Category: Gravity’s Rainbow
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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…
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Kumis
Some in the past have had the gall to suggest that this project is nothing more than alcoholism dressed up in exotic hats and tweed jackets. These scurrilous individuals should take careful note of today’s post and the extravagant lengths I’ve gone to to track down what is the least alcoholic beverage we’ve drank here…
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Cognac
Cognac first appears in Pynchon crated up on the Swinemünde dock, among the cargo Gerhardt von Göll / Der Springer is shipping upriver. Springer’s cargo also features “six chorus girls, wearing feathers and spangles under old cloth coats to save trunk space, a small pit band at different levels of alcoholic slumber, manymany cases of…
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Happy Christmas! (Piesporter)
It’s Christmas Day in Australia, and we’re pairing the mud crab, prawns, and salads with a Piesporter German riesling from Gravity’s Rainbow. We’ve had maybe more explicitly Christmassy tipples in past years (fruitcake with brandy and pink champagne), but this one does at least come recommended as befitting an Occasion: They arrive at Peter Sachsa’s well after…
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Berncasteler Doctor
Today’s plonk tube comes to us from no less notorious a recommender than Mrs Quoad, of Disgusting English Candy Drill fame. (The original, not the usurper, for you PIPCast listeners). We last visited this territory with some gin marshmallows. Also in her fearsome arsenal: wine jellies made from the products of great European vineyards. Slothrop remembers…
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Grain Alcohol with Grapefruit Juice
Happy Pynchon in Public day all! I confess I am not doing my drinking in public this evening, but I did at least read Vineland on the train this morning AND left it lying prominently on my desk at work all day and it’s just not my fault if none of my colleagues were curious…
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Gwenhidwy’s Drink
As you should all already know, the Pynchon in Public Podcast team have planted the glorious tombstone/nosecone on their quest both madcap and meticulous through Gravity’s Rainbow after the rocket. In small tribute to their gargantuan efforts, I shall here tackle perhaps the most intimidating drink found within those pages. It’s maybe more like a…
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Montrachet
Early on in Gravity’s Rainbow, while we’re still huddled behind London blackout curtains with relatively recognisable characters and fairly coherent plots, Jessica sits up while Roger sleeps, “filling with a need to cry” because she cannot protect him as she wants to. She remembers asking him what things were like before the war. Page 59:…
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Brandy Alexander
Just post-Slothrop’s troubling moment with the really-too-young Bianca (discussed with great thoughtfulness and insight on the latest Pynchon in Public podcast), our dubious hero finds himself weaving through “newly-risen roisterers” below decks on the Anubis. Page 480: There is hardly a thing now in Slothrop’s head but getting to Bianca. At the end of the passageway, across a score of…
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Aged Bourbon
Tommy Boy turns eighty today, and while I won’t say that counts as officially old, it is a pretty creditable age. No doubt he’s got another book coming together, as vivid and profound as anything before… On the occasion of our Chief Chum of Chance’s 80th, I’m toasting Pynchon in Public Day with an 18 year old bourbon.…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 