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From: Celeste801@aol.com
Subject: Celestial Reviews 210 - Aug 23
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Celestial Reviews 210 - August 23, 1997
Note: A man and his dog are shipwrecked on an unpopulated island. After a few
days he decides to take the dog and reconnoiter the island. He discovers that
the only other inhabitants are sheep. He recalls how his farm buddies used to
brag how they would screw sheep for kicks, but he says to himself, "I'll
never be that desperate."
So, a few weeks later he can't get those sheep out of his mind, and soon he's
sneaking up on the flock. Just as he is about to pounce on a really cute one,
the dog grabs his leg and won't let go. He snaps out of it, and thanks the
dog for keeping him from making a fool of himself.
This same scene happens every night for a month, and the guy starts to get
really pissed at the dog.
Then one day, the man spies a life-raft bobbing in the surf. In the raft is a
beautiful young girl, barely alive. He takes her back to his hut, revives
her, and nurses her to health. After a few days the girl is feeling fine, and
that evening a rush of gratitude sweeps over her....
She confronts the man: "I owe you my life. I'm yours forever. I'll do
anything you want"
"Anything!!"
"OK, hold that dog for ten minutes!!!"
Final note: Remember: even though someone else may be posting my reviews for
me, my e-mail address is still Celeste801@aol.com.
- Celeste
"Fortissimo" by Uther Pendragon (post-partum lovemaking)
10, 10, 10
"Wet Camera" by James Lawson (animalistic sex) 10, 8, 8
"Muse" by Seurat (writer's block) 10, 10, 10
"Mistress Molly" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (threesome &
ff femdom) 10, 10, 10
"Emptiness" by DevoSpudC (disillusionment) 9, 10, 10
Guest Reviews:
"Passages in Life" by Jubal Harshaw (emerging adolescence)
10, 10, 10
"Cary" by daVinci (romance) 10, 10, 10
Reposted Reviews:
* "Siblings" by Michael K. Smith (consensual sibling incest)
10, 10, 10
* "Summer Dreams" by Lysander (romance) 10, 10, 10
"Fortissimo" by Uther Pendragon (anon584c@nyx10.nyx.net). When I found a
"story" posted in a.s.s. last week labeled "Forceps," I was at first happy
(because I looked forward to another installment in the Brennan story) and
then sad (because it wasn't really a story at all, "just" a birth
announcement.) Now that the story has actually arrived, I guess I should
send a virtual present or at least plan to attend the virtual baby shower.
As you may have surmised, the newest Brennan has arrived and Bob and Jeanette
are engaged in celebratory copulation. Jeanette is concerned that Bob
considers her breasts, which have been exploited by Catherine as a source of
nutrition, to be unattractive. Bob disabuses her of this notion. Then, just
a foreplay is getting really good, they are interrupted by the "fortissimo"
cry of the baby. And so it goes; lovemaking is delayed, but climaxes come
later.
Most men and many women who haven't had or nursed a baby have no idea how
sensuous the combination of nourishing a baby and making love to the baby's
father can be. The author seems to have figured this out and has made the
connection pretty clear in this story.
Ratings for "Fortissimo"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Wet Camera" by James Lawson (jdlawson@cybrtyme.com). This is not a complete
story. Just two minutes worth of a hot set-up and brief follow-through. To
find out what that means, check out this story.
Ratings for "Wet Camera"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 8
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 8
"Muse" by Seurat (dantedibby@aol.com). The narrator is a man who is writing
a femdom story for this newsgroup - perhaps this is genuinely
autobiographical! His wife catches him in the act, looks at the story, tells
him it is silly, and recommends something more romantic - if you know what I
mean <wink>.
Ratings for "Muse
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Mistress Molly" by Mary Anne Mohanraj (mohanraj@goonsquad). Michael is happy
with Kate, and partly to please her he invites Molly in for a threesome.
They have one wild night together, but almost immediately Kate finds herself
drifting away from Michael and falling under the control of Mistress Molly.
OK. I'll admit it sounds a little lame, but the author makes it all sound
both enticing and plausible.
Ratings for "Mistress Molly"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Emptiness" by DevoSpudC (cwilson9@ix.netcom.com). Erika has always known
herself to be beautiful: she won her first beauty pageant at age eleven.
Tonight her boyfriend has been murdered in a drive-by shooting and she has
run off into the street, tried to kill herself, been rescued by a passing
motorist, and has essentially been raped by that man.
This is a weird and confusing story - but deliberately so. It's not really
all that sexy, but it certainly did hold my attention.
