So we have a cover! In the unlikely event that this is news to you, please find the USA (left) and UK/Aus (right) covers for Thomas Pynchon’s forthcoming novel Shadow Ticket attached below.

Do you like them? I think I prefer the UK cover overall, although the diagonal text in the US version sets up a nice sort of loose noir trilogy with Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge. Those diagonal Os in the UK cover sure are juicy though. The backdrop for both is a street in Budapest—more of that Hungarian gear promised in the original press release.

And of course all our Pynchonian Christmases are coming at once, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose Vineland adaptation One Battle After Another due for release just a few weeks before Shadow Ticket. That trailer, to me, bears some pretty clear Adventures of Zoyd Wheeler DNA, though perhaps with added guns. But will we also get the ninja nuns? My fingers remain crossed.

On the Vineland theme, let’s crack some Santiago rum. Frenesi reunites with Hector Zuniga, sympathetic DEA agent and failed tubal detox escapee, at a Cubanesque bar:

By the time they got there neither could remember why they’d picked the Club La Habañera, deep within a thousand-room resort-casino much too close to the airport, designed after the legendary gambler’s paradise of pre-Castro Havana, where the smoke of genuine Vuelta Abajo filler and the fumes of Santiago rum, smuggled past the long embargo, mingled with a couple dozen brands of perfume […]

Vineland, p. 343.

That long embargo, as far as I can tell, is back in place in the USA these days, after the current regime rewound an Obama-era reprieve. So I guess this marks a rare occasion where being in Australia actually works in my favour. (Pynchon’s characters aren’t drinking a lot of Barossa shiraz). Santiago de Cuba rum is not exactly a dime a dozen down here, but it’s not illegal.

I’ve got the eight year old anejo, and I’ve mixed it with a little brown sugar and lime juice over ice (an approach I picked up when we drank some Jamaican rum here a while back). Man is this a nice way to drink rum! It turns something that you might otherwise just mix with coke into a compelling sipper that’s somehow as warming as it is tropical; a drink for all seasons.

It’s shaping up to be a glorious Pynchonian summer (or winter, depending). Raise a glass, lift an embargo, hug your neighbour, bug a cop, and get those shadow tickets ready for punching.