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Pinot E-Grigio
Puns, often of the ludicrously bad-good variety, are a significant Pynchonian sideline. The classic might be Gravity’s Rainbow‘s “For DeMille, young fur henchmen can’t be rowing,” but we could fill volumes quoting them from across the oeuvre—probably about nine volumes. For many of us, or for me at least, these Pynchonian puns exemplify a chief…
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California Champagne
This post is the final in our Against the Day-Latin American adventure series (see Pulque, Chilean Riesling, Orizaba Beer, and Pox & Comiteco for previous installments). California, I realise, does not qualify as Latin American, but we headed back home to the antipodes via San Francisco, so the Golden State is getting lumped in. Late…
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Gentian Brandy in Tea
Proverbs for Paranoids, 3: If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers. Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 251. I am pleased to inform you all I have meditated on Lt .Tyrone’s Third Proverb and concluded that “Ooh what’s this they’re drinking then?” is in fact exactly the right question.…
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Broglio
Chapter seven of V. opens with some very fancy dentistry, as New York dentist Dudley Eigenvalue admires his treasured set of dentures, “each tooth a different precious metal”. Not too many pages later, we’re in front of a wine shop on the Ponte Vecchio, Florence, with a gem of a bottle. Signor Mantissa is on…
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Hot Sake chased with Iced Champagne
As you may have read, I recently threw a party for the tenth anniversary of our bookish boozing here. No Tupperware was sold, but a fondue did get a little over-kirsched. Don’t be thinking that was our only Pynchonian drinking though! Guests were plied with a possibly excessive array of drinks, more or less entirely…
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Too Much Kirsch in the Fondue
Last week, we celebrated ten years of Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet. Believe it or not, an entire decade of literary boozing has passed since that first bottle of Chivas Regal (V., p. 124). I threw a party for the occasion, and what centrepiece could have been more fitting than a fondue with Too Much Kirsch?…
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Pox & Comiteco
When I wrote the Pulque post a couple of months back, I was still polishing off an Against the Day reread that had carried me through the Americas. Little did I know, having just recently left Mexico, I was about to encounter a passage bearing a couple of the most specifically Mexican drinks in the…
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Orizaba Beer
I was reading the last chunk of Against the Day a few weeks ago, freshly home from Mexico, and I found a passage containing a couple of drinks that I’d entirely missed recording on The List. Page 990 brings us to a cantina called “El Quetzal Dormido,” where Frank is drinking “either maguey brandy from…
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Chilean Riesling
You would think I could have taken care of this one years ago. But nary a drop of Chilean riesling has graced Australian shores in the years I’ve been looking. So it took a trip to Santiago. We had only a day in the Chilean capital, sandwiched between two weeks in Patagonia and a week…
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Pulque
I remember clearly the moment I reached page 376 of my first reading of Against the Day. I’d already been moonlighting as Drunk Pynchon here for a few years, just with a big “Coming Soon” sign plastered in place of the AtD list (or actually, it originally said “coming less soon”; I was pretty intimidated…
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Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 