Category: Against The Day
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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, […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
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 […]
-
Imported Danish Aquavit
Happy Pynchon in Public Private Day all! Did you declaim a paragraph of Gravity’s Rainbow from your rooftop? Put a copy of V in the window? Change your zoom background to an Against the Day airship? I hope everyone’s homes or other places of social isolation are well stocked with Pynchon tomes. We venture here […]
-
Pouilly-Fuissé
My sister described this Louis Jadot 2015 Pouilly-Fuissé as tasting of peach followed by buttery toasted pastry. Her palate must have developed some since last year’s bottle of Graves, where she managed “fruity.” This wine, a Burgundy chardonnay, comes to us from not only the same book as the Graves, but the very same sentence. […]
-
Opium Beer
I sit drinking this opium beer on my roof, and Australia’s current apocalyptic choke of bushfires has certainly leant the scene an opium den-esque smokiness. But that might be as close as we come to actual opium here. On Googling “opium beer”, one mostly uncovers tales of homebrewers getting arrested and genetically-modified morphine-producing yeasts. The […]
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 