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Sloe Gin Fizz
In the last part of the last pre-epilogue chapter of V., Fausto Maijstral walks into Profane’s lodging-house in Malta, looking for Stencil. He’s gone though, and Maijstral can’t even find a drink. Profane’s drank everything in the house, and now lies “snoring and drooling and apparently enjoying himself,” (p. 452). Maijstral wakes him up and…
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Cuervo Extra
Illness in the household sadly keeps me indoors this Pynchon in Public night. Normally it should go without saying I would be out flaunting posthorns and flashing bootleg “The Small Rain” editions on the streets, which streets I’ve no doubt this evening are thronged again with acolytes of our favourite postmodernist. Failing that though, we…
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White Bordeaux
Chapter 17 of Bleeding Edge finds Maxine at a disreputable tavern by the name of Junior’s Ooh-La Lounge sniffing out leads on Gabriel Ice and the fire at Shae and Bruno’s place. She meets Randy, a helpful fellow with a fondness for Shania Twain and a key to Ice’s front gate. They drive out to…
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Taittinger
Here’s a quick one; I couldn’t let the month of fifty years since Gravity’s Rainbow‘s detonation into the world fly past uncelebrated! Back to the Casino Hermann Goering, just post the Veuve and the vulgar song, where Slothrop’s a bit out of it, his drunken dissolution presaging perhaps his later existential dissolution, and the waiters…
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California Chenin Blanc
Drinking Dos Equis back in 2018, I found myself pretty hazy on the narrative details of Vineland. The reread I prescribed myself then has unfortunately yet to occur. Hopefully 2023 is the year! Today’s relevant passage finds Weed Atman, who sounds more or less familiar, talking with someone called Rex, who is who knows who.…
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Ouzo
If the drinks dotted liberally through Against the Day represent a boozy symphony, ouzo appears as a major-key motif late in the piece. We first find Cyprian drinking it among “fair limbs and spring sunrises” in Salonica: “It was the absence of all hesitation here that impressed Cyprian, setting aside the ouzo and hashish whose…
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Chablis Punch
In the innocent days of late 2019, I ordered a box of wines of Pynchonian pedigree. We’ve since knocked off the Constantia, the Pouilly Fuisse, the Tignanello, and the Zeltinger. But the bottle of Chablis has had to bide its time. It was destined to become punch, and opportunities to break out the punch bowl…
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Homemade wine
I started making wine at the very beginning of covid lockdowns in Melbourne. On Good Friday 2020, in a transaction illegal under the newly implemented social distancing laws, I picked up four boxes of grapes from the back of a Hilux at a servo on the side of a highway. I spent the drive there…
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Málaga Mountain Wine
Chapter 12 of Mason & Dixon finds our beloved astronomers, along with the probably less beloved Maskelyne, on St Helena, a British island territory in the South Atlantic Ocean. They’re drinking at a “punch house” called the Moon, which I can only imagine they selected based on their attraction to heavenly bodies. The Moon appears…
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Corn Liquor
Right near the opening of Against the Day, the Chums have the Inconvenience parked at the Chicago World’s Fair. Dally Rideout (who we’ve shared several drinks with before) makes her precocious first appearance: “Pa!” An attractive little girl of four or five with flaming red hair was running toward them at high speed. “Say, Pa!…
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Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 