Brilliant dominatrix probes my perverse literary psyche!

A rainy, dreary day in Manhattan. I went out for a walk simply because I had to get out of my apartment for a little while, and I stopped at the flea market where I picked up a translation of Flaubert’s novel, Salammbo, the exotic tale of a priestess of ancient Carthage. I’ve always wanted to dip into this book.

I recently saw a sword-and-sandal version of the story:

This is a more lurid poster for America:

Of course Salammbo has power over men, clouds their brains with lust…what other kinds of stories do I like to read lately? Or write? (I’m being 50% serious and 50% self-deprecating.)

[I got those cool movie posters from this great site here.]

I recently read the 1890s Pierre Louys novel Woman and the Puppet, about a wealthy Spanish nobleman who gets enamored and enslaved by a girl who works in a cigarette factory…despite her numerous lies, manipulations, and open infidelity, he always keeps crawling back…

Here is a picture of me enjoying the book, which I used in my brief column about it here on the Domme Dose website where I write weekly…

Amongst my various sins in this life, I freely mix a purple tee shirt with a green sports jacket…

Right now I’m about a hundred pages into Emile Zola’s late nineteenth century novel Nana, which is about a French actress, a bad thespian but a magnificent stage presence and sex symbol of her era (1867), who basically dominates various big shots. It’s supposed to have some amazing scenes of humiliation. The book is very absorbing, meticulous in its recreation of things like high society midnight dinner parties full of decolletage and drunkenness, but it takes real concentration to read. I hope I finish it. I probably will if only to get to those scenes of degradation…

Here are a couple of cinematic interpretations of Nana…the first from 1982:

The second from 1934, starring the actress Anna Sten, briefly a rival for Garbo-type status in Hollywood:

These are some early paperback covers of Nana. Both depict the amazing opening chapter, which goes into minute detail to describe how she comes onstage in her first theatrical performance as the “Blonde Venus” and, after a rocky start due to her lack of theatrical skills, eventually wows the audience with her total sex appeal and lack of pretention…

I got these Nana covers from the Caustic Critic blog, which has an interesting post about the history and influence of Zola on paperbacks here.

Meanwhile, I do my own humble best to write about the femmes fatale who walk amongst us–at least in my imagination. And today on the femdom site Domme Dose, a smart and beautiful dominant gal named Femme.S, with whom I’ve exchanged various comments on the site, wrote a very interesting review and interpretation of my two ebooks Learning to be Cruel and Learning to be Cruel Part 2. You can read her column, entitled “Learning to be Cruel: A Reminder of Why being Bad Feels so Damn Good to Me” right here. You can also learn more about Femme.S by visiting her blog here.

And if you haven’t read my Learning to be Cruel stories yet, I hope you’ll check them out. You don’t have to read the first one to enjoy the second; each is self-contained, although the second has a brief synopsis of what happened in the original story. You can find them on the Amazon store, complete with free samples that you read right online.

Just go to my Domme Dose columns here and here to read more about them!

 

The divine beauty of Belinda Lee enraptures and captivates!

It’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted because in addition to my usual thousands of words produced weekly for websites and magazines, I spent a good chunk of time writing my longest femdom story yet, which I will be putting up on Amazon shortly as a Kindle ebook. I just want to make the final polish to the story, which would be about forty pages long in print, and is 12,000 words of delectable kink and perversity in my Erotic Realism style that puts you into the scene so vividly you think it’s happening to you! That’s the kind of writing I like to read, and that I always aspire to create myself.

Meanwhile…take a look at this:

Isn’t this an amazing image? I find it so freakin’ sexy, those legs…the sand underneath her toes…the indolence of her exquisite hands as she looks down at the bare-chested, unconscious male…

Yes, a girl long ago finds a guy who’s out cold on a beach. And when she’s not rescuing stray beefcake, she’s posing for a statue of the goddess Aphrodite! This is a poster for a 1960 movie called The Goddess of Love in English and La venere di Cheronea (The Venus of Cheronea) in Italian, the story of the ancient Greek sculptor Praxiteles and his creation of a statue of Venus (aka the goddess Aphrodite). The movie starred the late Belinda Lee (1935-1961) in the title role, and if anybody could embody such a character (or at least, embody a girl who perfectly qualified to model for such a statue), it was Miss Lee.

I believe this is a publicity shot from that movie, used on a postcard. I saw The Goddess of Love awhile back, and although it wasn’t a great movie, Belinda was wonderful to watch…

I recently wrote a magazine article about 1960s girlie magazines (it hasn’t come out yet, though, but I’ll let you know here when it does) and Belinda Lee’s pictures were in some of the issues, so I’ve got her on my brain…

She died young in a car accident in 1961. The driver survived, and when he died recently at age 91, he reportedly said that he wanted to be buried next to her.

Read more about Belinda on Wikipedia here.

I also recently saw Belinda in her lusty role in a pirate movie, Marie of the Isles. Here is a poster from it:

Even in the variable quality of video recordings made by fans and friends of these now-obscure movies, the hypnotic beauty of Miss Belinda Lee shines through brightly and lives forever!

These are the kinds of images that inspire me as I write, even though my erotic stories both for adult magazines or the Web are not about ancient Greeks or pirates–although I would like to write on such topics at some point. But my tales are always about alluring women who, like Belinda Lee, enrapture my heroes and give them through their beauty and vivacity a taste of the divine–and sometimes a taste of divine hell! Belinda was great at playing femmes fatale too.

Have a great Labor Day and I’ll be back next week with more info about my new ebook!

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I found the image of the rare poster of La venere di Cheronea here.