M&D Deep Duck Read. First cuppa coffee post

[Becky Lindroos]

Interesting stuff,  Mark.  The Age of Reason loved the idea of a non-sleep inducing drink like - ta-da - coffee!  Voltaire, 1694 –1778,  is said to have drunk 50+ cups a day, as did Balzac, 1799-1850, a bit later. And, fwiw, Voltaire is mentioned a few scattered times, too.  

 “A History of the World in Six Glasses” (Tom Standage,  2006)  is quite an interesting book.   It’s a fun book and I was put off at first,  but it has some seriously interesting insights as to how these six drinks affected world history - beer, wine, “Spirits in the Colonial Period”  (rum),  coffee, tea, Coke.    (Water obviously would get it’s own several volumes.)  The chapter entitled “Coffee in the Age of Reason”  includes this little passage: 

"Poets and philosophers gathered at the Cafe Parnasse and the Cafe Procope, whose regular patrons included Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, and the American scientist and statesman Benjamin Franklin. Voltaire had a favorite table and chair at the Procope, and a reputation for drinking dozens of cups of coffee a day. Actors gathered at the Cafe Anglais, musicians at Cafe Alexandre, army officers at the Cafe des Armes, while the Cafe des Aveugles doubled as a brothel.”

Fwiw,  coffee is mentioned 63 times in the book (courtesy of the Kindle search feature,  not my counting).  

The word “rum" is only used a few times and usually as an adjective rather than as the actual drink -  “Rum thing not to know about of someone, isn’t it?”  (p. 765) -  and not in the first 100 pages. (Odd as it was one side of the slave trade triangle,  but maybe way outside whatever scope Pynchon had because the rum went from Europe to Africa so it was totally indirect -  like an adjective? - lol .) 

Bek




> On Jan 6, 2015, at 2:03 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> p.6..."freshly infus'd coffee flows ev'ryplace."....and was associated
> with rebellious political activities in Europe. From Venice, it was
> introduced to the rest of Europe. Coffee became more widely accepted
> after it was deemed a Christian beverage by Pope Clement VIII in 1600,
> despite appeals to ban the "Muslim drink." The first European coffee
> house opened in Rome in 1645.[24
> 
> The Dutch East India Company was the first to import coffee on a large
> scale.[25]
> 
> When coffee reached North America during the Colonial period, it was
> initially not as successful as it had been in Europe as alcoholic
> beverages remained more popular. During the Revolutionary War, the
> demand for coffee increased so much that dealers had to hoard their
> scarce supplies and raise prices dramatically; this was also due to
> the reduced availability of tea from British merchants,[29] and a
> general resolution among many Americans to avoid drinking tea
> following the 1773 Boston Tea Party.[30]
> 
> After the War of 1812, during which Britain temporarily cut off access
> to tea imports, the Americans' taste for coffee grew. Coffee
> consumption declined in England, giving way to tea during the 18th
> century.
> 
> ed across the Americas.[33] The territory of Santo Domingo (now the
> Dominican Republic) saw coffee cultivated from 1734, and by 1788 it
> supplied half the world's coffee.[34] The conditions that the slaves
> worked in on coffee plantations were a factor in the soon to follow
> Haitian Revolution. The coffee industry never fully recovered
> there.[35] It made a brief come-back in 1949 when Haiti was the
> world's 3rd largest coffee exporter, but fell quickly into rapid
> decline.[36]
> 
> Coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia; legend has it that a goatherd
> found his goats eating some strange berries that made them so lively
> that he could not catch them. The substance had made its way to the
> Arab Nation by the 15th century, and in 1511 the first Islamic ban on
> coffee, by the governor of Mecca, shut down all the coffee houses. But
> his superior, the sultan of Cairo, soon stepped in and overruled the
> governor.
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l