Friday feature: John Hospodka's innovative South Side Trilogy

Chicago is an enigmatic two-faced town, its glory undeniable and its depravity unavoidable. Bridgeport resident John Hospodka is trying to evoke that duplicitous essence in Hardscrabble, the fictional neighborhood of his multimedia literary experiment, South Side Trilogy.

Chicago is an otherworldly experience,” Hospodka explains from Bernice’s Tavern, his neighborhood pub and the inspiration for Hi-Fi’s, the local watering hole in Hardscrabble. “Hardscrabble is Chicago’s purgatory, characters trapped between death and ghost.”

Hos (pronounced ‘Haas’) drew from his theater background to create a “Literary Picture Show” rife with monologues, prose poems, lyrics, a soundtrack, artwork, and a narrative. “I was longing for interaction as I was writing. I decided to see how these would translate into other people’s interpretations rather than directing them.”

Book I includes three monologues by Mr. Man, anecdotal snapshots of characters in Hardscrabble. There’s two more monologues performed and broadcast on the site: “Tami’s Sis” played by Mierka Girten and “Mr. Man” by Nicholas Cimino, who plays a plumber on a bar stool, recalling the one that got away. The artwork accompanying the monologues was done—on notebook paper—by Steven Badauskus, the owner of Bernice’s Tavern.

Like Hi-Fi’s, Bernice’s is a quintessential Chicago tavern with a long bar, a couple of tables and a bar full of characters. South Side Trilogy evokes the character of a place more than a specific set of characters. Hos, a self-described office geek with a retinue of theater friends, pulled the Hardscrabble archetype from Bridgeport. “The people of Hardscrabble are souls from a tough neighborhood who have very soft hearts.” 

Hos’s influences on the ambitious project range from local painter Ivan Albright to Walter Payton to Sherwood Anderson. Exploiting the technology of the medium, South Side Trilogy is more of a mosaic about the place of a people rather than a traditional novel. The sense of time is nonlinear, abstract and open-ended. “You don’t have to read it all to get Hardscrabble,” Hos says. It’s laid out so the reader can jump around and listen to music or a monologue, or go from prose poems such as “The Night They Tore Old Comiskey Down” to “Pubic Library Crush” that comprise Book II.

“I wanted to offer something where if people wanted to read poetry it was there, or if they wanted to listen to music, it was there,” Hos says. Part of Book II includes Sonny Kidd: The Basement Tape, four songs performed by Eric Winzenried (aka Hollywood Drunks).

Book III is the book most resembling a novel. It’s told in the second person to Chicago as a character displaced from your neighborhood. “The character of Chicago can be home while still being anonymous,” Hos says.

There’s a lot of content, pulled from over ten years of working on the project. While the narrative is nebulous, the concept of literary multimedia collaboration is intriguing. I expect to see more literary innovations like Hospodka’s tangled love song, a fitting contribution to Chicago’s literary landscape.

For more info: South Side Trilogy launched today and it’s free, though you can print out a PDF for $5.