Tag: Dally Rideout
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Corn Liquor
Right near the opening of Against the Day, the Chums have the Inconvenience parked at the Chicago World’s Fair. Dally Rideout (who we’ve shared several drinks with before) makes her precocious first appearance: “Pa!” An attractive little girl of four or five with flaming red hair was running toward them at high speed. “Say, Pa! […]
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Love in the Shadows of Pera
Just after the 900 page mark in Against the Day, Kit and Dally are reunited in a serendipitous kidnap-foiling encounter at a train station in Szeged, Hungary. We then flash back to learn how Kit came to be aboard that train, picking up the thread in Istanbul. He’s working at a bar called the Deux […]
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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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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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Nebbiolo
Right near the end of Against the Day, we witness Dally and Kit reunite with Reef and Yashmeen in Turin. There’s a little wife-with-ex-lover tension, but the whole thing basically seems to go very nicely. Page 1073: To celebrate they all went out to dinner at the Ristorante del Cambio, known locally as “the old lady.” […]
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Primitivo
I finished Against the Day more than two months ago now. Or that’s when I read the last page anyway–who really ever finishes a Pynchon book. Drinking through it is sure going to take a while. The list is longer than for V, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon combined. And it’s fun stuff, distillations of many of the books […]
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 