(no subject)

[lapsedmodernist]

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)

Comments

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that. The little Prince has been my favorite book since i was little and St Exupery's Vol de Nuit is amazing.

I was at the site in Tarfaya , Morrocco where his plane crashed. It's just like the landscape in the little prince. :)

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

yes, it seems that he is one of the authors who predicted/intuited his own death in his work. Like Lermontov and Pushkin both "knew" they would die young, in duels, etc.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Yes and also... flying planes at that time was probably kinda like being a mountain climber. You know that you're taking your life in your own hands every time you do it.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I was almost the pilot. I took the quiz twice, changing one answer and in one instance I was the pilot and in the other I was the fox.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Can you say more about the "Chronotron"? Googling doesn't help me, unless it's a digital signal processing technique or a wristwatch or a cheap 70's scifi.

then there's this...

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Fomenko, a russian historian came up with the idea
http://history.mithec.com/

Chronotron is a more insane wide-scale project that grew out of it. Interestingly enough I recently saw this CFP on h-net:

http://h-net.org/announce/show.cgi?ID=144229

CALL FOR AUTHORS:
Alternate History Book Series, New Chapters

We are inviting academic editorial contributors to a revolutionary new series of history books for high-school students. The Alternate History series uses what-if scenarios (counter-factual history) to attract, intrigue, and stimulate interest in all facets of historical thinking and discussion among students. Constructed to complement the existing high-school curriculum, chapters are being assigned that cover native and colonial America, Manifest Destiny, and the Civil War.

Of course, this is specified as "speculative history"and it is not the same as äll history is wrong, here is the new insane one" as Chronotron does.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

alternate history as a fiction project is kinda cool.

As a serious historical enterprise, it's wack like The Da Vinci Code. I am intrigued by the Anatoly Fomenko stuff, though. It seems to be based entirely on the premise that:
* medieval paintings painted people in medieval clothing
* medieval paintings depicted the events of the Old Testament
* therefore, the people in the Old Testament must have been wearing medieval clothing
* therefore, they were actually medieval *people* in the Old Testament
* therefore, the years from 0 CE to 1000 CE didn't actually happen.

This is marvelously paranoid.

[theophile.livejournal.com]

also:

There is a cheap literature that speaks to us of the need of escape. It is true that when we travel we are in search of distance. But distance is not to be found. It melts away. And escape has never led anywhere. The moment a man finds that he must play the races, go to the Arctic, or make war in order to feel himself alive, that man has begun to spin the strands that bind him to other men and to the world. But what wretched strands! A civilization that is really strong fills man to the brim, though he never stir. What we are worth when motionless, is the question.

Flight to Arras

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

That is such a great piece of text. Thank you.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I love that passage. While "The Little Prince" has been genred (is that a verb?) as a fairy tale (although it has more in common with stories that are inadequately classified as "fairy tales" like Oscar Wilde's "Star Child" or "The Fisherman and his Soul" or Hoffman's wonderously trippy pieces like "The Golden Pot"or "The Nutcracker"), his other books like Night Flight and Flight to Arras and especially Wind, Sand and Stars have this kind of "magical realism" (ew, I hate that phrase) that has nothing to do with magical realism via-Marquez. Meaning it is not the kind of exhibitionist almost Disney-like self-consciously stylized "magic" infusion through butterflies! or eating dirt or whatever. Instead, it is a very gentle, very subtle way of making reality tingle (now I sound like a hippie), like flight maps becoming topographies of a fairyland, and houses becoming like stars and stars becoming like houses. It is my favorite kind of writing and I always makes me think of the inadequacy of formal genre categories of "magical realism"vs "fantasy" vs "urban fatasy" vs "dreamlike prose"and in the end I always have to resort to equivocation. It kind of reminds me of one of my favorite Nabokov short stories, "Gods" which is just a two-page ditty, a second-person consolation, a narrative of a man taking a walk with his grief-stricked lover:

