Blog popularity

I wonder if the most popular blogs are just the most miserable or sick ones.

I think it ironic that the blogs that get picked out and published are the ones that stand out as being the most tragic. Rather like the news, it's almost expected that tragedy sells far more than simple day to day ordinaryness. Isn't it inevitable that that just leads to competition over who has the most tragic or difficult life?

It's like the artist who kills himself in the obscure Dick Van Dyke film The Art of Love, from 1965. Typically peculiar movie of the period. The hero, Van Dyke, realises that his art will sell so much more if he was to commit suicide, so he feigns killing himself in order to sell his paintings, which naturally sell for a fortune.

I can't help thinking that so much bollocks goes on in the art world. I mean, are we all just voyeurs, really? Is that it? We just want to see the lives of other people, to compare our own?

Look at the popular blog Belle de Jour, about a prostitute who's commenting on her life, her clients and so on. It gets attention, but why? Because it looks at the seediness of someone's life, and of the lives of her clients?

It's well written, sure. Better than I could do right now. But who does it pander to? The kinds of people who've never really explored the erotic themselves? Isn't it rather corny in that respect? I mean, so what that a whore can put pen to paper. Does it have to be glamorized? But then sex does sell, doesn't it? And who doesn't like sex? But where's the really interesting, in depth thought in the blog?

Having said that, I confess to having not read it all that much, so who am I to say? Maybe I should read it. In fact, perhaps I should write about some of my own seedy sexual adventures. I note that she doesn't reveal her own identity. And it's been suggested that the whole thing might be fictional, so who knows? I wonder sometimes how many people live their lives according to the imaginations of others. How many people have been influenced by pulp fiction, I wonder? How many have imagined that dealing heroin or becoming a whore or going to prison is somehow romantic. I mean, "Belle de Jour" does seem to make the whole idea of prostitution somewhat romantic, doesn't she?

But even deeper into the question, why do we want to know what goes on inside someone else's minds, hearts and lives? What is the whole business of living vicariously, anyway? What makes us want to read about other people's dramas?

Maybe I should make my own ficticious blog. I wonder what it could be about...

Hmmm...this has got me thinking.

Also, I think I should get on with the homeless blog. I could go somewhere with it. It has potential, if I could get the homeless people blogging, too. I have visions of the impact of the 60s movie Cathy come home, or something.

I'm already thinking too high.