Tag: Slothrop
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Old Fashioned
I’ve recently embarked with the Chums of Chance aboard the good ship Inconvenience—and man, (isn’t this supposed to be some kinda kid’s book?) the air in here sure is alcoholic. My Against the Day list is already 50 drinks long, and I’m not even halfway through. Gravity’s Rainbow only has 45 or 46 all up. And now that’s as smooth…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Tom Pynchon's Liquor Cabinet 