Primal Fear and the Nutty Putty Cave

I've been in that cave the man got trapped in, the Utah Nutty Putty cave.

I had just turned 11 and moved to a new city. I was attending a hippie school with a serious outdoors bent, and to celebrate our first day and introduce some unit cohesion, we went out to the cave.

The cave was simply a hole in the ground, on top of a wind swept, hot and lonely bluff out about an hour from the city, within easy spitting distance of Utah Lake. There was no administration of the place then, and we brought no equipment other then hiking boots and palliative towels. The name of the cave,Nutty Putty, evoked the nature of the formation's unique mud, found nowhere else in the world, a geological singularity, a fascinating development.In laymans terms: the mud was exceptionally sticky and it got everywhere and took a million years to come off in the shower. I looked down into the hole, and up at my teacher, who I had met the day before. "You're sure about this?" I asked.

"It'll be so fun!" he said, encouragingly. I stiffened up my shoulders, and began to climb, down, down, down, everything getting darker, more slippery, my feet scrabbling for purchase on the slippery rock. It was only about ten feet to the bottom, but I wasn't even five feet tall, yet.

"HELL YESSS!" I heard, as one of my classmates flung himself down the hole, feet first, a flesh colored blur. He hit the ground adeptly: he picked himself up and regarded with interest the slime that now covered his feet and his hands.

"Don't do that!" my teacher said, desperately, from above our heads.

I'd been caving before when went down into the hole, in a huge and wild cave in Tennessee. That had been an adventure, something exciting and exotic, but the Nutty Putty cave was something entirely different: a hampster-tunnel made out of rock, just big enough to admit the body and not much else, a place that lent itself to wriggling and physical gyrations. I had a fear of heights, but nothing in the way of claustrophobia, and I began to enjoy it: we crawled through tiny spaces and into bigger chambers, we climbed up and over muddy obstacles, we chimney-walked through corridors and passages.

There were no stalactites or stalagmites here, no mysterious cave life, but it was an underground obstacle course and that was enough fun, for us. As we made our way back to the surface, my teacher stopped us, in the middle of a large chamber that could comfortably admit us all. "We're going to turn off our flashlights now," he said. All 12 kids did, with some sarcastic tittering tossed in. "Look, be quiet, just be quiet," our teacher said. "Now look around you."

The darkness was immense, all-encompassing, something that weighed on you, that pressed against your face. I felt as if my chest was being compressed, as if something was trying to push me into the rock that my back leaned against. It was disqueting, a horror: I focused on the sounds of the people around me, the assurance that they were alive. There were little phantasms of light around me, generated only by my mind (I knew that) - I wondered what they would turn into, if I was down here in the black for a long time. We kids had all gone quiet, totally organically.

My teacher broke the silence, after eight minutes. "That's pitch darkness. No light at all. Imagine what would happen if you got lost. If your flashlight went out."

"Horrible death," one kid said, trying to make a joke.

"Exactly," our teacher said. "So stay close."

We illuminated our flashlights, again. Our eyes adjusted to the light. We were quieter, now: still talking and laughing, but an aura of solemnity had taken us over, a bit. The class was a success, pretty much, from there on out, throughout a year of outdoors adventures of varying length and death potentiality. We had seen what could be the worst, what could occur if we pushed off too far on our lonesomes: it was inconceivable, too dire to consider. The things in the dark that came for you, the pressure on the chest, the endless, forever silence. Enough of a lesson.

I imagine the man who got trapped in Nutty Putty and give an involuntary gut-reaction shudder. I know just enough of what it must have felt like, for him, to truly disturb and terrify me, to imagine what he must have felt like. "He's now really in the bowels of the earth," a comment to the SLC Tribune page on his passing went. Good, god, let that never be me, I think, selfishly. It's an ancestral fear, one that is probably encoded deep in our DNA. Don't wedge yourself into holes, don't get caught out in the dark, and avoid the bowels of the earth, avoid death by wedging. Not that I blame the man who died - he was an adventurer, an athlete, he had made resisting certain instincts a habit, a habit that had brought him great pleasure, enhanced his life.

