Category: Other spirits
-
Conoloways White
I recently spent a week in Kentucky with ten children in my care. This provided an ideal opportunity for some moonshining. Chapter 59 of Mason & Dixon finds our charismatic surveyors at Captain Shelby’s home in Virginia, where they hear told a saga (more of that trademark M&D nested narration) of rioting and baby-snatching that […]
-
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 […]
-
Sake
I was in Japan a while back, and when I wasn’t annoying my travel buddy and oldest friend searching for good Japanese whisky (ping Hibiki), I was annoying my travel buddy and oldest friend searching for a Japanese edition of Gravity’s Rainbow. Priorities are important. Occasions also did arise when I annoyed no one, and […]
-
Arak
Somewhere deep in the vast and mapless territories of Against the Day, Lindsay Noseworth of the Chums of Chance finds himself riding atop a camel through a “nook” of New York City that is also “in some not strictly metaphorical way” a Turkish desert. The geography of AtD is certainly intriguing. Lindsay rides through this […]
-
Tanqueray No. 10
Although it is fairly icy cold in Melbourne and probably best suited to a whiskey and a fireplace, today is World Gin Day and I do not wish to attract the displeasure of the World Gin Police. Drunk Pynchonette and I have a resolutely summery gin old-fashioned each. The particular gin is Tanqueray No. 10, pulled from the same […]
-
Stolichnaya Elit
Probably like plenty of other Pynchonites, I found the ’90s pop-culture bandwidth overload of Bleeding Edge pleasantly jarring. Not that it was really out of character—the books are all loaded with this kind of cultural flotsam and jetsam. It’s just that Pynchon’s usually rebuilding a pop culture expired well before my time. Catching lowbrow references comprehensible without wikipedia was a strange new […]
-
Apricot Brandy
Around page 718 of Against the Day, Cyprian and Yashmeen meet up with Ratty McHugh to discuss Yashmeen’s fear that she’s being followed, including by a “Hungarian element.” (My recollection of this passage is close to nil, but the Chumps of Choice group-read blog has great memory-refreshing summaries of AtD chapters—it’s a great travelling companion if you’re reading the book […]
-
Merry Christmas! (Fruitcake soaked in brandy)
Merry Christmas all! The day’s over here in Australia; probably just beginning for Tommy Pynchon himself. Among my celebrations, I’ve squeezed in a fruit cake soaked in brandy, as recommended by Mason in Mason & Dixon. A nice chunk of Christmas does appear in M&D, but the fruit cake doesn’t actually herald from any of the […]
-
Cachaça with beer chasers
Well I really lived up to that ‘Drunk Pynchon’ moniker on this one. Cachaça, it turns out, goes down easy and goes down fast and then may or may not come right back up again. A few days later now, I think I’ve just established enough distance between myself and the event to write about it. That’s contrary to my […]
-
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 […]
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 