Category: Against The Day
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Crocodile
Exciting times! Shadow Ticket galleys are appearing in a few smiled-upon hands, and the rest of us only have forty-something days to wait before it’s in our preterite mitts too. In the meantime, PTA’s Vineland riff One Battle After Another is out in a month. Wildly for me, if less crucially for the rest of…
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Grappa
In-between my drinking this grappa and my writing about it here, a wondrous new window opened in the world: we are getting a new Thomas Pynchon novel! I struggle to overstate my excitement at this tremendous, improbable news. It felt like—feels like—the Christmas of childhood. No doubt you’ve read the blurb, clearly penned by the…
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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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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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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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Merry Christmas! (Perrier Jouët)
Merry Christmas everybody! May your parties be as glamorous as R. Wiltshire Vibe’s (and not as evil): Palm trees grew everywhere, arecas, palmettos, Chinese fan-palms, ranging from squat greenhouse specimens in wicker-covered pots to twelve-foot foyer varieties to stately coconut and date trees rooted somewhere far below and soaring to these ballroom altitudes through openings…
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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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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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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!…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 