We can't succumb to cowardice and to our base and Darwinian (oh, that word is overused) natures when it comes to our lives, the risks we will or will not take. He's dead, it's a tragedy. The cave will be shut up forever, I've read. They couldn't take his body out of the place where he is - not in one piece. The authorities concluded that, both to protect the family and to protect the public, the cave will be filled in, rendered "a tomb." I can't come down on either side of that debate, if one man's misfortune should lead to the closure of the path he picked.

I can just consider primal fear again when I think of him, think of the cave: my first experience with the notion, conflated eleven years later with a current event, a pinpointed moment. I can't think too hard on it, or I'm not sure I'll sleep tonight, if my nightmares won't be crushing, claustrophobic.

Urumqi, Stanley Fish, and the Nature of the Sun

China Sends "Harmony Makers" to Urumqi - CNN

One should always be deeply apprehensive when China sends reps with coded names into the fray. Although those syringe attacks sound profoundly sordid. Best wishes to all involved.

What Should Colleges Teach? - NYtimes

Stanley Fish is running a great series on the teaching (and non-teaching) of basic writing skills to university students. As a college student, I admit I am often appalled at the level of writing skill supposedly college-level students display. Basic grammar and punctuation simply can't be ignored until a student waltzes their way into Freshman comp. I was lucky enough to have a few style task-masters in high school that eliminated that silliness from me before I hit college. Fish is on the right track.



The Top 15 Skylines of the World

I remember being blown away by the sheer height of Hong Kong. I felt as if I was stepping into a future that no one had told me about. We took the ferry around the island and I grew more and more amazed as the sun went down: They have buildings this big? This makes New York City look paltry, San Francisco look miniscule, London a mere imposter.

Turns out the HK skyline really is the most impressive in the world. I'd agree with most of these (having not seen Dubai or Shanghai). And San Francisco can't fail to stir the heart a little when it comes into view across the water.



Finally: Who doesn't love these guys? Infidels?

Decadence!, Doom Comic Books, The Horror of Ice Cream Men

I have been a bit bored lately. I am on vacation from school, back home in Sacramento. There are no jobs. There have never been many jobs for young idiots in Sacramento, and with the onset of the recession, there is exactly nothing for me to do but update my Twitter feed, over and over again. I am also getting back into drawing comics with somewhat limited success.

In my days of sloth and langour, I have done some good reading. I fell in love with Isak Denison's beautiful "Out of Africa," one of the most incredible odes to the wild lands (as they once were) that I've read. This is Kenya before the safari parks and the Disney tie-ins, the place where a Danish society lady could run a coffee farm and shoot lions in her free-time. It's a mode of lost-Eden travel writing that really cannot be pulled off anymore (we've taken apart all the Ngong Hills she once roamed in, have implemented lawsuits). A must-read.

Am also slicing and dicing my way through a large quantity of Roman history. To those pessimistic, the similarities between their history and our own - a fall into decadence, a spread-out empire, et all - can be distressing. But I like to think I am no pessimist.

Linking.

Doom: The Comic Book!



The most epically horrible comic book in the Universe. "You are huge! That means you have huge guts!" (A very old link, but I have been going through my million year old livejournals of late and revisiting old funny crap. I suppose it is the modern equivalent of combing through one's sparkly middle school journals). What deranged soul wrote this. What deranged soul wrote this so I can be their bestest friend.



Speaking of old stuff: remember the Horrible History books? They were my most beloved Scholastic book club purchase. The cartoons and funny writing about the squashier aspects of history inspire me to this day. Perverse and sick. And British. Go figure.