...They are leading camels along the street, on the way from the circus to the zoo. Their plump humps list and sway. Their long, gentle faces are turned up a little, dreamily. How can death exist when they lead camels along a springtime street? At the corner, an unexpected whiff of Russian foliage; a beggar, a divine monstrosity, turned all inside out, feet growing out of armpits, proffers, with a wet, shaggy paw, a bunch of greenish lilies-of-the-val...I bump a passerby with my shoulder... Momentary collision of two giants. Merrily, magnificently, he swings at me with his lacquered cane. The tip, on the backswing, breaks a shopwindow behind him. Zigzags shoot across the shiny glass. No--it's only the splash of mirrored sunlight in my eyes...
...Look! Above the vacant green expanses, high in the sky, an airplane progresses with a bassy ring like an aeolian harp. Its glass wings are glinting. Beautiful, no? Oh, listen--here is something that happened in Paris, about 150 years ago. Early one morning--it was autumn, and the trees floated in soft orange masses along the boulevards into the tender sky--early one morning, the merchants had assembled in the marketplace; the stands filled with moist, glistening apples; there were whiffs of honey and damp hay. An old fellow with white down in his auricles was unhurriedly setting up cages containing various birds that fidgeted in the chilly air; then he sleepily reclined on a mat, for the auroral fog still obscured the gilt hands on the town hall's black dial. He had scarcely gone to sleep when someone started tugging at his shoulder. Up jumped the oldster, and saw before him an out-of-breath young man. He was lanky, skinny, with a small head and a pointed little nose. His waistcoat--silvery with black stripes--was buttoned askew,
the ribbon on his pigtail had come undone, one of his white stockings was sagging in bunched wrinkles. "I need a bird, any bird--a chicken will do," said the young man, having given the cages a cursory, agitated glance. The old man gingerly extracted a small white hen, which put up a fluffy struggle in his swarthy hands. "What's wrong--is it sick?" asked the young man, as if discussing a cow. "Sick? My little fish's belly!"
mildly swore the oldster.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

The young man flung him a shiny coin and ran off amid the stands, the hen pressed to his bosom. Then he stopped, turned abruptly with a whip of his pigtail, and ran back to the old vendor. "I need the cage too," he said.
When he went off at last, holding the chicken with the cage in his outstretched hand and swinging the other arm, as if he were carrying a bucket, the old man gave a snort and lay back down on his mat. How business went that day and what happened to him afterwards is of no concern to us at all.
As for the young man, he was none other than the son of the renowned physicist Charles. Charles glanced over his spectacles at the little hen, gave the cage a flick of his yellow fingernail, and said, "Fine--now we have a passenger as well." Then, with a severe glint of his eyeglasses, he added, "As for you and me, my boy, we'll take our time. God only knows what the air is like up there in the clouds."
The same day, at the appointed hour on the Champs de Mars, before an astonished crowd, an enormous, lightweight dome, embroidered with Chinese arabesques, with a gilded gondola attached by silken cords, slowly swelled as it filled with hydrogen. Charles and his son busied themselves amid streams of smoke blown sideways by the wind. The hen peered through the wire netting of her cage with one beady eye, her head tilted to one side. All around moved colorful, spangled caftans, airy
women's dresses, straw hats; and, when the sphere lurched upward, the old physicist followed it with his gaze, then broke into tears on his son's shoulder, and a hundred hands on every side began waving handkerchiefs and ribbons. Fragile clouds floated through the tender, sunny sky. The earth receded, quivery, light-green, covered with scudding shadows and the fiery splashes of trees. Far below some toy horsemen hurtled past--but soon the sphere rose out of sight. The hen kept peering downward with one little eye.
The flight lasted all day. The day concluded with an ample, vivid sunset. When night fell, the sphere began slowly descending. Once upon a time, in a village on the shore of the Loire, there lived a gentle, wily-eyed peasant. Out he goes into the field at dawn. In the middle of the field he sees a marvel: an immense heap of motley silk. Nearby, overturned, lay a little cage. A chicken, all white, as if modeled out of snow, was thrusting its head through mesh and intermittently moving its beak, as it searched for small insects in the grass. At first the peasant had a fright, but then he realized that it was simply a present from the Virgin Mary, whose hair floated through the air like autumn spider-webs. The silk his wife sold off piecemeal in the nearby town, the little gilded gondola became a crib for their tightly swaddled firstborn, and the chicken was dispatched to the backyard. Listen on.
Some time elapsed, and then one fine day, as he passed a hillock of chaff at the barn gate, the peasant heard a happy clucking. He stooped. The hen popped out of the green dust and hawked at the sun as she waddled rapidly and not without some pride. While, amid the chaff, hot and sleek, glowed four golden eggs. And no wonder. At the wind's mercy, the hen had traversed the entire flush of the sunset, and the sun, a fiery cock with a crimson crest, had done some fluttering over her.
I don't know if the peasant understood. For a long time he stood motionless, blinking and squinting from the brilliance and holding in his palms the still warm, whole, golden eggs. Then, his sabots rattling, he rushed across the yard with such a howl that his hired hand thought he must have lopped off a finger with his axe...
Of course all this happened a long, long time ago, long before the aviator Latham, having crashed in mid-Channel, sat, if you will, on the dragonfly tail of his submerging Antoinette, smoking a yellowed cigarette in the wind, and watching as, high in the sky, in his little stubby-winged machine, his rival Bleriot flew for the first time from Calais to England's sugary shores.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Lovely. Thank you. This "meme" also generated long posts and comments in my journal. Interesting.

