Category: Against The Day
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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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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!…
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Szekszárdi Vörös
We now make a final return to a paragraph we’ve visited twice before (first for Apricot Brandy in 2015, then Gewurtztraminer a year later). Yashmeen and Cyprian are fleeing some Hungarians, hiding out in Ratty’s safe house, inspecting the pantry. Here it is one last time: By the unwritten rules of these transitory dwellings, the…
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Sazerac
Against the Day serving up another favourite! Ever since as a somewhat pretentious teenager I decided it should be thus, I’ve esteemed the Sazerac above all other cocktails. It’s a boozy contemplator, rye whiskey lifted and complicated with some sugar, Peychaud’s bitters and hint of absinthe. A slightly weirder, more gothic Old Fashioned. Pynchon’s Sazerac…
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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…