New York Parents Battle the Dark Scourge of the Ice Cream Man



A band of distressed New York parents conspire to prevent odious ice-cream pushers from selling their heinous and melty wares nearby playgrounds. I so dearly wish I was making this up. (DECADENCE! DECADENCE! AUGUSTUS SHAKES HIS FIST AT YOU ACROSS THE ERAS!) Did Roman kids have their parents carefully monitor every olive and hot-roasted dormouse they put in their lovely little mouthes?

Ever since Katherine had an inconsolable meltdown about not being able to have a treat, Ms. Sell has been trying to have unlicensed vendors ousted from the park. She has repeatedly called the city’s 311 complaint hot line, joining parents nationwide who can’t stand the icy man or his motorized big brother, the ice cream man.“I fall into the camp of parents who are irate,” Ms. Sell said. She has equal disdain for Mister Softee and the ice cream pop vendor outside the park, but since they are licensed, there is not much she can do about them.


Historic Tale Construction Kit
The Historic Tale Construction Kit, one of the internet's most briliantly shining treasures. Check out the brilliant Something Awful competition for these of old.

Indian Dating Service for Dogs
Speaking of decadence, India now has a dating service for dogs. Really. (I suppose Nero DID make his horse a senator. YOU SEE)

The Tomb in Seville: Norman Lewis's Account of a Lost Spain

I returned from Spain recently and have been ambling through a profusion of Spanish history, attempting to make sense of an endless procession of kings, princes, corpulent dictators and bad-boy knights. Spanish history is a nilhist's pursuit: everything seems to end in war and terror, empires grow large and are tossed back to the ground, idealistic revolutions end in something exponentially worse. In the middle of this comes Norman Lewis, widely renowned as one of England's best travel writers. "The Tomb of Seville" was his last book, published in 2003 when he was all of 95, but it does not reads as some sort of enfeebled final memory.

In 1934, the young author and his Sicilian brother-in-law, Eugene, set off to find the family tomb at the behest of the patriarch, who knows it is located in Seville. The two young men cross the border from France into Spain and find they have walked directly into the early stages of the Spanish Civil War, an impending crisis that they (being young and foreign) do not fully grok. The tone of the book is a curious mixture of youthful fun - because what young person has not to some degree wanted to be involved in great historical doings, in revolution? - and premonition of something horrible on the horizon.

Throughout the book, Lewis and Eugene nervously shrug off the impending revolt, the impending rise of violence ("Surely not another revolution?" as Lewis remarks to Eugene as they are impeded from crossing the border at France). They walk into a shot-up Madrid and find themselves crawling on their hands and knees to cross the street, and still the are unflappable. The journey to Seville proves roundabout and convoluted owing to the "situation" - they are forced to detour north to Salamanca and down by way of Portugal, crossing over the river back into Spain not entirely legally.

Eugene reveals himself to be an aspirant socialist during their time in Madrid, and the author is forced to talk him down from immediately joining up with the Red Army and marching off to fight for social change. Lewis himself appears to have no particular political conventions, tempered with a healthy dose of skepticism for communism - as he remarks to Eugene, "Anyway, communism is only one of the modern religions. Trouble is, I'm not a believer." Eugene for his part, isn't fazed by his companion's skeptical view of the entire revolutionary affair: as he informs Lewis, "I can't tell you how lucky we are to find ourselves here, waiting for the curtain to go up." The curtain would indeed go up, but not as Eugene had envisioned it.













Seville cathedral.

Norman Lewis was always praised most for his clear-eyed and achingly simple prose, his spot-on descriptions of landscapes, and this comes through to great effect in this little book. There are brilliant passages throughout, evocative of a sort of faded and mysterious Spain, a place where a healthy portion of the people still lived in caves and vast wildernesses cut off one city from another, pre-bombings and pre-modern warfare and all of its incumbent trappings. The Spain Lewis describes is desperately poor but it is not ugly, not yet.