Ratings for "Emptiness"
Athena (technical quality): 9
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Passages in Life" by Jubal Harshaw (jubal@flash.net). Guest review by Green
Onions.
Ah . . . the joys of church summer camp. Fresh air, tall trees, silly skits,
roasted marshmallows, clear spring water, and--um--the other stuff.
No, I don't mean sneaking out at midnight and managing to put all the camp
superintendent's furniture out on rowboats tied to the pier or any of the
other clever stunts that bored kids do in order to while away the first time
in their conscious lifetimes in which they must somehow survive bereft of the
blandishments of computer games, the vidiot box, and the local cruising
strip. (Well to be frank: this is a.s.s.--not a 'Leave it to Beaver' rerun on
cable TV--so you can bet that the "other stuff" I was talking about is the
forbidden fruit normally denied to kids young enough to be denizens of these
would-be gardens of Eden.)
But <ah-hem> this is not a child porno story <amen!>; in fact the protagonist
is an almost unbelievably mature seventeen year old boy whose brilliantly
planned and skillfully executed pranks of several years ago have since become
legendary at the camp. His lover is another counselor who happens to be
scarcely nineteen herself and the job they both have ahead of them is to make
their relationship fully functional.
Well, what is there to a boy's 'first time' anyway? Is it a gradual process,
one that begins with a lot of groping, giggling, cuddling and caressing and
that eventually ends all-too-quickly in a juicy sticky splattered mess?
Actually our hero's baptism is a long drawn-out affair, one that the author
studies reverently in a remarkable number of sensual and psychological
dimensions through the mind of an unusually reflective protagonist. This is
_anything but_ a story of a 'quick fuck.'
Indeed this piece isn't principally about sex at all, even though there's no
shortage of hot scenes. It has much more to do with romance and the recovery
process from a short lifetime of failed youthful expectations--AKA: 'growing
up.' As the plot develops, we discover that he and his lover have met before;
both have an intricately developed past that turns out to account in large
measure for mysterious ways in which they move.
What does it mean to cross the sacred threshold between childhood and
adulthood in the context of romantic relationships? What does it mean to have
a love affair based on more than superficial attraction or hot passing
passion? How does a sensible person (or to be more precise, _two_ sensible
people) deal with the molting of their adolescent fantasies and the emergence
of integrated romantic, sensual, and spiritual desire? And how will our hero
step out of the shoes of a boy in order to don the vestments of His Lover's
Man?
This is not a story for the impatient or intellectually feckless reader: at
something in the neighborhood of 35,000+ words, it almost qualifies for the
label 'short novel.' Most of the time I found myself enjoying the author's
slow, painstaking and loving style of careful psychological development--but
at other moments I occasionally wondered which of the myriad details
presented in the first few chapters would turn out to be important.
Granted: a certain amount of seemingly 'irrelevant' information is desirable
in any story to paint the scenes in the reader's mind, to frame the events,
and to develop the characters. And one so often hears from the _literati_
that a typical weakness of erotica inheres in the inability or unwillingness
of so many writers to weave their protagonists' actions into the subtle
complex tapestry of human needs, desires and motivations--a criticism that
certainly hits the bulls' eye for all too many a.s.s. submissions.
Yet although the author's gift for careful description tended to make the
story a bit slow at the beginning (for example, we learn the names of nearly
a dozen different subdivisions of the camp in one of the early chapters: none
of which is used later), it turned out to be a solid foundation on which to
base the unfolding of the plot--the basic outlines of which are probably
familiar to nearly everyone who has legitimate access to this newsgroup.
Overall this is an extremely thoughtful, well written and remarkably
sophisticated piece that might have been even better if the writer had kept
in mind that in art, less can sometimes be more. It's also one of the
sweetest emerging sexuality/emerging romance stories I've had the pleasure of
reading and one that I think most patient straight or bisexual readers will
find both charming and delightful.
P.S.: My humble apologies to both Celeste and the author for the inexcusable
tardiness of this review. Perhaps a one-part repost of this excellent novella
might be in order.
Ratings for "Passages in Life"
Venus (plot & character): 10
Athena (technical quality): 10
Flagger (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Cary" by daVinci (rmbte1@ix.netcom.com). Guest review by DG.
