Private Showings on Kindle

Questions/Answers on Private Showings for Kindle

Q:  Now that your first novel, Private Showings, is available on Kindle, can you fill us in on the history of its writing and publishing?

A:  After I finished writing the short story The Coming of Momette, which took me about three years while I was living in Europe, I began conceiving Private Showings after a couple of visits to the St. Denis statue in Paris that overlooks the Montmartre district.  The original St. Denise was martyred and then carried his head around that district, back in the away day.  The juxtaposition of a statue of holy martyr carting around his head after decapitation showing itself in a district historically devoted to exotic bars, showgirls revues, and sex shops appealed to my sense of the ironic metaphysical.  I was nearing the end of my work on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal/Europe at the time.  That ending caused a miserable spiritual and political collapse that ultimately sent me back to the States, where I cashed in a 401K and spent several years drifting between the family country estate in DeMotte, Indiana, and sleeping on the couch at my sister’s place in Chicago as I wrote Private Showings.  It took me about four years of obsessive perfectionism before I suffered a more severe physical and aesthetic collapse after several rejections by literary agents that sent me to a hospital.  Eventually, one of my personal advisers told me to self-publish the novel and, essentially, move on to other projects.  This I did on Xlibris, where it is currently available in paperback.  The Kindle opportunity came recently, of course, after keeping Private Showings in my desk drawer, so to speak, for several years.

Q:  What are your current overall feelings about the novel these days?

A:  Subjectively, I think it is a great work of literature, and I’m not what you would call a braggart.  As I was sending it out earlier, I received comments about how short it is, how it really shouldn’t be considered a novel: but its length is deceiving, considering its density that gives it the impression of a much longer work.  That said, the novel is otherworldly and may not be of its time.  Certainly, when I announced its Kindle publication on Facebook to my “Friends”, there was hardly any reaction, which puzzled me, considering most of my other fiction announcements receive some sort of acknowledgement.

Q:  What do you think of its appearance on Kindle?

A:  I had a great deal of difficulty in formatting.  It’s not your typical, everyday chapter-by-chapter construction, which may have thwarted my efforts to put it over as a Word document.  I complained to Amazon several times, until I experimented with an HTML format that “worked”.  That said, I am seeing various errors, such as all the dashes defaulting into the fractions 2/3 and paragraphs distorted.  But I am leaving it as is.  It gives it an unintentional feel of a kind of samizdat document, or those Beeline pornographic books from the early 1960s that kids of my time would collect and stash under their beds.

Q:  Beeline Books?

A:  Yes, which gives me the opportunity to cite its influences.  Mainly, the French nouveau roman, which I studied in Europe while learning my second language.  Alain Robbe-Grillet, certainly, but more pertinent, Claude Simon.  The text of Private Showings employs the notion he invented of textual “triggers”, words or turns of phrases that motivate the story forward, instead of traditional plot artifices.  It was a method akin to the twelve-tone system created by Schoenberg in music, but like Schoenberg, welcomed with much antagonism and turmoil.  Simon won the Nobel Prize for Literature around the time I was living in Europe: it was met with much controversy because of the profoundly complex nature of his writing style.  In addition, the collection of 1970s meta fiction titled The Naked Eye is a major influence, especially when it comes to the mixing of genres in Private Showings.  And, of course, William Burroughs’ books for their sexual erotic content: I was experimenting with his notion of arousal as plot motivation as well, or at least, that’s the way I interpret it.  Then there’s those notorious Beeline Books—those cheap, primitive paperbacks of mysterious, crude erotic enchantment out of the Sixties, before the mass production of visual commercial erotica we see now—Private Showings is somewhat of a parody of those.  And finally, Memoirs of Fanny Hill: the sex scenes in Private Showings never use four-letter words, you will notice, as don’t the Memoirs.

Q: You call Private Showings a “sexistential novel”.  What does that mean?

A:  The appearance of “being” in a sexual world and “nothingness” to the main character of XXX.  XXX is a “nothing” character: everything is physical appearance in the purely sexual world, the soul means “nothing”, if there is a soul.  In a sexual world, the body alone and physical appearance is the be-all and end-all of existence.  XXX is alienated in such a world: an anti-hero of flesh as bad faith.  The physically grotesque or ugly or neutrals, in essence, barely exist.