Further, there is a mysterious and ancient aspect to the people themselves, which Lewis - the son of an English physic medium - taps into and notes with clear-eyed detail. In Portugal, they are still burning witches, and the townspeople claim she gave herself up for the attention. Madrid's women flock to the slaughterhouses to drink fresh blood in the hope of warding off evil. Castilian men keep watch for foreigners and alert the village when unknown souls float through, far before tourists and tour buses and t-shirt shops. This is the primitive and backwards Spain that used to be, the pre-industrial Spain that did not entirely die until after Franco's passing.

The family tomb in Seville turns out to be a fantasy. Located in Seville's cathedral, it has been dismantled and taken out to the rubbish pile in the back - as the priest explains, only a Christopher Columbus really has the wherewithal to be buried in the cathedral forever, lesser mortals are simply allocated time. Eugene's father, the bombastic old Ernesto Corvaja, unexpectedly races to Seville immediately after, in the hope of stopping his son from joining up with the Reds and involving himself in an imbroglio far larger then he can comprehend. Lewis tells us at the end of the book that he got his wish and returned to Spain to fight on the side of the communists - he survived the battle, but would die soon after, weakened by the periods of starvation he endured during the fighting. He at least got his rendezvous with destiny.

As Senor Corvaja says, darkly, on their last day in San Sebastian upon shutting himself up in his room with some musty literature, "Excuse me, I am off to relinquish the modern world". Lewis's Tomb in Seville is one of the finest testaments to this past and gone Spain we have. Highly recommended.

Is it Really Time to Pony Up, Daniel Lyons?

I saw Daniel Lyon's editorial in Newsweek this morning and simply had to reply.

It's Time to Pony Up - Daniel Lyons

Back in the last downturn, in 2001, Jason Katz realized he was in trouble. His fledgling Web site, Paltalk, was trying to make money by giving away a free service and selling advertising. But suddenly advertising was drying up. So Katz—whose site operated chat rooms in which you could not only send text messages but also talk, the way you would on a phone—did something radical: he started charging people to use a premium version of his software, which offered some extra features. Guess what? Since 2004 he's been making a profit, and he's come to believe that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, people really are willing to pay for online services. "I think some companies are scared that they will cede users to the competition if they deign to ask someone to pay for a subscription to something—but that is obviously a mistake," Katz says.

Lyons is arguing that for internet-driven companies to survive, they will have to charge for their services. As major social media sites money-making schemes have proven profoundly unsuccessful, the hordes of users who depend on these services to make some sort of sense out of their lives will happily pay up to use them. As he notes, "If the service is so useful, surely people would pay." Further: " The really passionate members are kids in their teens and 20s. They spend hours every day on Facebook, and would be lost without it. You think they won't pay five bucks a month?"

Lyon's idea may sound both innocuous and delightfully capitalist, but he shouldn't be anywhere near so confident that people will pay. (Further, I've never heard a thing about this Paltalk service he's touting). As an un-elected representative of my Facebook-humping generation, I'm unconvinced. People my age have spent their entire lives seeking the newest and shiniest Free Thing, and social media sites are simply the latest expression of such. Lyons is making the fatal assumption of assuming that we are in any way loyal. We, the young twinkies of the Internet, are not.

Fact is, if Facebook or Twitter began charging to use their services, I am certain that some enterprising little punk would simply create a cunning (or improved) duplicate of same. Coding a Facebook or Twitter copy isn't that hard, and a mass exodus won't be that hard to orchestrate either - note how pretty much all of Myspace's casual users migrated with a quickness to Facebook a couple years ago. Face it, Mr. Lyons, I don't think we will pay five bucks a month. We'll just go elsewhere.

Facebook's owners get it. Facebook's head of marketing, Elliot Schrage, has said as much: ""Facebook is a free service, and we have no plans to change that."

