Category Archives: Literature

Kingsley Amis at Princeton, New Jersey, May 1959

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Come into the garden, Maude,


you faithless American faculty wife.


Strife? Christ, girl, there’ll be no strife.

Your husband, Linguistics Professor Claude,

saw your foot tease my cock to life


under the table, which he ignored.

No wonder you yank girls are bored:

I’d have gone for someone like me with a knife.

Ciggie? Well, you’re a sport. Our time just flew.


Now go back to the dinner, don’t get all soppy,

and send me out another wife or two.

Come on, love, no need to get stroppy,

you’ve got super tits and you’ll make great copy;

Sure I’ll put you in a book, or a girl just like you.

Intermission: key words in bdsm writing

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The next episode in the tawse saga will be the meeting with Gemma.

But before I write about that I should explain who Gemma is, and that’ll be a saga in itself. Let’s have a few short stand-alone posts first, as an intermission. This one’s about key words in bdsm writing.

As a child, I’d look through books that looked as if they might possibly contain a bdsm scene. I’d skim books under the shopkeeper’s eye, so I had to scan each book quickly. Given that bdsm scenes in mainstream books exist but are rare, my strike rate was surprisingly good. So good that I used to wonder how I was doing it.

I realised that was using certain words as my indicators. If you see one of these words, check the page on which they appear. I hadn’t consciously made a list of key words, but I’d created one anyway. The central list of bdsm indicator words was something like this:

quiver, thighs, damp, plump, bare, moist, sir, strap, smack, mistress, girl [as form of address], sobbed, quavered, kneel, bend, firm, reddened, buttocks, proud, humbled, stripe, swish, schoolgirl, plimsol, upturned, presented, disobedient, lowered, raised, serve, tied, wrists, cords, cuffs, sorry, rosy, master, cane.

It’s amazing how good the eye and brain is at detecting words in a blur of skimmed text. It’s like that effect where you can hear your own name mentioned at a party, where you didn’t think you could make out a word anyone was saying. All you have to do is be interested. 

Why does bdsm feel so good #4

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(Continuing that excerpt from “Between the Lines”: thoughts about pleasure, while delivering my second-ever successful spanking.) 

There was something else. Once again there was that strange, almost telepathic intimacy between us as I heated and marked her.

Harder?

I knew that the sting in my hand was only a distant echo of the much fiercer pain in her skin, and – though I wouldn’t like that sensation if I were to experience it myself – I seemed to be able to sense the way in which Maureen was experiencing that pain as pleasure, and so I could feel that pleasure along with her.

I also knew, just as surely as I knew that I felt her pleasure, that she could feel my pleasure in watching, holding and hurting her.

 This isn’t a mystical claim. Telepathy is an illusion. It’s that when people focus closely on each other’s reactions – and between a dominant and submissive this mutual focus is very intense – they can develop such a strong intuitive and empathetic understanding of the other person’s feelings and sensations that it feels very like telepathy.

I wouldn’t enjoy being hurt, and Maureen would have no interest in hurting me, but we somehow each knew how the other’s pleasure worked, and we could each access and enjoy those different and complementary pleasures. Later, I’d discover further pleasures in bdsm, but those were already enough to absorb me. 

Radclyffe Hall with a whip. Dot tumblr dot com

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I’m taking a short break from the Golden girl saga. There are probably only two more episodes left in it. It’s a true story, by the way, with the usual changes to de-identify people and to fill in gaps in my memory.

An image that haunted my twelve-year old imagination. How could the world have something this sexy in it?

I should say that Therese really did talk like that. Writing her dialogue, she sounds like a slightly kinky lesbian from a 1920’s or 1930’s novel. Like Radclyffe Hall, only with a whip. (There’s probably no such tumblr. Though I haven’t looked.) 

I didn’t notice it when she was saying these things, because she carried it off so well. She was a professional, and therefore an actor. She’d chosen the style and she stuck to it. 

I’m pretty sure that if I had a woman bent over a table and a whip in my hand, no matter how fraught that hanging moment might be, if I said something like “And not a peep out of you, dear”, that girl would laugh her fool head off and the tension would fly right out the window.

