Category: Gravity’s Rainbow
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Vat 69
A few of my colleagues have recently formed a book club. The club is constituted of a pretty mixed bunch of more and less serious readers, with some romance-only types and a strong “audiobooks are reading too” contingent. Having started with a pretty basic book club staple, we planned then to embark on a season […]
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Italian Gin
We return now after an interregnum of two years to the Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick, Slothrop’s ode to his drunkard mate. Last time we came for the French beer, nowhere near as septic as our lieutenant would have it. Hopefully he’s misjudged Italian gin too. The Ballad of Tantivy Mucker-Maffick Oh Italian gin is a […]
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Jamaican Rum
One Sunday evening mid-blitz, somewhere in Kent and just before Christmas, everyone’s favourite adulterers Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico come upon a church. England’s war-weary are trudging in to warm themselves with advent nostalgia. Roger’s rationalism softens a moment and he and Jessica head in too—“to hear the music,” he explains. Inside, a “scratch choir” […]
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Banana Breakfast
This one’s been percolating in the back of my head pretty much since day one of the project. Parts of it have been bubbling away in the actual physical world since late 2019, creeping toward readiness. The time has come. From Mrs Quoad and her Disgusting English Candy Drill for drink ninety-nine, on to crest […]
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Lafite Rothschild
Well so I got bored of joking that someone should buy me a Lafite Rothschild bottle and just went and did it myself. Let’s not dwell too long on the fact that it maybe cost more than every other wine I’ve drunk here put together. It’s our ninety-ninth bottle pulled from the Pynchon cabinet: we […]
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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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Sherry
No one thus far has drunk sherry in a Pynchon novel that I have noticed. But sherry’s ghost does linger by a window during the Rathenau séance early in Gravity’s Rainbow. Milton Gloaming is telling Jessica about his statistical analysis of the paranormal investigations; Jessica’s “mad young gentleman” Roger is off in another room with […]
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French Beer
French stuff gets a good run around here. Usually wine, occasionally brandy, now and then absinthe. Never before a French beer though. Beer doesn’t really register on the Franco-radar. According to this book Farmhouse Ales I happen to have sitting on my shelf though, the French have a “little known tradition of beer appreciation” and […]
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Zeltinger
Like probably everyone, I’ve been finding reading lately involves a constant underlying outrage that characters are going about pursuing such extravagances as associating in groups of more than two, coming within 1.5 m of each other, leaving their houses, and washing their hands for less than forty-five seconds… I’ve been putting the extra quiet time […]
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Irish Whiskey and Water
When we last met here, you were humouring my rambling on at unprecedented length and pretentiousness about fermented horse milk. Let’s maybe settle back down with something a little simpler. Drugged drinks are a bit of a theme throughout Pynchon, if one we’re mostly yet to tackle here. Beer spiked here with LSD, there with […]
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 