IS BLOGGING OVER?

The brothel creeper is just as good as Belle de Jour ever was, maybe better. (Not to be confused with Robert Crumb's grammatically correct Belle d'un jour.) But creeper is a one-time shot. Belle was there for us every day of the year. Sad, sad that she's gone. (The Pentagon must have been reading her. It's taken the romance out of joining up. See the clamp down on prostitution.) Also gone: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift. Or was it The Minor Lift, the Major Fall. Uh, The Major Fall, the Minor Lift? I've forgotten already. Whatever, more sadness.

Yeah, yeah, the Guardian in London and the Washington Post now have "Best Blog" competitions. "There's hardly a major newspaper -- from the Observer and the Evening Standard [also in London] to the New York Times and USA Today -- that hasn't published at least one lengthy feature on the growing influence of blogs," Paul Carr writes in an article on "Why bloggers are good for profits."

Professors love blogging, too. It's caught on in academe, the Chicago Tribune reports in a recent article that rolled out the usual suspects: Law professors Eugene Volokh, Glenn Reynolds, Lawrence Lessig, and some others (Russell Arben Fox, Tim Burke, Brad DeLong). The Trib hasn't put that article online, so no link. Funny, huh? And we've heard The Wall Street Journal loves bloggers, too (some more than others). Yeah, yeah, blogging has reached sea level.

Postscript: Some have claimed the mysterious Belle is Martin Amis in drag. But according to the poet Leon Freilich, Belle is really Bella:

Bella, Bella,
Charged a fella;
He wanted gash,
Hadda pay cash.
And really, why not?
She's hot, he's hot;
When ya gotta get in,
It ain't no sin.
Guy knows virtue
Can really hurt you.
Suffer no more --
Hire a whore.


That's what St. Augustine used to say before he took the gloomy pledge.

September 23, 2004 9:12 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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