18 July, 2011
Poesis is the making of things, and as I look back at the process which produced Road House I realize how aleatory the making of these kinds of things is. Also how compelling, once you tap into them.
As much as I have enjoyed the time devoted since March, 2009, to The Devil’s Workshop, it increasingly seems that there are greater pleasures to be found in other activities. My friends Paul and Chris lamented that I was spending my time on Facebook rather than on this blog, but something else happened, no total migration to FB. Instead, something of a miracle occurred, one which will alter future posts in this slot.
I’ll leave it to others to judge if the miracle is only internal — one whose truth belongs only to me — or instead something that might be measurable and appreciated from the outside. But Road House is such a radical departure from the kinds of writing I have done and has such thorough-going implications for my sense of self that I need to call it a miracle, as opposed perhaps to a fit of craziness.
Miracle or craziness, whatever, the experience has been shared with my cousin John Young, whom I knew in my youth as Johnny Mack and who now goes by the handle of Red Dog. Roughly, this is how things transpired.
Alert readers might have noted that back in March I revised and posted into my Archives some old lecture notes from the first graduate seminar I gave in Edmonton in the autumn of 1987 (Pre-Eighteenth Century Travel Literature). Those notes captured what I had to say about Horace’s Satira V, i, usually known as Iter Brindisium, in particular of the conventions and topoi (commonplaces) of travel writing therein exemplified. Iter Brinidisium was one of ten texts I asked my students to read, a gamut which included almost all continents and classical cultures and concluding with the travels of Olaudah Equiano, an eighteenth-century African from what we now call Nigeria, in some people’s minds the prototype of abolitionist narrative.
One afternoon, in a flash — one of those legendary bolts of lightning poets long for — I wrote out the first 25 lines of a “red-neck travelogue”, which I imagined would recapitulate and update Horace’s journey along the Appian Way to Brindisi, Sparks City as I re-baptized it in some dimly perceived and defined southern landscape — brindisi meaning, among other things, sparks in Italian
That first version aimed at a five-beat line. I am generally in favor of recognizable poetic forms, which doesn’t necessarily mean ones which already exist. I quickly realized that hexameters in the sense of flexible six-beat lines would work better, and also captured the proclivity of southern speakers towards dactyls (DA-da-da: descending feet, e.g. IN-sur-ance), spondees (DA-DA), and dropped syllables (syncope and apocope) .
The metric pattern I devised can be discerned in the present version of that passage.
Virgil and me set off to Sparks City with the two
fat cats who’d bankrolled the operation and insisted on
tagging along for the ride. That city, which it ain’t, sucks.
The stops along the way themselves leave considerable
to be desired, details of which y’all’ll shortly hear.
Now Virg, not since tender youth himself the virgin
his name evokes, maybe for that very reason
fixated on liberating others from that sorry state,
consequences be damned, had a number of things
occupying his mind, which works okay on a single
track but encounters difficulty when issues surpass
two or three. Leaves were poppin’ out all over.
It was glorious Spring time. Distractions were many.
Like Indian paintbrushes suddenly unclad, the ladies
were doing their damnedest to show, and were showing well —
adversity which can drive a man to fortify himself
with hard liquor, this to keep thoughts down to a few
and in manageable rows, which Virg and me wisely foreseen,
packing provisions for the trip, hip flasks of bourbon
plus some extra bricks of the fine product, the weed
we hoped to turn a decent margin on in Sparks City,
we’d camouflaged, along with a gun, under a lot of junk
piled on in the pickup truck’s locked tool box.
I am going to save most of this kind of talk for later (sometimes mock or parodic) pieces of scholarly literature on Road House (including a “feminist critique of the “logo-phallocratic” bias in this poem, forthcoming in Hysteria: A Journal of Radical Feminist Thought). What I want to talk about here is how the collaboration between Red Dog and myself came about, in particular how collective poesis happens.
One seminal moment was the first Throw-Down in Irvine, a term with multiple meanings, but the one Red Dog had in mind when he so dubbed it back in December — a combination of “to party” and the sense derived from the early years of hip-hop and break-dancing).
In the last post I linked to the YouTube of “Lone Star Blues” as performed at that first University Hills Throw-Down on our patio in Irvine by Uncle Dave Lang, Red Dog Young and my brother Steve Lang.
In the first place there was, then, Davo’s rendition of Delbert McClinton’s voice and its down-home manner of addressing the rigors of life in Texas, rigors which were mine until I fled like a bat out of hell at the tender age of 18, rigors which all of the Texans present, and even those who have not been so benighted but have consonant traumas of their own, grasped immediately.
Sometime in late March I had a chat with Red Dog in which I asked him if he would be willing to be a first reader of the strange poem growing within me, since it was in a language I had lost touch with,Texas Tawk, the dialect of English I heard spoken in my youth, its pronounciation, vocabulary and phraseology and idioms, even grammar).
Sure, I had a pretty firm sense of the rhythms, and I soon starting hearing within the voice of the character who came to be Johnny. But I did not trust myself entirely because I kept reverting to registers and a vocabulary which could never have been those of a thirty-year old drifter in, say, 1950s Texas.
