Tag: Roger Mexico
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Jamaican Rum
One Sunday evening mid-blitz, somewhere in Kent and just before Christmas, everyone’s favourite adulterers Jessica Swanlake and Roger Mexico come upon a church. England’s war-weary are trudging in to warm themselves with advent nostalgia. Roger’s rationalism softens a moment and he and Jessica head in too—“to hear the music,” he explains. Inside, a “scratch choir” […]
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Sherry
No one thus far has drunk sherry in a Pynchon novel that I have noticed. But sherry’s ghost does linger by a window during the Rathenau séance early in Gravity’s Rainbow. Milton Gloaming is telling Jessica about his statistical analysis of the paranormal investigations; Jessica’s “mad young gentleman” Roger is off in another room with […]
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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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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 […]
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 