M&D Deep Duck Read. First cuppa coffee post

Tue Jan 6 14:29:44 CST 2015

Love it - thanks! The link goes straight into my Pynchon miscellanea folder.

Which used to be a proper subset of the folders for fiction, art, history,
philosophy, etc. etc., but seem to have gradually become coextensive...

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 3:20 PM, M Thomas Stevenson <
m.thomas.stevenson at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think the whole linkage of coffee and coffeehouses partly to revolution
> or at least some kind of great Up-something is fascinating, and also
> sort-of like something Pynchon might make up.
>
> Also, this spilled across my feed, don't know if any/all of you have
> already seen this. . .
>
> http://www.businessinsider.com/this-is-the-first-ever-ad-for-coffee-from-
> 1652-2012-7?IR=T
>
> . . .but it really could've been seamlessly integrated into M&D.
>
> On 6 January 2015, at 19:47, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >More interesting stuff, maybe, than mine...
> >Fascinating that coffee is mentioned so much more often that rum (or
> >other spirits?)...we know it
> >appears in other works too and I think it has some of these resonances:
> >Drink of the rebellious. (researching, I found a line from a good
> >history that went something like, "
> >the European revolutions were brewed in its coffee houses.)
> >Drink of the modern age. The first energy drink for the Go--Go new
> >country. (lotsa stuff recently
> >on how good it usually is for one, generally)
> >Loosely, the secular beverage.                A few years-- or even a
> >pentade[show off]--- ago now some Candlebrow
> >profs at Hawvaard, I think, wrote a book trying to pin down the
> >lineaments of our secular age. I did not
> >read it all, but I was lead to their pages on how coffee,
> >weekend-brewed, high-quality coffee on Saturday
> >and Sunday mornings, with the news fo the day to get started, were our
> >new churches and synagogues
> >(and mosques? can't remember).
> >On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 1:06 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com>
> wrote:
> >> 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/?listÒnchon-l
>
>
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