeteers. Weird growlings, rumblings and squeaks started to emerge. They became louder and more alarming. Imagine you were at a traction engine rally and the engine running towards you started to shake and shudder, while steam hissed out of the boiler. Suddenly the driver leaps off the seat and yells: “Save yourselves! It’s too late for me!” The Speaker had to interrupt, in the interests of public safety. “When you ask a question, it is polite to get the answer – even if you consider it not to be an answer.” This is the equivalent of fire safety officers dowsing her with foam.’
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