Pumpkin Wine

My first batch of pumpkin wine has just begun fermenting. I hope. My kitchen is a mess, the counters are covered in simple syrup, and there is a trail of pumpkin guts from the dinning room table to the kitchen sink, but I have three hollowed out fermenting pumpkins. In two weeks, give or take a week or a few months, I will hopefully have some drinkable pumpkin wine. For this first foray into winemaking, I dispensed with recipes, winemaking equipment, or even standard winemaking ingredients. I'm using a whole lotta granulated sugar, nine packets of dry active yeast, and lots of water. As I mentioned, I'm fermenting in the pumpkin instead of using a large food grade plastic tank. Fermentation will start in my kitchen for a few days as a sort of jump start, after which I plan to move the pumpkins to my storage area to slow down the fermentation in the hope of encouraging greater flavour development. My biggest concern is that dry active yeast, principally used in making bread, may have a low alcohol toxicity (the percent alcohol at which the yeast will be killed off due to alcohol poisoning). If this is the case, I may end up with some very sweet vaguely alcoholic (5% or so) undrinkable swill. Even if it reaches the 11-15% that I'd like, it may still be undrinkable swill, but at least it won't be too sweet. I hate sweet wines that end with a cloying finish, and I doubt that pumpkin must has the acidity to balance much, if any, residual sugar. To this end, I am going to procure some acidifier from a local wine making store for my second batch, and I will also be using real wine yeasts that are already on their way via UPS. But I still have high hopes for my first batch.

Hollywood Bans Fun

Governor Arnold, in cahoots with the California state legislature, has recently made the production and sale of foie gras illegal in the state of California as of 2012. Siding with animal rights activists, he says that the force feeding methods used to produce foie gras are cruel. And he's probably right. But I doubt that the force fed geese are significantly less happy than the chickens, cows, pigs and other animals that are mass produced in factory farms across North America. Is this the beginning in a revolution in animal husbandry? Will we soon find ourselves eating Kobe style chicken and Kobe style bacon? Will all of our animals be massaged, fed luxurious diets and slaugtered when they least expect it? As tantalizingly tasty a prospect as it is, I do not find it to be terribly practical, or fair. If consumers want to pay for humanely raised meat, let them do so. If, however, they'd prefer the economic savings created by cruel factory farms, then let them make that choice as well.

If anyone hasn't tasted the creamy goodness that is foie gras, may I suggest that you get a few friends together and cook some up tonight. You'll need about a two hundred bucks, a hundred for the foie gras and and a hundred for the wine. Besides the cruel force feeding, this is the main reason that I don't eat foie gras. But should you find yourself with the money to spare, a hundred dollars will get you 1-1.5 lbs. of fresh goose foie gras and the other hundred should afford you a fine bottle of a 1983 Rieussec, an excellent vintage from a fine chateau. Don't forget to invite me over.

Lacan, non-self, and other personal musings

I recently pulled my first all-nighter of the semester. As I see it, I'm doing pretty well. Almost halfway through the semester and only one night of no sleep. I have an upcoming phil paper (Descartes) and a presentation on Foucault's "History of Sexuality", but I think I can get through those without any painful sleepless nights.

Lit theory was interesting yesterday. We discussed Lacan's mirror stage article. I don't know what the title of the English translation is, but in French it's "Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je" (roughly: The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function"). Though Lacan touches on other things, the heart of this article is his analysis of subjectivity. In Lacan's view, at some early point along the line, one comes to recognize oneself as a coherent whole through the experience of seing oneself reflected in, for example, a mirror. The problem with what I have just written are the words 'one' and 'oneself'. In the sentence above, 'one' implies a pre-existing subject that can recognize 'oneself' in the mirror, and 'oneself' implies an existing subject. Please do not be confused by these implications. 'One' does not exist as SUBJECT (this is an important word choice) until one has subjectivity, that is, until one has recognized 'onself'. However 'oneself' does not exist. It is a conceptual ideal, a notion that we construct, but not something we can ever obtain. Be careful, words like 'we' in the last sentence suffer similar problems as those already mentioned for 'one'. So what is subjectivity? For Lacan, subjectivity is simply the desire for coherence, which can also be called wholeness.

This all got me to thinking that it would be interesting to look at different theories of non-self. It's something I might one day write a book on, if I ever do such a thing. Thus far in my life, I have become acquainted with the following:

Ferdinand de Saussure: As far as I'm aware the first person (in the west) to propose that meaning is differentially established. There are probably some who proposed this before him, but his concept of the sign really does a nice job of describing a world in which there is no inherent, pre-existing meaning, or if you will, 'thingness', or you might say 'suchness'

Jacques Derrida: I've read some of his writing, including his exlanation of différance. I'm not going to hasard an attempt to say anything about it at this point. I'll just say that I plan to go back and reread some of his writing as, at least some of it is clear and lucid, despite that much of it is, well, difficult.

Jaques Lacan: as described above

Buddhist Philosophy: In particular, notions of shunyata, or emptiness, that might more accurately by tranlated as 'empty of suchness'.

Contempoary theories of Conciousness as an emergent property: I know little about this. Jedd and I went to hear a philosopher speak at UBC who spoke very briefly about his work on conciousness and his views of it as an emergent property. I remember being struck by the similarities to some of buddhist theory/philosophy. Near the end of his presentation, he read some of the negative reactions that other philosophers have had to his work. They were strikingly similar to the common (and sane/reasonable) response of an indignant 'wtf' when people are told in an intro buddhist studies class that the self does not exist.

Any one have any ideas of any others?

The difficulties of sunshine

Mostly, I'm having a hard time staying focused on my reading. It's a beautiful autumn day here. Looking through the old lead pane windows of the library, I see leaves in every shade from green to red, many of them backlit by the golden afternoon sunshine.

The last week has been good. Busy as usual, but mostly interesting and engaging. I had a great time at the radio show. The music was a bit more ecletic than usual. I don't know than anyone but me appreciated the transition from the depressed soundscape of Radiohead's 'Kid A' to the upbeat good o'l rock and roll of Roy Orbison's 'Candy Man'. I followed that with 'Hey Ya!" and after that my memory is a little blurry.

I discovered a new beer. Some of you may know of the 'Anchor Steam' beer made by the Anchor Brewing company of San Francisco. It manages to be at once complex and refreshing. Last night I decided to give both their 'Liberty Ale' and 'Anchor Porter' a try. The Anchor Porter wasn't bad, not something I'll buy again, but not a bad beer by any means. The Liberty Ale was however very good. It's dry hopped and so has a very nice fresh fruity/floral hop character that I really like. If you Bridgeport's 'Blue Heron', I'm sure you'll like the Liberty Ale, which is, in my opinion, a better beer. Unfortunately, I don't know that the Liberty is available up in Canada. As of a couple years ago, I'd only ever seen their Anchor Steam in Vancouver.

I'm off to read Plutarch. I hope all of you are having a good weekend.