Category: Vineland
-
California Chenin Blanc
Drinking Dos Equis back in 2018, I found myself pretty hazy on the narrative details of Vineland. The reread I prescribed myself then has unfortunately yet to occur. Hopefully 2023 is the year! Today’s relevant passage finds Weed Atman, who sounds more or less familiar, talking with someone called Rex, who is who knows who.…
-
Homemade wine
I started making wine at the very beginning of covid lockdowns in Melbourne. On Good Friday 2020, in a transaction illegal under the newly implemented social distancing laws, I picked up four boxes of grapes from the back of a Hilux at a servo on the side of a highway. I spent the drive there…
-
Brunello di Montalcino
Around here, we’re pretty religiously devoted to the Drinks as they are laid down in the Books. (Nevermind that business a few weeks back drinking water from the wrong creek). If it weren’t for one loophole in this strict originalist dedication to Pynchon’s word though, not much of anything would get drank at all. That…
-
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…
-
A six-pack of Dos Equis
Vineland hasn’t gotten much of a run around here, I think because I can barely remember what happens in it. Something to do with Reagan? And ninjas? Clearly a reread is in order sometime soon. I do remember Pynchon’s sympathies for Family as a potential seat of grace and humanity and a bulwark against Their…
-
Rye Whiskey
Rye shows up in both Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland. In a weird coincidence, the paragraphs in the two books that mention the stuff both also mention Superman. Here they are. Gravity’s Rainbow (p. 752): Superman will swoop boots-first into a deserted clearing, a launcher-erector sighing oil through a slow seal-leak, gum evoked from the trees, bitter manna for this bitterest…
-
Suntory Scotch
Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet turned one year old on Wednesday. We started out drinking Chivas Regal with Winsome in V. A year later, it’s a very happy birthday sipping Suntory Hibiki 12 year old. Very happy. My whisky knowledge has progressed not at all in the past year. My tasting notes for this might look something like: The…
-
Singapore Sling
We Australian Pynchonites have been waiting patiently and less patiently for Inherent Vice to reach our shores. It did finally appear in Melbourne in a moonlight preview last week, but I was already seeing (the excellent) Gareth Liddiard that night. So I’m still waiting. BUT the movie comes out on Thursday and I have a ticket in hand! So…
-
Chivas Regal
We’re in the second section of Chapter five (in which Stencil goes west with an alligator) of V., and Winsome’s sitting on his “grotesque” espresso machine smoking something referred to as “string.” The string was from Bloomingdale’s, fine quality: procured by Charisma several months before on one of his sporadic work binges; he’d been a shipping clerk that time.…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 