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Conoloways White
I recently spent a week in Kentucky with ten children in my care. This provided an ideal opportunity for some moonshining. Chapter 59 of Mason & Dixon finds our charismatic surveyors at Captain Shelby’s home in Virginia, where they hear told a saga (more of that trademark M&D nested narration) of rioting and baby-snatching that…
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A huge can of Australian beer
That most significant international day of celebration has rolled around again — happy Pynchon in Public Day all. This drinking is happening on PIP Day Eve on my relatively unpublic roof, but I assure you all tomorrow I will be brandishing Mason & Dixon more publicly than any of my colleagues or fellow commuters are…
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Tequila Sour
Not long after Oedipa first spots that muted posthorn in the bathroom of the Scope, she finds herself out with Metzger and the Paranoids for a day at the among the earth-moving machines and “total absence of trees” of the still under construction Fangoso Lagoons. It’s a perfect picnic spot: The Paranoid element piled out…
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Cognac
Cognac first appears in Pynchon crated up on the Swinemünde dock, among the cargo Gerhardt von Göll / Der Springer is shipping upriver. Springer’s cargo also features “six chorus girls, wearing feathers and spangles under old cloth coats to save trunk space, a small pit band at different levels of alcoholic slumber, manymany cases of…
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Graves
It is February and a little late for new year’s resolutions, but I will nevertheless assert that I’m hoping to pick up the pace around here this year. When I last checked, there were something like 403 drinks on the list. We’re not even a quarter through; this one-a-month pace is not going to cut…
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Sake
I was in Japan a while back, and when I wasn’t annoying my travel buddy and oldest friend searching for good Japanese whisky (ping Hibiki), I was annoying my travel buddy and oldest friend searching for a Japanese edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. Priorities are important. Occasions also did arise when I annoyed no one, and…
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Happy Christmas! (Piesporter)
It’s Christmas Day in Australia, and we’re pairing the mud crab, prawns, and salads with a Piesporter German riesling from Gravity’s Rainbow. We’ve had maybe more explicitly Christmassy tipples in past years (fruitcake with brandy and pink champagne), but this one does at least come recommended as befitting an Occasion: They arrive at Peter Sachsa’s well after…
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Arak
Somewhere deep in the vast and mapless territories of Against the Day, Lindsay Noseworth of the Chums of Chance finds himself riding atop a camel through a “nook” of New York City that is also “in some not strictly metaphorical way” a Turkish desert. The geography of AtD is certainly intriguing. Lindsay rides through this…
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Berncasteler Doctor
Today’s plonk tube comes to us from no less notorious a recommender than Mrs Quoad, of Disgusting English Candy Drill fame. (The original, not the usurper, for you PIPCast listeners). We last visited this territory with some gin marshmallows. Also in her fearsome arsenal: wine jellies made from the products of great European vineyards. Slothrop remembers…
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Nebbiolo
Right near the end of Against the Day, we witness Dally and Kit reunite with Reef and Yashmeen in Turin. There’s a little wife-with-ex-lover tension, but the whole thing basically seems to go very nicely. Page 1073: To celebrate they all went out to dinner at the Ristorante del Cambio, known locally as “the old lady.”…
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Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 