Francis Levy at the East Hampton Library

Author Francis Levy reads from his new novel, Seven Days in Rio, at the East Hampton Library.

You're Invited!

THE COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF THE FICTIONAL IMAGE OF RIO, EVEN IF IT MEANS BURNING BOOKS AND CREATING THREATENING EFFIGIES OF DESPISED WRITERS, INVITES YOU TO A READING AND PUBLIC RECANTING

WHEN: SEPTEMBER 8, 2011

WHERE:  THE SIDEWALK CAFÉ (94 Avenue A at Sixth Street NYC)

TIME: 6:15

Mr. Levy has allowed himself to be put in stocks for this reading so that he may demonstrate how sorry he is for offending not only the people of Rio, but mankind in general. Since publishing SEVEN DAYS IN RIO, Mr. Levy accepted an invitation from the Brazilian government to view the destruction that his novel has wrought. After touring devastated areas of the city, Mr. Levy described being shocked by all the untruths that his character Kenny Cantor perpetrated in the novel.

Mr. Levy saw no evidence of pickpockets anywhere and performed a test whereby he left $l0,000 in small denominations on a public bench near the Copacabana. When he came back from a walk on the beach, the money was all there and his frenzied attempts to find thieves or anyone who would take it were unsuccessful. One resident of the city suggested that the reason why the money wasn’t taken is that the Brazilian economy is booming and $10,000 American dollars is not worth the trouble for the city’s affluent populace. Eventually, Mr. Levy had to hire a cleaning service to sweep the money away— in order to avoid getting a ticket for littering.

As for prostitutes, Mr. Levy is not sure where Kenny got his ideas from. Mr. Levy found that the Copacabana, one of the most famous beaches in Brazil, was filled with nuns in habits. Not able to find any members of the world’s oldest profession in a city where women who might have sold their bodies now earn higher wages selling derivatives, Mr. Levy hired a private detective service, Three Guys, named after the popular coffee shop opposite the Whitney. Three Guys helped him to locate some alumnae working girls in the financial services industry.  But Mr. Levy was shocked to find that none of the former prostitutes he interviewed had ever heard of Susan Sontag. Through no fault of his own, Levy again found that he’d been duped by his own character.

“Basically, I was receiving misinformation from this fictional individual. I have no intention of shirking responsibility for my crimes. I’m not trying to say that I was just taking orders, but I’m clearly a victim too. I also think that Kenny’s attitude towards psychoanalysis is totally distorted. He treats psychoanalysts like whores who bilk their wealthy patients. Anyone who has ever been psychoanalyzed knows this is a myth. The average psychoanalyst is happy to listen to neurotic patients expressing the same fears four times a week without receiving a penny’s worth of compensation, and he or she is happy to work nights on the loading dock of a supermarket to support his passion for listening to repetitive drivel. In sum, I am more than ready to accept any punishment that the people of Rio and the profession of psychoanalysis wish to dole out. It is the only way to relieve me from the huge burden of guilt that I am carrying for my transgressions. I would suggest that I be spanked, lashed and crucified, with my naked body hammered to a cross, but I’m afraid I would enjoy those punishments too much. Instead let me be yelled at and nagged to death. Let the punishment fit the crime.”

COME EARLY SEATING IS LIMITED!

Brazilgate 2011

The most prominent daily newspaper in Brazil, O Globo, quoted government officials saying they'll request an apology for the US publication of Seven Days in Rio by Francis Levy, as well as write a letter to the US Embassy. The article elicited nearly 350 comments from readers of the paper, some outraged while others found the matter trivial. O Globo quotes Aparecida Gonçalves, the secretary for combating violence against women, a government body that reports to the presidency, insisting that all Brazilians must be "treated well, even in fiction."

We include a fiction disclaimer on the copyright page of all our books, but in addition, the author penned a prologue that kicks off the novel, stating:

"None of the characters in this novel are real, nor are the places or the psychoanalytic movements, even though the name Rio may conjure the real city of Rio de Janeiro. Lacanian analysis as described in the novel bears no resemblance to the branch of psychoanalytic practice initiated by the French analyst Jacques Lacan. Even the duration of time stated in the title bears little resemblance to what is commonly known as seven days. So don't start writing irate letters to my blog correcting this or that or asking for refunds."