Q:  Is there really a “purely sexual world”?

A:  No question.  It’s a phantasm world, however, that we see it in such vehicles as advertisement: the misbegotten promise of satiated fulfillment through objectivity of a product.  And, the character XXX tries to seek out the enlivenment of the object in the quest of Private Showings.

Q:  In the final episode of rejection …

A: You know, rejection is another theme of the novel.  We are all told in our love lives (and of course when it comes to writing fiction) that we will inevitably face rejection and shouldn’t take it personally no matter the hurt.  As someone described it to me: “no, no, no, no, YES!”  Well, what if the quest is one of constant “no” and, instead of “yes”, must end in an act of “fantastic nothingness”.  Personally, I hate rejection.  When one of my pieces is “rejected” by some magazine and such, I don’t just feel the pain then eventually move on: I detest it: it insults my creative humanity.

Q:  Really?

A: Uh, maybe I exaggerate.  It does feel that way sometimes, though.

Q:  In a final episode, XXX strongly contemplates hitting a woman.  Given the current “MeToo” movement and such, doesn’t that bother you?

A:  In a sense, yes, because it has always bothered me, much earlier than current media concerns.   But remember, the character is strongly alcoholic too … and I suspect booze is a main trigger in all these current incidents that is being overlooked.  Sober people generally don’t behave that way.  Also, XXX has gone through a period of watching television after work, switching between erotica films and war footage on the networks: I was only following the dictates of the character as XXX deteriorates.

You know, I also chose the name XXX in recalling the climate when the X-rated movie first appeared.  Especially the movie Deep Throat, which caused a major reaction in the national pop cultural scene, hell, in the news media itself.  My theory is that the emergence of the XXX so-called pornographic film was due to the constant viewings of televisional violence from out of Vietnam; it was a filmic reaction through a sexessential rite of “being” as opposed to the nothingness of an agonizing war with no strategic value, of futility and humiliation.

Q:  Won’t gay people, especially women, be offended by the Sapphic sex scenes, given current preoccupation with gender issues and such?

A:  I don’t know, whatever.  But really, those scenes were designed more as a Sapphic multiplication of the fixation of XXX on the unreal perfect woman than anything else.  The novel is also making a statement on the sexual role-playing in fantasy invention: the cheerleader, the swimsuit model, the office worker.  Typical of erotica, in general.  Only, I conceived Private Showings as an elaborate deconstruction of all of that.  And the gender of XXX is never explicitly stated, let’s remember.

Q:  Another role is the Catholic schoolgirl in a sex scene with a character who seems to be a nun, though you never state that explicitly.

A:  I am, essentially, a sub-Catholic writer, informed by my visits to the tombs of popes beneath the Vatican years ago.  The church underlies much of my fiction because I was born into it and am both fascinated by its history and its metaphysics but, most importantly, it owes me an apology for certain indignities, and I am talking about from the pope directly, ho, ho, ho, holy.  I didn’t state it explicitly because it is also a parody, this time, of the mysteries of church role-playing deconstructed into the sex act.

A:  Finally, have you ever considered rewriting the novel?

Q:  No, it stands as is.  I can do no more with it.  Unless a publisher or editor pays me to do it.  It deserves that, but, given the current literary climate, I doubt that will happen.

A:  Can you explain?

Q:  Beyond an overreliance on Victorian plot structures in current literature and hackneyed themes, no, nothing specific.  It, frankly, causes despair but what can you do?

A:  So, George, what’s next?

Q:  Promoting the novel.  Like Samuel Beckett, I hate marketing my “brand”.  The work should speak for itself.  But I have no alternative.  Ho, hum.  I’m currently trying to return to writing a short story after an abysmal rejection by New York agents at a writers conference: I paid money for the privilege of ignorant and unprofessional behavior to the point of physical revulsion.  I thought of just chucking it all in after all these years of writing fiction after that humiliation, you know.  But I am getting major synchronicity these days about this short story, and I must obey the promptings of the muse, as fickle as she can be.