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Dom Pérignon
We have, I suppose, a bit of a conspicuous consumption problem around here sometimes. Pynchon’s drinks may more than occasionally point to the capitalistic excess of the drinker. If we find Scarsdale Vibe guzzling Pommery, we might be best not to take that as an authorial endorsement of the Champagne house. In other instances, the…
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Jamaican Rum
One Sunday evening mid-blitz, somewhere in Kent and just before Christmas, everyone’s favourite adulterers Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico come upon a church. England’s war-weary are trudging in to warm themselves with advent nostalgia. Roger’s rationalism softens a moment and he and Jessica head in too—“to hear the music,” he explains. Inside, a “scratch choir”…
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Love in the Shadows of Pera
Just after the 900 page mark in Against the Day, Kit and Dally are reunited in a serendipitous kidnap-foiling encounter at a train station in Szeged, Hungary. We then flash back to learn how Kit came to be aboard that train, picking up the thread in Istanbul. He’s working at a bar called the Deux…
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Šljivovica
A few years ago, an old work friend and mentor originally from Montenegro showed up at a party I threw with a very kind gift of a bottle of Serbian šljivovica. Maybe a year later, she brought another bottle to another party. I had a few other spirits laid out that night I wanted finished,…
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Stale Ale
Early in their American period, after an afternoon with an unexpectedly scatty Benjamin Franklin, Messrs Mason and Dixon head on Mason’s suggestion to a tavern by the name of the Fair Anchor. It’s a bit of a dive, just how Mason likes it: And withal, when they show up at The Fair Anchor that Night,…
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Jurançon White
A bit over a year ago, I was in lockdown drinking a very tasty German white wine from Gravity’s Rainbow. In 2021, things are looking totally different, where by totally different I mean exactly the same except the wine is French and the book is Against the Day. This year’s lockdown white is the 2017…
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Tequila and Beer
Happy Pynchon in Public Day once again all. To celebrate, I’ve turned again to the well-nigh inexhaustible well that is Against the Day. I find often when I crack that spine afresh for one of these drinks, I’m plunged into a passage that a) I have all but zero memory of, and b) is of…
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A Fifth of Old Stagg
In Chapter 13 of V. (in which the yo-yo string is revealed as a state of mind) Profane has occasion to call in a favour Pig owes him. This sends our narrator digressing away on how the favour came to be owed, a tale involving Profane saving Pig’s own mortal bacon via a radar antenna…
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Banana Breakfast
This one’s been percolating in the back of my head pretty much since day one of the project. Parts of it have been bubbling away in the actual physical world since late 2019, creeping toward readiness. The time has come. From Mrs Quoad and her Disgusting English Candy Drill for drink ninety-nine, on to crest…
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Lafite Rothschild
Well so I got bored of joking that someone should buy me a Lafite Rothschild bottle and just went and did it myself. Let’s not dwell too long on the fact that it maybe cost more than every other wine I’ve drunk here put together. It’s our ninety-ninth bottle pulled from the Pynchon cabinet: we…
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