My reflex to consult with Red Dog was spot on, as became obvious the first time we met at the old colonial-style San Clemente Hotel café. I was relieved that there were not too many false notes in the hundred or so lines I printed out for him. But there were some rather egregious ones and in the beginning I had trouble escaping from following too literally the template of Iter Brindisium.
Repeatedly, Red Dog urged upon me to go for the concrete rather than the abstract — advice familiar in the prescriptions of twentieth-century poetics but that I have often neglected.
The first time we met we were supposed to be talking about the text as language, but the scope of our collaboration rapidly expanded. For one thing, he had some ideas about the characters, Bea in particular, but also Virg and Johnny and the legendary country songwriter, Waldo HubCap Brown. These threads soon became part and parcel of the story.
There were only two and a half chapters out of ten at the point in time. As far as action in the here-and-now went, I had the Pimps stomping out of the Poker House Strip Club into what looked like a fight, the Partners following because they couldn’t resist the sight of fisticuffs, or worse. I knew that Bea and Virg had to bound, to put it politely, but I figured that would happen the next day, since, following Horace, I had the three cars and the five characters crossing over some very big river on a ferry, Johnny, the Narrator hung over while they all went out on the stern of the ferry and smoked a joint.
Red Dog’s advice was to compress the action, forget about the river and stay where we were, imaginatively, more or less in East Texas. Make it happen fast and then let the cards fall where they will.
There weren’t all that many times we met in San Clemente, though I love the drive down on the 73 and sometimes arranged a nice Korean lunch for myself afterwards. Each time, though, our exchanges flowed fast and furious, and we separated with very different ideas than those we had brought to the table.
In retrospect, let me set out two major changes.
The first is that Red Dog suggested I write the last chapter as soon as possible, before I got down to Chapter Three, where we were then. You have to know where you are going in order to go, is what he said. Those words could just as easily be in a HubCap song as not. And the recognition that almost anything can be converted into poetry or song was instrumental in what happened to us both thereafter.
The second major change or turning in the road is that, somehow, Waldo HubCap Brown was born, and his songs became Red Dog’s business.
I knew early on that there was a country songwriter hovering over the proceedings, since Virg and Johnny loved his songs, two titles of which having already wormed their way into the poetry: I’d Go to Jail for You and Thanks Ma’am, I’ll Roll My Own. I initially had him as “Can-Opener” Brown, but Red Dog told me that every time he thought of him (remember this was still a figment in our imaginations), he would replace “Can-Opener” with “Hub-Cap”. HubCap it soon became.
The next thing I knew Red Dog delivered the lyrics and the chords of I’d Go to Jail for You, plus a draft MP4 file.
From then things took right off. Red Dog started working on the songs and I sought ways to fit them into the action. I lept ahead to the last chapter, suddenly (SPOILER ALERT) had the vision of the tornado, no doubt in part because of the Jopin, Missouri disaster of May 22 — a useful timeline for the purposes of the poem’s composition. I say in part because, as anyone who knows me intimately knows, I have always been obsessed with powerful weather, tornados, hurricanes, blizzards, you name it.
Stuff just comes up out of the unconscious and finds its place in what is ongoing. There is much buried here that I shall certainly never talk about except in fiction. All the imagery of houses, yearned after or destroyed, homes, shacks, hovels, trailer houses rose to the surface without my ever thinking about them. “HubCap” itself was a token of the by then well-integrated road theme. That was something I didn’t get until almost the end.
The sighting or siting of two other pivotal scenes in subsequent chapters happened in a similar whoosh. First, the spell the three fugitives pass at Homer’s place, Homer’s home way back in the woods, and the back-story of Homer, his link to HubCap and further HubCap memorabilia of which there is more to come.
Second, Bea’s identity as part Indian and the two chapters built around the the traveling roadshow Swamp Carnival to Nooseton (noose+Houston). Both Red Dog and I were haunted by memories of sideshows and traveling circuses in our youth. The comic grotesque floating in those memories also chimed with the spirit of the poem.
There is no doubt that my scholarly writing on Chinook Jargon predisposed me to set up aYama or Mobilian Jargon sub-plot, one which I feel (fear?) will now follow me into future writing. Bea’s “Indian name” is Moon Woman. The grandmother she shares with El-Bak-e-Show (“No Arm”) is Water Daughter (Ok-e-Alla). The most thorough study of Yama is Emmanuel Dreschel’s Mobilian Jargon, but this is an obscure scholarly interest. I probably know or know of most of the individuals out there who might be inclined to pursue it.
Finally, the posting of Road House in this kind of form on a website in rudimentary hypertextual form will, I am now convinced, shape what writing is left to me in my present incarnation on Planet Earth.
Throughout, Red Dog and I kept referring to “road movies” as the underlying template of our imaginings. Even if you are writing “literature” — even if you are writing a “satire in hexameters” based on an obscure poem in Latin — you are thinking, these days, in filmic terms. There is a plethora of theoretical texts on the impact of film on literature. I don’t need to quote them anymore, since I am retired from that profession. But trust me, the evidence is clear to all those with eyes to see.
And, as in cinema, the forms of creativity brought to bear in Road House were intensely collaborative. As I put it in the Prologue: Red Dog and I were like a tag-team.
It was a fabulous experience, and it is not over yet. Other HubCap Productions are being ramped up, slowly.