Maybe the biggest challenge to writing an erotic story - a good erotic
story, that is - is finding a way to keep it fresh. There are only so many
ways that boy can meet girl, only so many things that boy and girl can do to
each other, only so many places they can do it. One common solution is to
expand the possibilities: boy meets three girls, girl meets German shepherd,
boy ties up girl and paddles her bottom- you get the idea. These stories can
be quite intriguing to read, but the gains in originality are generally
offset by the loss of the romantic underpinnings of the fundamental boy meets
girl formula.
Another solution, which the author of this excellent story uses, is to
stick to the old formula and make the characters vivid and unique. The
nameless narrator of "Cary," by daVinci, is a burned-out classical pianist
who decides to take early retirement and live a quiet secluded life in the
suburbs. In the third floor loft of his house he reads Kafka, listens to
Mahler, and works on writing a symphony - not your run-of-the-mill erotic
hero. We never even find out how long his cock is.
His next door neighbor is a beautiful woman with a troubled marriage.
She has the opposite problem from the narrator: he lived the kind of life
that people fantasize about and finally found it unfulfilling, while she
lives a drab existence in the suburbs, feeling that there should be more to
life. If you think you know where this is headed, you're right. But that
doesn't matter - the enjoyment in this story isn't watching the plot unfold,
it's in the vivid characters and the realistic descriptions of their problems
and thoughts. And when they do finally get down to business, the sex is very
hot, thank you very much.
It's not a perfect story. Some (but certainly not all) of the
character's musings about the meaning of life are overly melodramatic, and
the dialogue and phrasings are occasionally awkward, particularly in the
first half of the story. But these are relatively minor quibbles. This is a
story that attempts to be both meaningful and sexy, and succeeds.
Ratings for "Cary"
Venus (plot & character): 10
Athena (technical quality): 10
DG (appeal to reviewer): 10
"Siblings" by Michael K. Smith (mksmith@metronet.com). The author labels
this a "novel in progress. The story is long - really long; but it's good.
It includes several completed chapters and an outline of what is missing.
The main characters in the story take the simple perspective that if an
action feels good and hurts nobody, then it is good; and on this basis the
brother and sister build a sexual relationship that extends from their
childhood into their adult lives and enables each of them to embrace other
lovers as well.
In chapter five the author digresses from the story and defends the practice
of consensual incest. His arguments are plausible. The most serious
objections, as I understand them, are genetic difficulties arising from
recessive genes (double recessives are much more likely to occur among
related individuals) and the high probability that incestuous relationships
are likely to be coercive and therefore abusive. The author is aware of the
dangers of abuse; his story "Remembering" vividly depicts the bad effects of
such a relationship. His argument here is simply that those problems do not
occur in this story and that the relationship between Michael and Alex is
healthy and beautiful. The story certainly demonstrates his point.
The other objection to this story goes something like this: "The bible says
incest is wrong, goddamit!" I'm pretty sure that's not true; but certainly
lots of people who read the bible and claim to be religious people say it's
wrong. This story doesn't address theology directly, but what it does do is
draw a portrait of two main characters and several others who are genuinely
good and socially responsible people. Bible thumpers make me nervous and
annoy the hell out of me. I'd rather have a couple of incestuous hedonists
like these for next-door neighbors.
The author states that "the story contains no sex scenes as such"; but that's
not true. It would be more accurate to state that the story does not glory
in sex for its own sake; but it is very heavy on romantic sexual contact in
the context of the developing relationship between this brother and sister.
This story is extremely well written. Because it is long and complex, I
won't even attempt to summarize it any further here. I strongly recommend
this story.
Ratings for "Siblings"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
* "Summer Dreams" by Lysander (lysander@bitsmart.com). I get more than a
little annoyed by people who say there are no good stories on a.s.s. The
people that call us all sick weirdoes I can at least understand and ignore.
But no good stories? I'm desperately trying to keep up with all the good
stories on this newsgroup. Certainly there are some weak stories here (and
some genuine garbage); but I find a.s.s. to be a good source of high quality
recreational reading for adults. This set of reviews should provide evidence
of that quality. And this story is what pushed me to make my comment.
Lysander has written several good stories; but I think this is his best. I
have previously enjoyed Lysander for his action stories; but this one is
almost poetry. He integrates the narrator's fantasies with his real life in
a unique and moving manner. Because the enjoyment arises from the unraveling
of the story, I can't tell you much about it. Just take my word for it: if
you're interested in romance with healthy doses of sex and genuine human
sentiment, this is a really good story for you. And don't be afraid to stop
and think after you read this story - and read it again.
Ratings for "Summer Dreams"
Athena (technical quality): 10
Venus (plot & character): 10
Celeste (appeal to reviewer): 10
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