author q&a: nicola themistes, spectacle city

Spectacle City is the first novel by author Nicola Themistes, and it is a complex, multi-layered novel about Melbourne, drugs, self-destruction, and most importantly, life in all its forms.

I caught up with Nicola to discuss the novel, writing, and self-publishing in the internet age.

Tell me more about Spectacle City.

I usually refer to it as an avant-garde allegory about contemporary life in the city of Melbourne. The novel’s dual focus is the cultural condition of the city over Melbourne Cup Weekend in 2005, and the central narrative of Alexander Smokescreen, a melancholic speedfreak who takes the opportunity of the long weekend to go on a self-destructive bender. But the story is offset and at times undermined by the digressions made by the all-seeing, all-knowing narrator, who relates the events in a singularly satirical and bombastic manner.

Your main character, Alexander Smokescreen is intriguing – where did the inspiration for him come from?

I suppose you could call Alexander my out-of-hand, wildly exaggerated alter ego when I was going through my early twenties. Like Alexander, I had a lot of big ideas and a problem with amphetamines, and I would often let my personal anxieties and desire to prove myself get in the way of meaningfully connecting with other people and the world around me. The character was also supposed to serve as a kind of composite portrait of a lot of men I found myself attracted to during that time.

Thankfully, the process of writing Spectacle City turned out to be a way of exorcising those particular demons that plagued me when I was younger. Throughout the book Alexander is frenziedly trying to prove himself to the world, and to come to terms with his own identity. I think that’s a struggle that a lot of people these days are trying to deal with and articulate; I really wanted to produce the character of Alexander as the sufferer of a particular psychological problem of the early twenty-first century, one which may derive from constantly identifying ourselves on the internet, and striving to assimilate ourselves in real life with how we imagine ourselves online. Crucially, though, I wanted to contextualise this struggle in a specifically Melbourne context, and to make a point about how Melbourne’s cultural identity is in a comparable state of ontological flux. That’s where the subtitle of ‘an allegory’ comes into play.

Spectacle City focuses largely on drug use and gambling – do you think these two things are prevalent in Melbourne society? Society in general?

I think these social issues are two sides of the same coin, and that coin is the sense of disaffection and malaise that comes from being young and bored in Melbourne.

What made you want to write about Melbourne?

I came up with the basic premise for Spectacle City when I was 20 years old and absorbed in the urban literary classics of Modernist Europe: having read about Dublin through James Joyce’s Ulysses and about pre-revolutionary Russia in Andrei Bely’s Petersburg, I figured that Melbourne was lacking a literary work that truly reflected its cultural climate in the present day, and so I set myself the task of formulating and producing a book that could really be considered a sociological document of the city’s state of being.

As a young person, taking walks on my own around the city I’ve lived in all my life, I was struck by the fundamental contradiction at the very heart of the city; why is Melbourne so hyped up? What draws people here, and why are suburban Melburnians so different from the cosmopolitan ones? What is the essential spirit of this place, apart from all the claims about Melbourne being the nation’s cultural capital?

Tell me a bit about the process of writing Spectacle City?

Two things: it took a very long time, and it drove me mad. I was working on the manuscript for Spectacle City for five very formative years between the ages of 20 and 25, and it was my only consistent goal or desire throughout those five years. By which I mean, I underwent many drastic personal transformations in that time, as you do when you’re exposed to so many ideas and people while studying at university, but the whole time I knew that I was supposed to write this book and that I couldn’t move on from it until the job was done properly.

In a lot of ways it stunted my growth, as when my friends were moving out of home and getting into serious relationships, I was living in the world I created in my imagination. The first draft of the manuscript was written on the edge of my descent into a very dark period of amphetamine abuse and intense melancholia, which anyone who reads the book will certainly fathom.
The narrative is saturated with my attempts to exorcise my personal demons, and I still find the notes of despair it contains both resonant and haunting when I re-read the text.

To cut a long story short, the manuscript sat untended for a very long time while I dealt with my personal shit (ie., got off drugs and grew the fuck up) and when I finally got around to editing the manuscript I was much better equipped to approach the work as a conscious adult and turn it into something that other people could find meaningful and enjoy. The point I’m trying to get at here is that Spectacle City is very much a document on how you can transform yourself through writing, and how beautiful and dangerous the process of creating something bigger than yourself can be.