We understand it to be natural for people to feel protective of their community. It was clear from the comments posted to the O Globo website that there is a greater cultural discussion ongoing, and we don't believe a work of satire by an American writer, never presented as anything other than fiction, belongs in that cultural discussion. It is also apparent from the O Globo article that the quoted official never read the book before demanding an apology, which is unfortunate.

Joshua Mohr pointed out to me that this all sounded familiar to when government folk in Brazil got in a tizzy in reaction to a Simpsons episode. According to BBC, "Simpsons father Homer was kidnapped by an unlicensed taxi driver, and he and son Bart were robbed by street children... Bart was at one stage swallowed by a boa constrictor, and Rio's slums appeared to be dirty and dangerous."

Fav Lines from Seven Days in Rio

Francis Levy's Seven Days in Rio got a killer-sweet review on Chuck Palahniuk's site, The Cult the other day.

From the review: "It's like an erotic version of Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Levy is matter-of-fact in his raunchiness, which is try-and-suppress-your-laughter-because-people-are-beginning-to-stare-at-you funny. The man is fearless in his exploration of human sexuality."

The review, by Joshua Chaplinsky, referenced the laugh-out-loud nature of some of the lines so we thought we'd revisit this original post featuring some of our favorite lines from the novel.

Seven Days in Rio, a novel by Francis Levy, will be out on July 4 of this year. Here are some meaty gems from the book that I thought I'd share with you to whet your appetite:

"Author's Note: None of the characters in this novel are real, nor are the places or psychoanalytic movements, even though the name Rio may conjure the real city of Rio de Janeiro. Lacanian analysis as described in the novel bears no resemblance to the branch of psychoanalytic practice initiated by the French analyst Jacques Lacan. Even the duration of time stated in the title bears little resemblance to what is commonly known as seven days. So don’t start writing irate letters to my blog correcting this or that or asking for refunds."

"Besides sex, one of my obsessions is clean air, and I try to engage in sexual acts that don’t release any toxins into the atmosphere."

"I sometimes think that there should be a support group for people who, like myself, are always missing something."

"Our parting had felt a little like the last scene of Casablanca. There was no plane waiting to take her away from me, there was no heroic resistance leader standing between us, no war, and I wasn’t a hardened American expatriate named Rick. Yet I felt I could hear the strains of “As Time Goes By” playing on the piano in some beat-up North African café."

"“I’m a traveler who has become waylaid,” I said holding out a real. “I’m a little like Odysseus. I started out my journey looking for beautiful prostitutes, but I have been experiencing famine amongst plenty. Now I feel like Robinson Crusoe. Except I haven’t been washed up on an island, and consequently have found no Man Friday to show me the way.”"

"He looked like the kind of guy who had spent his life as a night watchman and now, in retirement, just watched over things on a recreational basis."

That's just a sample. Like the sampler appetizer you can order at Applebee's.

Q&A With Francis Levy

This Q+A was posted at some point last year, but with today being the official publication date of Seven Days in Rio, we figured we'd revisit it.

In 2011, we'll publish Francis Levy's second novel, Seven Days in Rio. In 2008, we published his first book, Erotomania: A Romance, which may have received the most amusing pull-quotes from reviews of any book we've published.


The Village Voice called Levy "Nicholson Baker and Mary Gaitskill's French-kissing cousin." Inland Empire Weekly said he was "our generation's DH Lawrence, Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski rolled into one." And the Los Angeles Times said "Levy's excellent too, like Miller and Bukowski, on the mechanics and energy and animal filth of rumpy-pumpy." (Rumpy-pumpy?)


Here's a brief Q&A with Levy to mark the occasion:


Erotomania made some year-end best-of lists and got some over-the-moon postive reviews, but there were places, such as the Seattle Stranger, who "abandoned" reading the book. As an editor, I found the love/hate knee-jerk reaction to Erotomania both exceptionally rewarding and enjoyable -- what is the point of art if not to inspire and provoke. What was your reaction as a writer?


