Does OCILobWrite suck as bad as it seems?

Here is a excerpt from the docs:

You create a new internal LOB by initializing a new LOB locator using OCIDescriptorAlloc(), calling OCIAttrSet() to set it to empty (using the OCI_ATTR_LOBEMPTY attribute), and then binding the locator to a placeholder in an INSERT statement. Doing so inserts the empty locator into a table with a LOB column or attribute. You can then SELECT...FOR UPDATE this row to get the locator, and then write to it using one of the OCI LOB functions

Is there a way to write to a LOB without selecting? I want to do this. (Normal databases would allow this.)

CreateLOB
Bind LOB to :1
OCILobWrite(....)
INSERT into TABLE values(:1)

or even

CreateLOB
Bind LOB to :1
INSERT into TABLE values(:1)
OCILobWrite(....)

But I'm not willing to do an insert and a select just to insert a frickin BLOB!

--
Jeremy Bettis
jeremy_at_hksys.com