Sure, it’d be replaced by some new tension, because there’s plenty available in the moments before a flogging begins. Still, one moment of it would be gone forever.

But really, I just wanted to post this drawing by an artist who called himself “Phegor”. Phegor is a demon in the Old Testament (that is, someone else’s god), so it’s probably a pseudonym, shall we say. Anyway, I first found it in a book, “The Cruel and the Meek”, when I was about twelve and already well aware of my desires. I thought this was the sexiest, darkest, sweetest, sweatiest, hottest image I’d ever seen.

A cage song, and stillness in bdsm

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This really is a robin redbreast in a cage. His name is Bugsy, and he's an orphan. His breast will get redder when he gets a little older. A few days after this photo was taken, he flew away.

This really is a robin redbreast in a cage. His name’s Bugsy, and he’s an orphan. His breast will get redder when he gets a little older. He was released a few days after this photo was taken.

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all heaven in a rage;

But birds, impervious to command,

Captivity can’t understand;

When you knelt, bound, so meek and still,

Unfreedom was your own free will;

My iron embrace was your delight;

Your body held, your mind took flight.

I do not think the heavens resented

Submissiveness so sweet presented.

 

 

Sorry for starting this poem with Blake lines and then continuing with mine. It’s like sticking another ‘tache on the Mona Lisa, isn’t it? Except that it’s meant respectfully. It may even be so, just as giving unfreedom can be an act of love..

One day I’ll write something about the woman who inspired this poem. She liked cages. My engagement with cages is specific to her and my relationship. I’d never used one before, and haven’t since. They’re not calling me, so unless I get a hint from a charming submissive woman to the effect that she thinks she’d look cute behind bars, it may stay specific to that one relationship. I did enjoy it. 

But this poem was about her stillness, when she was waiting in her cage for me to “notice” her. In her mind – you know how doms and subs know these things, even when they’re not said – she was a captive, abducted from a beach or a railway station, trained to wait, neatly ready for her captor’s pleasure, and to be put away again, like a toy, after use. She was not meek, even when submitting, but she liked the thought of being meek.

hisagain1I was going to post something more explicit about pleasure and power today, but I’ve been out digging and unblocking drains, because of a sudden and heavy rainstorm, dumping more water against the walls of the house than the drains and gutters could handle. 

I think I’ve headed the water off. Reaching down to where metal pipe meets ag pipe, about 18 inches below the ground. The rain down my back and between my buttocks while I pulled out the Japanese maple roots that were causing the blockage. If that means nothing to you, you’re lucky.  

On the other hand, the sudden GAWP! sound when you’re cleared it and the water starts to drain is good.

But I’m soaked and freezing. Now I’m for a hot bath and a cup of coffee with a drop of rum. 

Steamy sex will have to  be posted later. 

An Arabian Night #2

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The answer us that it sounds exactly like an Arabian Night.

But really it’s a Parisian night, from the early twentieth century, put into English a little later by a London-based Welshman, Edward Powys Mathers.

Mathers’s version is probably still the most popular English-language version of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”. But he didn’t know a word of Arabic. He translated the French version by Joseph Charles Mardrus.

Chaste, though naked, athletics, as in the original Arabic version

Mardrus knew Arabic, but he also wrote his own mildly erotic Oriental fantasies, like his “The Queen of Sheba”, which is all gold costumes (underwear that goes “clank” when you drop it), yearning glances and shuddering thighs. Then in the early 1920s, Mathers did an English version of Mardrus’s French. The original is two generations away from the English version.

I discovered all this when I went searching for other translations of the Princess Abrixa scene when I was researching my “Between the Lines”. “Between the Lines” among other things tries to sketch in a cultural history of bdsm. I wanted to show that there’s awareness of bdsm pleasures in pretty much all world literatures, not just the European ones. But when I checked the Burton translation, the bound and spanked girls weren’t there. There were only some chaste athletic competitions.