You self-published the novel – how has that been? Are there things that you found particularly difficult/easy?

Like I said, throughout the time I was writing the novel I had a whole lot of personal shit going on and a lot of stupid ideas about what I was doing with my life and the nature of my work. It was only once I was able to overcome all that bullshit that I could really go about publishing the work. The publication process was very much dictated by the talent and energy of people around me: Oliver Hunter, who illustrated the first edition, and Josephine Collins, my faithful and tireless editor, were committed to the project from the outset, and were willing and able to contribute many hours of intense creative labour without expecting payment.

I am very lucky to have very clever people who love me that much, and as we were all first timers to the business of publishing a novel, there was a fair amount of naïve zeal driving the production of the work. By far the best thing I gained from publishing the work myself was the sense of being able to pass on a very intense, personal piece of writing into the hands of others, and observe the ways in which they were able to make it a beautiful thing. I gave my book designer, Peter Borg, complete creative control over the look and feel of the novel, and it was amazing to see the ideas that he was able to come up with in response to my material. Having to do the distribution myself has obviously been a bit annoying because nobody really trusts a self-publishing author, but so far that’s really been the only pain in the arse.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing contemporary writers?

Striving to maintain integrity amidst a world of shit. There are so many expectations for emerging writers to do things in a particular way to qualify for what is termed ‘success.’ Basically none of those expectations involve writing a good book; to me it all seems to be driven by marketing initiatives these days instead of the quest to produce quality literature.

How can writers find time to create meaningful work when they are always on Twitter? You can’t come to any real conclusions about the human condition by cruising Facebook, consuming narcissistic blogs, or streaming videos of cats doing cute and funny things on Youtube. Finding stimulus for producing literature comes about the old fashioned way: by observing people, by reading the classics, by ensuring that everything you do in life is driven by a feeling that you are being honest with yourself and those around you.
There is more writing going on today than ever before, because people are constantly writing about who they are and what they are doing with their time. The real challenge for writers is to be aware of their precursors and to meaningfully contribute to a literary context that is bigger than any ‘like’ they get on a witty Facebook status, a literary context that has been established over thousands of years of people sitting down with a pen and trying to get across their ideas.

Why was it important to you to physically publish the novel? Did you consider submitting it to publishers?

I never considered giving my book to publishers, because I had enough trust in the abundant talent of my immediate community to help me produce the work as a relevant and visually engaging object. I made a decision very early on in the game that I was never going to make money out of Spectacle City, and my foremost aim for the book is to get it into the hands of people who will be inspired by it and find it meaningful. Obviously that is a ridiculously idealistic aim to have for a first novel, but I figure you’re only dumb enough to do this once in your life.

Also, I realised that if I were to go about things in the mainstream fashion, I would effectively have to sell myself and my ideas to the pompous old men in charge of publishing companies, and that idea never really appealed to me. I am just not a fan of the patriarchal hegemony that saturates the mainstream of anything, particularly literature. Spectacle City is a highly unconventional book, and it really had no place being produced in the mainstream. I have been fortunate enough to come of age in an epoch where it is possible to produce and promote my work directly, via the internet, to my target audience (ie., educated deros living in Melbourne) and I definitely would not have been able to go about things in this way 10 years ago.

What has been the most rewarding part of this process?

Having people send me text messages in the middle of the night telling me how much they are enjoying the book.

What else can people expect from you and your writing in the future?

I probably won’t be producing any substantial literary output for the time being, as Spectacle City exhausted the hell out of me, but my next project is to establish a small press with Josephine Collins, the editor of Spectacle City. We’re still working out the specifics, to say nothing of the finances, but Josephine and I have a spectacular working relationship and we’re both committed to publishing quality works of contemporary literature.

So we’re starting up Fleshmarket Press in 2013 in order to publish and promote culturally relevant and non-conventional works of Australian literature by contemporary authors, specialising in interdisciplinary and hybrid media projects to bring good writing into the world.

If you’re interested in finding out more, or purchasing a copy of Spectacle City, check out Nicola’s website here.