Category: Gravity’s Rainbow

• Oude Genever

  Now we’re getting somewhere. The beaten track just slipped out of sight. Oude Genever.It’s totally obscure to me, but gets a couple of runs in Pynchon, making a grand debut in Gravity’s Rainbow then popping its head up again in Mason & Dixon. In GR, it’s episode fourteen and we’re flashing back in Katje’s memory/imagining to Holland, to the…

  mjhorn

  September 13, 2014

  Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Other spirits

  Blicero, Genever, Gottfried, Holland, Katje, Pynchon

• Absinthe with water

  From Hemingway’s Papa Doble, on to another drink with a great literary/artistic pedigree: absinthe. We’re all familiar with its green fairy aura of inspired madness and creative self-annihilation. The stuff’s been put away by Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Oscar Wilde, Picasso, Modigliani, etc etc etc. Even more impressively, it gets mentioned in both V. and Gravity’s Rainbow. In V., a not exactly gallant…

  mjhorn

  September 1, 2014

  Gravity’s Rainbow, Other spirits, V

  Absinthe, Czech Republic, France, Pastis, Pynchon, Roger Mexico, Signor Mantissa, Slothrop, Switzerland

• Canadian Ale

  The Kenosha Kid episode is something of an early milestone in Gravity’s Rainbow, I’d say. Sixtyish pages in, playful and bizzare, it might well mark the dividing fork at which a new Pynchon reader either hurls the book at the wall or really starts to settle in for a good time. Slothrop’s doped up on sodium amytal, dreaming variations on…

  mjhorn

  August 17, 2014

  Beer, Gravity’s Rainbow

  Canada, Montreal, Pale Ale, Slothrop, St Ambroise

• Brandy

  Seeing as our friend Tyrone Slothrop’s Pilsner Urquell was such a good idea, we’d better see what else he can recommend us. Or actually–he gets through some classy girlfriends, some of them must have pretty good taste. Let’s try Katje. Mysterious Katje. Near the start of the second part of Gravity’s Rainbow (“Un Perm’ au Casino Hermann…

  mjhorn

  June 28, 2014

  Gravity’s Rainbow, Other spirits

  Bardinet, Brandy, France, Katje, Pynchon, Slothrop

• Pilsner Urquell

  CORRECTION: On my recent rereading of Gravity’s Rainbow I discovered that this post from back in 2014 is gravely in error. There I am down below rattling on about Slothrop drinking Pilsner when he is in fact barely involved in the scene in question at all. The character in Bad Karma drinking the beer is actually Ensign…

  mjhorn

  June 7, 2014

  Beer, Gravity’s Rainbow

  Czech Republic, Pilsner Urquell, Pynchon, Slothrop