Category: Against The Day
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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…
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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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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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Watered pink wine
Perhaps after a weekend of global celebration following the Americans’ step back toward sanity, I’m not the only one who could use some gentle Monday hair of the dog? My glass is half wine half water and I make no apology. If Pynchon is to be believed, the key constituencies for watered-down wine, other than…
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Imported German Beer
On page 986 of Against the Day, Frank Traverse has just recently put his engineering skills to use rigging a train with an imperial fuckton of dynamite and now finds himself in the Mexican Capital. (Why the Capital is Capitalised isn’t clear to me. Was Pynchon working on Mason & Dixon at the same time…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 