FL: I'm a naturally provocative person. It doesn't take much for me to provoke and there was a time in my career when the provocation actually produced it's desired effect which I suppose was to steel myself up against anticipated rejection. I for instance had written a series of letters from Jews to Herr Hitler asking to be excused from the Holocaust.The letters played upon all the elements of Jewish self hatred that were evident amongst the ambitious, assimilationist crowd I grew up around. People in my little fiction would plead to be excused from the Holocaust because they didn't look or act like the other Jews. The piece by the way was called "Passive Resistance," a title that also got me into trouble since that mode of social protest was tied to folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King who most educated readers idolize. "Passive Resistance" was appreciated by some, but reviled by others and managed to create the effect someone has when they walk into a room after soiling themselves, even though it never actually got published.


Then I wrote another parody "Joseph Mengele:Man of Science" and yet another one in which Hitler is in a rehab for recovering dictators and tells his story, how he took the Sudetenland, but it was not enough. He was portayed like a sexual compulsive who is addicted to conquests. In those years, I was actually enraged and the rage was barely sublimated so the net effect was to give the reader material they found hard to digest. Mind you others like Phillip Roth and Wally Shawn had dealt satirically with subjects like Jewish self hatred and facism. It's the same material that Mel Brook's dealt with in the original movie of The Producers with its infamous number "Springtime for Hitler."


Provocation is really the comic form of tragedy, or tragic comedy. Look Erotomania is a tragi-comedy. James and Monica exemplify evolution on an ontogenic basis. They start as animals and the overly developed cerebral cortex gets in the way. The higher brain activities cause them to lose all the fun. The only problem is they wouldn't have realized they were not having fun unless they had consciousness, nor would they have had the pleasure of getting to know each other and getting to experience other forms of enjoyments such as mimesis, such as art, such as food. Freud wrote about this in Civilization and Its Discontents. I don't know why that book is not a perpetual bestseller. It should be in the drawer of every motel room like the Gideon Bible once was, giving the lonely traveler a little bit of gospel and the solace of knowing why he is so torn.


In a nutshell, Erotomania wasn't provocative because of the sex, though there was almost as much of it in the book as there is in life. It was provocative because of its rather upsetting message, which is again Freud's message i.e. that in the course of being human and socializing, man must forego certain things. Instinct will become compromised by the inhibitions that accompany consciousness. The book was also upsetting because my couple, who I really fell in love with myself, eventually embark upon a project which causes them to explode. Here again, hyperbole was simply underlining a truth: that we all separate and individuate only to be reunited again with common matter in death. My feeling is that some people simply don't want to read these things. It's like Spielberg's A.I. A lot of filmgoers didn't like the movie, but not because it was a bad movie. Rather the movie said something that was upsetting in the case of A.I. that the species could perpetuate itself, consciousness could exist without the body.


On the surface level, Erotomania was the arc of a couple as they perfect their relationship, is Seven Days in Rio the story of a man searching for the perfect relationship . . . with a prostitute?


FL: Not really. In essence Seven Days is about a sex tourist who gets waylaid at a psychoanalytic convention. It's not an autobiographical novel in any sense of the word. To begin with, I have never been to Rio, but it's far more more personal in a poetic way than Erotomania was. In essence I'm the sex tourist who got waylaid at the psychoanalytic convention, though to bookend I have never been to a psychoanalytic convention either.

However basically in some harum scarum way Seven Days tells my story. I recently published a piece about my own analysis in American Imago, a scholarly journal founded by Freud and Hanns Sachs in l939. It's called "Psychoanalysis: The Patient's Cure" and it tells the story of my own analysis. In one of the early parts of the piece I describe how I was beaten up outside a bottomless bar called Diamond Lil's which was on Canal near White Street in the 70's. I don't know what caused me to get worked over by the bouncers. I must have done something provocative to get back to the subject of the kind of provocation that doesn't delight audiences. For instance back in those days I had the habit of getting blind drunk and doing things like pulling on a fellow nudie bar aficionado's beard. People don't like that kind of provocation, but I didn't know that. I had to be told, in fact, that this was very naughty, very bad and that it would provoke the ire of those to whom it was done. That same night I went down the street to a famously violent Punk Rock place called the Mudd Club where women and I suppose some men were routinely raped in the bathroom. I had been knocked out during the beating and when I got up my arm was hanging out of its socket, but I thought "this is pretty cool" and proceeded on my merry way, drinking and using my dangling limb as a conversation piece with bug-eyed women blasted out of their minds on who knows what. In any case, the incident was one of many in which I was playing around with my own death. My self undoing had reached a certain pitch were it became apparent that I might truly succeed in having an ending like that of some of my idols, from Jackson Pollock who rammed his car into a tree, to Janice Joplin and Sid Vicious and in a more literary vein, John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. I had to really think about it at the time: did I want to live or die?