[trochee.livejournal.com]

also, I love the trigram "classic tinfoil maneuver".

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

how is that a trigram? I thought a trigram was a three-letter word. Or is there an I Ching reference I am not getting?

remember, you asked...

[trochee.livejournal.com]

heh, you're right: that's what Google and Wordnet think.

In my line of work, though, a trigram language model is a kind of Markov Chain, in which the probability distribution of the next word is predicted conditioned on the previous two words (thus 3-gram).

Thus, we refer to high-probability trigrams like [all, of, the] or very very low ones like [classic, tinfoil, maneuver] to virtually zero-probability ones like [mrfl, zusoo, platz] or [the, of, and] (which are near-zero probabilities for different reasons).

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Humorless feminists at Oberlin? Gambling in Casablanca? I almost went to Oberlin, but chose to be near a big city instead. Some days I wonder though...I can only imagine what they buy into at Antioch. Oh wait, I know - The Burning Times (otherwise known as The Great Burning).

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Where did you go to college? I realize that I do not know this about you. What the fuck is the Great Burning? I know about the Sex Code (may i feel said he) but what is this burning stuff, some kind of Burning-Man type deal, except in Ohio and thus lame?

[fengi.livejournal.com]

I went to Northwestern University and was a student of Stuart Kaminsky, that mystery writer who wrote the first few of his Moscow cop series without ever visiting the USSR. Not sure this is a good thing, but...

The Great Burning or Burning Times is a bit of Wiccan revisionist history which claims the witch panics of the 16th and 17th century was carried out against the wiccan religion (in an attempt to claim history for a 20th century invention) and claimed 9 million victims (yet another group attempting to one-up the Jews). No. Really. I'm not fucking kidding.

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/40/story_4007_1.html

I once went out with someone from Antioch who claimed the school kept an ongoing map of how everyone was "related" sexually, which encompassed most of the school population and went back years. I have no idea if the map myth continues, but it squicked me out to say the least.

[apropos.livejournal.com]

"Well, I BELIEVE that a matriarchal society existed, maybe not in this very reality, but it existed, I need to believe it." (from her)

From what I've seen of Gimbutas' arguments (in the laudatory new-age feminist film about her), this is essentially what she says too. Her thesis is entirely dependent on presumptions about the univocality of certain geometric forms--for example, that the triangle ALWAYS symbolizes the vulva, which is just about the most bizarre thing I've ever heard, seeing as how representations of the vulva from many other ancient contexts are often the furthest thing from triangular.

Peggy Sanday, who is the closest thing to a matriarchalist in 'respectable' anthropology these days, has altered the terms of engagement by saying, "Yeah, there are no matriarchies, if we think of matriarchy in terms of 'female rule', but there are/were societies where power was not necessarily enacted through gendered individuals or gendered classes (in the sense that second wave feminists thought about a 'sex-gender system'), or in which linguistic and cosmological structure emphasize gender parity or complementarity or even feminine primordiality." La la la.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

but the thing is, with Sanday's totally valid argument it's still like point/counterpoint. I mean, especially after Foucault when you can do analysis of power in spheres, "women's" ethnographies have focused on systems of power even in "male-dominated"societies, like influence in the household, gossip as a system of control, etc. etc. Furthermore the sex/gender correlation these people are fixating on is not a category that always translates well to other systems. Quite often the systemic grievances these feminists are rooted in monotheistic and later capitalist culture that they then naturalize as "men always oppress women in the same way throughout all history which is always the history of feudal-then-capitalist Bible-thumping men oppressing women in identical ways." So this naturalization/universalization is projected on a reified Known History of the World and then of course a mythical desired counterpart is constructed within that paradigm, of a Matriarchy That Was (where? when? how?). Really, that tendency is just another manifestation of the second-wave proclivity for the universalization (i.e. Westernization) of the Female Experience.

Unrelatedly (except that this made me think of Margaret Mead...I am reading this weird book now by Mary Gaitskill that is this bizarre story of two women whose lives are changed by Ayn Rand (except in the book she is named Anne Granite) and all these historical people exist under thinly veiled monikers, so at one point Ayn Rand/Ann Granite disses on Margaret Mead/Can't Remember her Made-Up Name for reifying naked savagery over capitalist civilization. It's also funny because there are long passages that are basically paraphrased Ayn Rand passages (the "rape"/rape scene in the Fountainhead, etc.) but with different and even more insane names than in the actual Ayn Rand books. This is the best thing ever since the Atlas Shrugged parody in The Illuminatus Trilogy called Telemachus Sneezed. Anyway, you see my train of thought feminism --> Margaret Mead --> insane book I am reading.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

I am sorry, but who represents vuvla in a triangular fashion except those "study aides" like Clitoris for Dummies that have illustrations of thumbs and index fingers arranged in a triangle shape to diagram what is where.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Heh. Good . Point.

