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!

 

A typical day of carnal creativity…

I wrote the first drafts of two short erotic stories for magazines today. I wrote each tale in the first person, and in the morning, I was a guy…

Love that antique public domain clip art...

And in the afternoon, I was a girl…

I find these ethereal images very sexy!

All in a day’s work, as a scribe of horny prose. I ate a salami sandwich and pretzels seasoned with sea salt and cracked pepper as I cranked (“cranking” is my slang for writing)…and listened to nineteenth century German drinking songs on the stereo.

Hey, anything to fuel the carnal creativity!