In the Myth of Sisyphus Camus says this is the only real philosophical question, but this wasn't intellectual matter for me. At the time, I simply hated myself and every night I went out on the town in the pursuit of so-called pleasure, I had yet one more opportunity to tempt fate. That's the odd thing about the thing that people call pleasure. Often what people call pleasure or ecstasy masks the search for oblivion. Epicurus is a philosopher whose name is often associated with pleasure, but he believed in the golden mean. Pleasure for him was not indulgance in excess, but a realization of limitation. These are some of the themes are set out to explore in Seven Days.

Seven Days in Rio begins with an amusing disclaimer of sorts: "None of the characters in this novel are real, nor are the places or psychoanalytic movements, even though the name Rio may conjure the real city of Rio de Janeiro. Lacanian analysis as described in the novel bears no resemblance to the branch of psychoanalytic practice initiated by the French analyst Jacques Lacan. Even the duration of time as stated in the title bears little resemblance to what is commonly known as seven days. So don't start writing irate letters to my blog correcting this or that or asking for refunds."

FL: Kafka wrote a novel called Amerika, though he never visited America. I was studying romantic French literature of the l9th Century like Chateaubriand's Atala. I started to read certain kinds of novels based on the writer's imagination of places they only partially knew. I suppose the advent of the New World inspired much fantasy. Being a person who baths in a world of sexual imagery (like most human beings, even if they might not always realize it or want to realize it), I am always imagining my Erewhon, my Utopia, both in terms of sex and its cousin therapy. I have no illusions about Rio or Bangkok or anything. In fact, after all these years of living what many people might called a hum drum existence (being a father and husband and parenthetically loving these activities), who at the same time conjures up altenative universes (I hope none of the family of man takes offense at my claiming that this is also being a trait of the species), I think I might commit suicide were I to confront the banality of pleasure.

The allusion to Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil," the famous phrase she used to describe Eichman is not coincidental and in part explains the disclaimer at the beginning of the novel. Were I to journey to a sexual and/or therapeutic paradise where I could finally meet a beautiful analyst who consented to sleep with me I would in all likelihood be disappointed. It's much better to write about these things. Then I'm free to come and go as I please with minimum destruction to other human beings.

You recently published a very thoughtful and reflective piece in American Imago on your relationship with your own psychoanalyst. How has psychoanalysis informed and furthered your fiction writing?

FL: I have already inadvertently answered this, but let me approach it from another angle which is to say the general question of the inner life. Analysis places a great amount of importance on the inner world. This may sound like a simple idea, but think about it. Most people go into therapy to solve a problem. Some men for instance go into therapy because they are having problems with sex; they have performance anxiety which leads to erectile dysfunction, in lay terms not getting it up. This is a serious matter for a man. I have a feeling that this is what Goethe's Faust is all about. Men will do anything for knowledge about how to solve this difficulty, even going so far as making a Mephistolean bargain.

Okay, I'm being facetious, before the lynch mob of comp lit scholars comes after me, I'm only kidding (not!). In contradistinction to this the analytic enterprise, looks at the whole human character. It's not that some symptoms aren't treated, rather it's a cart and horse matter. Instincts and desires are a part of the humanity of the individual. The idea is that something is getting in the way and that something becomes the subject of the analysis. In the course of this, you embark on a kind of inner life party. I was already fairly practiced in doing emotional striptease before I got into analysis, but the analysis opened up a rich territory which became my palette and eventually the raw stripping, in which I would get attention by exhibitionistically revealing everything, got turned into a ballet, then a piece of modern dance, then a tableau vivant a la Robert Wilson and then novels like Erotomania and Seven Days. I also started to produce a blog called The Screaming Pope. I've also written over 2000 poems, numerous humor pieces and short stories. I don't know if my analyst is totally aware of it, but all his years of treatment created a Frankenstein.