[mysteryjesse.livejournal.com]

You are the drawing.


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


My mother used two copies of the little prince to teach us both french - broken, horrible french, but we had an english version and a french version, and when I was five or six we would try and figure out how to say things to each other. I think I'll take your advice about Night Flight.

yours,
jesse

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

awww, the drawing is so sad!!

[mysteryjesse.livejournal.com]

( sighs ) yep.

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

My friend carl has this tattoo on his shoulder. Best tatoo. ever.

[buttler.livejournal.com]

that st. exupery story is enthralling. i need to believe it happened, if not in this very reality.

also, i remember a matriarchal society very clearly from one of my past lives.* that's, um, mental archaeological evidence, right?


*buttler seance, mme. kalashnikov's vision thing, booth at funtown rambling carny, ann arbor, mi, april 7, 1997.

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

that's, um, mental archaeological evidence, right?

In my archaeology seminar my first year in grad school we had to read some totally insane shit that could only be described as "phenomenological archaeology." While I have a complicated relationship with anthropology-as-science, a scientific method in archaeology in definitely appropriate. I remember some insane article that argued for something a lot like mental archaeology where the dude stood inside of some dome and envisioned echoes from the past and somehow archaeologically "experienced" the past.

I was the Little Prince

[isquiesque.livejournal.com]

And I adore Saint-Exupéry, so this little quiz made me smile. And Vol de Nuit is a great book. As a pilot, my favorite quote from the book is:

...Puis, comme rien ne vacillait, ni ne vibrait, ni ne tremblait, et que demeuraient fixes son gyroscope, son altimètre et le régime du moteur, il s'étira un peu, appuya sa nuque au cuir du siège, et commença cette profonde méditation du vol, où l'on savoure une espérance inexplicable.

That's how it generally is, at least for me. Nothing exciting, just peaceful.

Re: I was the Little Prince

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately I don't know French. Translation, please?

And...you are a pilot??!??

Re: I was the Little Prince

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Puis, comme rien ne vacillait, ni ne vibrait, ni ne tremblait, et que demeuraient fixes son gyroscope, son altimètre et le régime du moteur, il s'étira un peu, appuya sa nuque au cuir du siège, et commença cette profonde méditation du vol, où l'on savoure une espérance inexplicable
I'll try... but it won't be perfect.

Then, as everything stopped moving, vibrating and shaking ... as the gyroscope, altimeter and engine came to running speed... he stretched a little , rested his head on the leather seat and began this deep flying meditation where one dwells inside unexplainable hope.

Re: I was the Little Prince

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

merci beacoup.

And there goes one third of my French skillz.

Re: I was the Little Prince

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Found a better translation than my half-assed one....Nothing shook or rattled, neither gyroscope nor altimeter flickering in the least, the engine was running smoothly; so now he relaxed his limbs a little, let his neck sink back into the leather padding and fell into the deeply meditative mood of flight, mello with inexplicable hopes.

Re: I was the Little Prince

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

It's funny because it's all one long windy sentence in French. And you just can't do that with English because the thinking process is more broken up. I used ... to remedy that and they use , and ;
But as a writer I use a lot of ... so that would make sense. Thank you for this little exercise. I just learned a lot !

Re: I was the Little Prince

[twotoedsloth.livejournal.com]

I liked your translation better (although my French is pretty rough).

Re: I was the Little Prince

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Merci!

Re: I was the Little Prince

[isquiesque.livejournal.com]

Ah, wow. Thanks for beating me to the punch on the translation. I got the comment from anthrochica while at work, and I don't really touch lj from work (I know, this is an odd concept) so I waited until this morning to reply.

To anthrochica: In response to your other question, yes. I've left the Earth alone and returned alive. Little more than that at this point, but I don't have access to a plane at present. Looking at finishing off my license winter after next (this coming winter already has lots of training-related things taking up my time). If I can do that, I can probably begin flying for work. That's one possibly path to take, anyway.

Re: I was the Little Prince

[boobirdsfly.livejournal.com]

Wow... a modern Amelia.. I love it !!!

[bing-crosby.livejournal.com]

I heard someone say on the radio the other day that some of the best things he has ever read were in footnotes. That whole "tinfoil maneuver" (great term btw) about the pre-"known history" matriarchal society is such an amazing way of seeing history, especially considering how much archaeology usually relies on the most literal version of evidence. It's like, they can't find evidence so that lack of evidence becomes the evidence itself. Blech, great sentence.

Anyway I am going to add you, hope we can be friends. I keep seeing you make wise comments to our many mutual friends-- I don't know why I have not read your journal before. -- Bess