Vino veritas, translates from the Latin, roughly, as this: truth-in-alcohol. The phenomenon by which we tell more of the truth when drunk. Is vino veritas something real? I wouldn’t venture a definitive guess. Different people react different ways to different stimulants and/or depressants. I would only say that, in my life as a writer, I’ve only dived (delved) into these murky waters once, i.e. written an entire piece (in this case, a chapbook length manuscript) while alcohol shit-faced. Rubber Soul was written and published in 2008. I have made a point of pointing out, in other places, that I was not playing the game straight for much of that particular, recession-trundling year. I wasn’t compulsively shit-faced either; I had (for instance) to function at Temple, both as adjunct prof and graduate student, and I did. But it was a saucy time, of old games turning up loose ends, and, where the recession was concerned, micro and macro levels converging in my life, and the lives of those I cared for. Even as I found, of course, that I couldn’t take care of them anymore. So: I was drunk enough of the time to take my stab, for instance, at the Jack Kerouac of Big Sur. The narrative voice emerges, as in Big Sur, fuzzy, hazy, staggering, stumbling. Drunken. Also channeling my old family relation Jim Morrison. Paul Rothchild said of Morrison, When he was being the shit-faced kamikaze drunk, it was odds-on against getting him to do a vocal. You might look into it. Paraphrase for a writer churning out a brief book: I looked into it.
The narrative Rubber Soul voice is, in fact, too fuzzy, too hazy, to attempt anything classic. Keats keeps getting leaned on, Manhattan juts in absurdly, as does a bizarre overlay of occult/New Age/Golden Dawn baggage. Amidst all the glass shards, who I am as a long-suffering male protagonist in Girl is clearly, and precociously, taking on the task of relating/mythologizing the years on the front-lines with Mary Evelyn. Eight years, to be precise. The Word finds me sounding not like Kerouac or Morrison but like Charles Bukowski. He becomes another absurd overlay, amidst the fuzziness and the Crowley bric-a-brac. The overall tone of Rubber Soul, I would say, is not morose like Big Sur but frenzied, chaotic, hysterical. Much of it’s supposed to be funny, too, the kind of funniness The White Album sacrifices at the altar of still-cherished classicism. Rubber Soul can be taken as a romp all the way through. Ungovernable Press, btw, which published The White Album (1st ed.) and Rubber Soul in ’09 and ’08, respectively, is based in Sweden, and emanates from editor Lars Palm at the center. Part of the ’08 fracas was about weird worlds colliding online. Philadelphia to Malmo? Why not. And me and many others did have a sense of largesse, then, about how many books and chapbooks we could publish. A nifty compensation, as it were, for all the drunken nights. And a clue as to why some of us have been able to survive all the melees.
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