(no subject)

Is it possible to have on-and-off lip numbess as a result of a prolonged stay at a very high altitide (over 12,000 feet)?

(no subject)

You are the fox.



Saint Exupery's 'The Little Prince'
Quiz.
brought to you by Quizilla

This just got me thinking about a story my dad told me a few years ago after Saint-Exupéry's plane, Lockheed Lightning P-38, was found. (Saint-Exupéry, a war pilot, had disappeared while on assignment in 1944 and his plane was presumed shot down). NB: The story ran in a Russian journal, and since Russian journals, popular or scientific, don't believe in citations, it is sometimes unclear whether you are reading archival material or conjecture. It's this interesting line between historiography and "fiction" that is "neat" on a metalevel, but totally frustrating on a practical level.^* it is not surprising that it was the Russian folks, Fomenko & Co. that came up with the insane Chronotron project that is essentially totally revisionist history of the entire world, where the Catholic Expansion into Europe was somehow mistaken, in historical narratives, for the Golden Horde.^**

Anyway, the story that anthropapa read concerned a man in Germany, a man who was a pilot in the war (for the Germans). The man was a huge fan of Saint-Exupéry, named his son Antoine, set up a memorial society/fan club and spent a considerable amount of his own resources trying to find out where, exactly, over the Mediterranean, Saint-Exupéry had perished. When he finally was able to uncover the approximate coordinates, he realized that he was there on that day, and had shot down a plane that, based on the timing, he had every reason to believe was Saint-Exupéry's. How's that for irony. If that story isn't true, then it belongs in the category encompassed by my "unique user interest"--"possibly apocryphal stories." Stories that, if they aren't true, should be.

Anyway, I know everyone and their brother has read The Little Prince but if you haven't read his amazing novel Night Flight you really should.

But night was rising like a tawny smoke and already the valleys were brimming over with it. No longer were they distinguishable from the plains. The villages were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk. And, at a touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house lit its star, searching the vastness of the night as a lighthouse sweeps the sea. Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage.

^*The most frustrating experience I have had with this to date was with a book called "Zoloto Partii" or "The Gold of the Party", which was a radical history of the events leading up to the October Revolution. The thesis was that Lenin & Co. were essentially international terrorists, mercinaries for-hire employed by Germany to stage an internal coup and take Russia out of World War I and "give" them Ukraine. In return they were rewarded with loot and according to the book all of them had passports ready to split to Argentina. But, unexpectedly, Germany lost the war and they stayed in power. Now, all of this is heavily documented with excerpts from Lenin's and Trotsky's and others' notes and correspondence between them, including Lenin's orders to hold relatives of emigres for ransom. However, there is not a single citation in the book. While the author worked a lot with archives that were just opened to the public in the 1990s, he just inserts relevant passages into text, without any references as to where he got them. At some points, especially when he starts waxing metaphysical and the arguments are summarized, rather than quoted, one starts to wonder how much of it is his deduction/conjecture and how much he actually got from the freaking archives. Later, dealing with anthropological texts published in Russia I ran into the same problem. Apparently proper (or any) citation is, like, considered declasse or passe or superfluous in Russian academia.

^** This kind of reminds me of the Maria Gimbutas groupies in archaeology and especially their more pop-sciency counterparts who are totally devoted to the idea of an age of Matriarchy that preceded "Known History." The fact that there is no archaeological evidence to corraborate this theory is not a deterrent; in a classic tinfoil maneuver, it is, in fact, incorporated into their argument: the evidence has been hidden by male archaeologists perpetuating the patriarchal agenda. I once had a totally insane conversation on this very subject with a girl at a party at my old apartment. She was a total humorless feminist, the kind I was used to from Oberlin, and she insisted on the existence of this mythological matriarchal society or time period (she wasn't really clear on her categories). It really felt like being at a party with the Mad Hatter and having to debate Foucault's views on insanity with him. So finally, after like an hour of this we came to the following glorious point-counterpoint: "There is no archaeological evidence for a matriarchal society and furthermore there is no anthropological precedent for a matriarchal society, there isn's even anthropological precedent for a totally gender-equal society, while a couple of small-scale groups like the !Kung and the Ache come close, they still have division of labor" (from me) vs. "Well, I BELIEVE that a matriarchal society existed, maybe not in this very reality, but it existed, I need to believe it." (from her)