Porno
with
redeeming
value

A just-released pornographic book is provoking a furor in Brazil, but it's the cheers of the media that is being mostly heard. The author is none other than one of the 40 "immortals" from the venerable Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters). Baiano (from Bahia state) Joćo Ubaldo Ribeiro, 58, is the author of some spicy and sexually charged novels. Nothing that compares, however, to his last work, A Casa dos Budas Ditosos (The House of the Blissful Buddhas).

Unabashedly pornographic, Ribeiro's new book tells the story in the first person of a woman with a voracious and superimaginative sexual appetite. The book was written at the request of Objetiva publishing house which was putting together the collection Plenos Pecados (Whole Sins), dealing with the seven capital sins. Ribeiro was initially asked to write about laziness, one sin all Baianos are supposed to commit. He didn't accept the stereotype, though, and opted for a more challenging sin: luxury.

In an often used literary trick, the author tells us in the foreword that the book is the transcript he made of several cassette tapes that were delivered to him by C.L.B, a 68-year-old woman. Having read that the author had been invited to write about luxury, C.L.B. left at the reception desk of the writer's apartment building a box with tapes and a note telling of her intention to reveal her most daring and intimate sexual experiences.

Ribeiro, now living in a penthouse on Leblon beach, a neighborhood on Rio's south zone, confessed to having blushed at many of the sexual experiences described. He also confessed that some of the practices described in the book he didn't even know existed before finding them while surfing the Internet. The author didn't dare use everything he read, though.

Rio's daily Jornal do Brasil celebrated the novel's arrival with an appeal to more sophisticated readers: "Poets, singers, intellectuals, come running. You finally have the opportunity to read a pornographic book without feeling guilty for consuming your time with fifth-class literature."

For Ribeiro this was the realization of an old dream: "I was always fascinated by the idea of writing a pornographic book with some literary quality. This is a very difficult genre." Now he is afraid people are going to start thinking the female character is being used as a spokesperson for his own philosophy.

The writer has been playing with the idea of writing a spicier book for a few years now, since a congress for writers in Canada when authors read from their own work. It was there that he found an older woman who confessed to him that she was a writer of pornographic books. He talked recently about this encounter: "I told her that it was very hard to write a pornographic book with some literary quality. One of these days I will write one, I thought. And this idea continued to occupy a little corner of my mind."

Lacking any morals, C.L.B. had all kinds of sexual experiences including incest, bestiality and sex with children. For her, normal are experiences without any sexual hang-ups or inhibitions. She intersperses her sexual exploits with philosophical thoughts and citations by Shakespeare, Robbe-Grillet, Lacan, Freud, Heidegger and Plato. C.L.B. believes she is doing God's work by fully living her sexual fantasies. She says, "I've done what He created me to do."

What about the title? "As any good title with literary quality this one means nothing," explains Joćo Ubaldo Ribeiro. The Blissful Buddhas are a statue of a female and a male Buddha having sex that the old woman who signed the book bought in Thailand. Ribeiro was inspired by a book on sex he got as a gift and that spoke about a temple called House of the Blissful Buddhas.

---

Immoral
fragments

"No one was born with a rigid sexual role, everybody is everything in a bigger or smaller degree, the rest is fear of ridiculous and absurd ghosts, that never sustained themselves on their misty little legs."

"We live according to rules and standards for which no human being was made."

"Exclusive heterosexuality, limitation. Exclusive homosexuality, limitation. Bisexuality, normal... Pansexuality, the future, the chance of universalizing love's aggregating force."

"I didn't sin against luxury. The one who sins is he who doesn't do what he was created to do."

"Taking it on your thighs is something that requires know-how to be decently enjoyed. The woman has to train her posture, to be sure that she will reach an orgasm—even more so when the man is semi-adolescent and comes in two tenths of a second."

"I have a fixation in the oral phase, cannibalistic oral phase naturally; I adore every form of ingestion. At that time I was already hooked on this kind of fixation, today this is perfectly clear."

"The devirginating was really a great day.... Virginity you only lose once, and since I had created the opportunity to get rid of it the way I had imagined, I would not waste such full satisfaction."

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