As co-director of the Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination, you come into contact with some of the most relevent thinkers of our time -- what are some of your memorable moments from the Center?

FL: I'm a bit of an intellectual groupie. I like all kinds of weird thinkers known and unknown. I've become friends with several writers published by Two Dollar Radio. Larry Shainberg, the author of Crust, and the classic Ambivalent Zen recently joined a panel on religious extremism called "The Politics of Ecstasy." Barbara Browning, whose The Correspondence Artist, you are publishing this year, was on the David Shields panel "The Lure and Blur of the Real" and that's an example of the the kind of thing that thrills me. The fine line between reality and fiction was what Shields was writing about and along comes Barbara Browning whose fictional characters (are they fiction?) engage in dialogues with real people on line and elsewhere. We had touched on something in the zeitgeist and it was a very exciting and contentious too. Shields and Rick Moody really fenced off on the issue of fiction qua fiction as opposed to reality as fiction or fiction as reality. John Cameron Mitchell who directed one of my favorite movies, Short Bus, was also on that panel.

Okay now I'm going to behave like the kind of asshole I hate. We had Turturro and Edward Albee talking about Beckett. We had Nicholson Baker and Judith Thurman on biography and autobiography. We had Dan Rather on civil wars in Afghanistan and Bosnia. We had the astrophysicist Brian Greene talking to the Harvard esthetician Elain Scarry about math and beauty. We had Christopher Ricks and Sean Wilentz on Dylan, the Nobel prize winning Neuroscientist Gerry Edelman talking about disenchantment in a panel on norms, Phillip Pearstein, Chuck Close, Kiki Smith. The list goes on. I'm proud of it so fuck me if I'm namedropping. Fuck me, fuck everyone. How's that for provocation?

Here's the opening to Seven Days in Rio:

"I went down to the Copacabana on my first night in Rio. I was told that most of the women were prostitutes who would gladly sleep with me for a hundred American dollars. I saw a sexy looking woman wearing high heels and an abbreviated bikini and decided that there was no sense in discriminating, since all the women were going to turn out to be whores and, from what I’d heard about the lovemaking habits of Brazilians, one would be as talented as the next. I pursed my lips and made purring sounds like a pussycat to get the idea across, but the woman didn’t seem to notice me, although I was wearing a seersucker suit from the Brooks Brothers 346 collection. There aren’t too many men, or women, wearing Brooks Brothers suits (or any suits for that matter) down by the Copacabana, and I would have thought I stood out from the crowd.

"I have always found communication between myself and other human beings to be a problem, and often worry that I haven’t succeeded with women where I otherwise might because my words get caught between my teeth. So I just held out my hand to her as she waited for the traffic light to change. “I’m Kenny,” I said. “I have a big dick. Do you understand Anglais? I am new to your country and I wanted to introduce myself while also initiating myself into your highly permissive sexual culture. I will put my cards on the table. I’d be glad to engage you to perform sexual acts on me for a fee.”"

Santutxo Etxeberria in BOMB; Nixon's Nose in Guernica

Dig it, some sneak peeks at forthcoming Two Dollar Radio titles:

The summer issue of BOMB Magazine is now out. In it, you will find an excerpt from Barbara Browning's forthcoming THE CORRESPONDENCE ARTIST, called 'Santutxo Etxeberria.'

Browning will be reading with other BOMB contributors July 13 in Tompkins Square Park.

In other reading news, Francis Levy will be reading tomorrow (Tuesday) night from his new novel, SEVEN DAYS IN RIO, at the Writer's Room in NYC.

If you missed it, Guernica Magazine excerpted THE VISITING SUIT: STORIES FROM MY PRISON LIFE by Xiaoda Xiao in their June issue. The story, titled 'Li Minchu - The Cost of a Dream' in the book, re-dubbed 'Nixon's Nose' at Guernica: "In Maoist China, a political prisoner feels his way through a Kafkaesque tableau of rumors, betrayal, interrogation, and execution."

Read 'em at the beach, at the lake, or with your feet dipped in the ankle-deep water of a kiddie pool.