Disgruntled slavegirls demand to be in the sexier French/English version. (Painting: Giulio Rosati)

So I checked other translations, and discovered that the bondage and spanking doesn’t appear in any other translation. Mardrus and Mathers had made it up. Well, the athletics was probably enough to keep Sharkhan happily watching, hiding in his tree, but it isn’t quite so saucy for the reader. Mardrus and Mathers knew what an Arabian night ought to be like, even if the original Arabic writer didn’t.

I fixed the immediate problem for my book by  dropping the “Arabian Nights” reference, and substituting some early medieval Arabic medical texts that showed some awareness of bdsm, or at least of sexual responses to whipping. But it was a pity to have to lose that warm, all-girl spanking night by the pool.

An Arabian night #1

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I’m going to interrupt the tawse story for a moment or two.

In my edition of “The Thousand Nights and a Night”, there’s a playful bondage and discipline scene early in “The Adventure of King Omar al-Nenan and his son Sharkhan”.

The young Prince Sharkhan is beside a pool when he sees a group of beautiful girls approaching. So, as you would, he climbs a tree so he can hide and watch them. This is most rewarding, because it is the beautiful Princess Abriza, with a retinue of serving girls almost as beautiful. And they undress and slip into the water, which runs sleekly over their peach-firm, lion-brown breasts, bellies and buttocks, their soft thighs and their sacral dimples.

Sharkhan is a happy man, though not a gentleman.

Then the beautiful and naked Princess, tiring of her beautiful and naked maidens’ silly chatter, threatens to tie them up and spank their bottoms with her belt, one by one. By one, by one. Having delivered the threat, she makes good on it. Let’s say there were a dozen serving girls. It must have taken ages.

"Like this, Princess?" Both paintings by the wonderful Etienne Dinet.

So the scene is one of spanked, mildly flushed servant girls in one heap, and an orderly queue of unspanked girls waiting for the Princess to get to them. The sound is all girlish squealing, the slap of leather on sun-warmed serving-girl buttocks, and an oddly human sighing sound coming from the tree above them. As for the scent … It must have been a nice place to be, though I doubt Prince Sharkhan was feeling comfortable.

That sounds like an Arabian night, doesn’t it?

(Answer tomorrow.)

Burns on love #2

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Robert Burns got his name attached to most of the poems in “The Merry Muses of Caledonia”, a collection of poems in Scots dialect, mostly about fucking. The rest concern … farting.

The idea of “The Merry Muses” is a bit better than the reality, though, because the poems could only seem funny if you were heroically drunk, and they aren’t all that sexy, either. Here’s a slice of one of the best ones.

From: Haed I the Wyte She Bade Me

Robert Burns: partial to a ploughman’s funch. Less partial to female lust, though. 

I pat six inches in her wame,

A quarter wadna fly’d her;

For ay the mair I ca’d it hame,

Her ports they grew the wider.

My tartan plaid, when it was dark,

Could I refuse to share it;

She lifted up her holland-sark,

An bad me fin’ the gair o’t:

Or how could I amang the garse,

But gie her hilt an hair o’t;

She clasped her hochs aboot my erse,

An ay she glowred for mair o’t.

(Robert Burns)

So Burns’s idea of a sex poem is a man complaining that some woman didn’t find his cock big enough and wasn’t ready to stop when he was. If it was just one poem, you could say it was characterisation, where you’re not meant to take the singer’s point of view, like in a Randy Newman song. Trouble is, they’re all like that. Except the ones about farting.

This is a Scotsman who doesn’t write poems about the wummin being too lusty for him. Mind you, he’s a painting.

It makes you wonder how Scots blokes got their romantic reputation. I know a woman who swears she will fuck any man who asks her nicely in a Scots accent.

Actually, that’s probably true of every woman I know, ach the noo. Sean Connery’s doing a lot of the carrying, I guess.

On the other hand, the Scots gave us the little kilt, essential wear for women pretending to be schoolgirls, and the tawse. And if you like welts and weeping (that’d be wauts and greetin’, if Burns wrote poems about that sort of thing), then the tawse is your implement.

I bought my tawse in Lochgelly. I’m a traditionalist, when I remember.