There's a lot at stake: a pay schematic for a monster like Facebook would totally destroy what makes it so valuable: its monolithic penetration (teehe) into almost every market everywhere. Minus that incredible power to attract everyone, it loses a ton of its appeal, it's ability to bridge the entire world in poking and drunk-photo-posting unity. Without total access, Facebook is nothing special. The same goes for Twitter. Do you really think those Iranian protestors or those Mumbaiker civilians would have ponied up to use Twitter? The incredible capabilities of Twitter as a real-time journalism service would be completely lost.


That's true - but it still makes money.

Can social networking sites really make money? Yes - Myspace offers a model of how making a buck off humanities exhibitionist streak could be achieved. I have confidence that Facebook will also figure out how to use its zeitgeist in the pursuit of capitalism, without losing the universality that makes it so special in the first place. Turning to a pay schematic is not , the answer - no matter how apparent it may seem to Daniel Lyons.

I Live and Other Stuff

Hello internet. Back from Europe and will begin posting here again with a quickness. I'm still finishing up my Europe travel blog, which is over here. Spain, Switzerland, and Italy - not a bad ride. I am sad I did not get to comment on gems like the Uighur crisis, Iran's political situation and HOLY FUCK MICHAEL JACKSON BE DEAD but there will be more opportunities for such things. Celebrities die and life goes on.

waiting to go to rome la dee da de da

I have flown through this city about a jillion times and have never actually visited it.

In the airport in Chicago and awaiting my flight to Rome on American, which will doubtless be deeply unpleasant (but such is the price one pays for cheap-ass international flights). I do happen to have potent sleeping pills, 50 pairs of earplugs, and a volume of Winston Churchill's World War II, all of which will doubtless produce powerful soporific effects.

Will be blogging the Europe trip over here, by the by: Faine Devours Europe

It's incredibly hypocritical since I am a 20 year old college student/semi professional punk, but I really hate sitting anywhere near other students traveling abroad. All the giggling and gossiping and poking and nefarious card playing. Whereas I sit sternly doing Important Work (blogging) on my computer and reading the Important NYTimes. I am probably frittering my life away. I also hate people who can play cards because I can't play anything other then Go Fish, and even then I get really confused and have to sit out for a bit sometimes.

I really do like Winston Churchill's writing, however. My school education regarding WWII seemed to be about the HOLOCAUST and PEARL HARBOR and nothing else. I realized pretty recently that my actual knowledge about the details of the USA's greatest conflict is in essence nil and figured getting the account of the whole thing from the horses/Churchill's mouth himself might be a good place to start. The prodigious output of the man is what impresses me most: book after book after book after.... One wonders if he was familiar with the notion of simply screwing around. Of course, I don't agree with him at all about India - he thought they shouldn't be independent and would never pull it off, and we all know how that worked out - but beyond that point of contention, he's a great thinker and very interesting to read.

Reading Camus and not entirely sure what to make of it. I have also been re-reading all my Calvin and Hobbes books and find the juxtaposition of theories of the absurd with the Best Comic Strip ever to be really gosh darn easy.

Also read Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum and very much enjoyed it. Sort of Owen Meanyesque with much more artistic merit and infinitely more surreality. Also great scenes of nastiness (horse heads --> eel infestations, et all) Made a stab at The Flounder a few years and threw up my hands in defeat...I may have to revisit it.

I promise I will produce more dumbass content for this blog in the near future. I have been spending a ton of time on Encyclopedia Dramatica of late. Although it is the conduit of pretty much everything offensive on the internet, it's also the website that can make me laugh my ass off more efficiently then anything else. I also find it amusing that /b and Something Awful apparantly originated LOLCats, a meme that is now being used by "hip" soccer moms. The Internet moves in mysterious ways, and we cannot know its intentions. That sounded cool when I thought it out.

Life Rules Edition One:

- Never eat at a restaurant with an Irish name unless you are in Ireland. Even then, you might be better off with energy bars.

- Plastic bags are the best travel item in the universe. I have like fifty of them in my backpack right now. With the little zip things. Oh man.

- The Scissor Sisters make everything better. Really!