This Man Moved to a Desert Island to Disappear. Here's What Happened | Hacker News Reader

This Man Moved to a Desert Island to Disappear. Here's What Happened

newrepublic.com

75 pointstokenadult60 comments

This is an interesting story but the writing style is so poor I can't make it through. Prose this disjointed would probably make a decent screenplay but it's a bad fit for an essay.

No joke. I kept scrolling, looking for the paragraph when he quits the "trying to be funny for the intro" style and switches to a normal, readable mode.

I would definitely consider it a candidate for bad writing sample of the year. And as overly flowery and obfuscated as the writing is, it can't really dress up a pretty mundane story.

I read your comment and thought, It can't be that bad. I've seen some really terrible writing before, but something on hackernews can't be that bad.

It is. I struggled to make it through two paragraphs.

It's perhaps part of the Australian culture to jovially dig at serious issues in life through stories and then cast them aside as incomplete potential tangents. You know, inflate the size of a crocodile over here, casually pull half a million a day back here, ethical about-turn over there. We call it "havin' a yarn". I'm not sure if the writer was Australian, but the style and the story sure are! So what makes you a literary critic anyway, mate? Get off ya high horse and crack a tinny will ya! Tell ya what, I've got an esky full of champpers back 'ere somewhere!

"After a dozen cathartic strokes, he looked up, and there was Dave, his logorrheic caddy, yippy-yapping about: trickle-down economics and the importance of job creators (There being nothing wrong with making money!)."

Is that even a sentence?

It's written as if Dave is talking. Seemed pretty obvious to me, and it works well in my opinion.

There were too many words that I did not know that seemed to be made up. Possibly they are just Australian English words, but it frustrated me in the way that reading a book in a foreign language I only partially understand frustrates me. More time is spent trying to guess the meaning of the word than is spent enjoying the reading.

"logorrheic caddy, yippy-yapping about" or "the crash led to them having some pretty heavy ding-dongs" - this may as well be French from as well as I understand what is trying to be said.

Yes, I think they are all Australian colloquilisms. A few I didn't know, but it didn't bother me. I thought "ding dong" and "yip yapping" were fairly obvious anyway, and words like "Sheila" would be known to you if you know a tiny bit about Australian culture.

Yeah but IS THAT A SENTENCE.

Hint:(nope)

I just read it again, and it seems a perfectly valid sentence with all the usual bits in the correct places. What part in particular were you wondering about? caddy is a noun, logorrheic is an adjective, yippy-yapping a verb, etc.

Same exact thing happened to me. This writing style is impenetrable.

The style of writing is suited to its purpose. This isn't a news report; it isn't vital to impart maximum information in minimum space. Rather, the writer was conveying the feeling of the situation in which he found himself. "Dave" is ridiculous and disjointed, so it is fitting that prose devoted to him would be as well.

Perhaps the problem is that hackers don't do much reading apart from man pages. Literature...does not compute.

I've read literature and New Republic this isn't literature!

I barely read man pages and read a ton of literature. It's written poorly and couldn't keep my interest. It's funny, because the idea of a desert island is really interesting to me. Somehow this guy made it dull and annoying.

But the article submitted is in no way literature. It'd be one thing if the disjointed, rambling style served the content... but in this context, such a writing style is unnecessary at best and distracting at worst. Rhyming couplets in dactylic hexameter are similarly beautiful and 'literary', but that doesn't make them an appropriate vehicle for long-form essays, as well.

And frankly, the style isn't very good to begin with. It feels inflated and cloying, like a freshman essay in strong need of an editor. But even if it were an exemplar of its style, I'd still hold it to be unnecessary here.

I'm confused as to why you think a "disjointed, rambling style" is out of context when that is precisely how Dave's personality would be described.

The subheading of the article tells us, "This Man Moved to a Desert Island in Order to Vanish. Here's What Happened." Assuming that the point of the article is to tell us what happened, then the writing style is extraneous, regardless of whether the man in question acts similarly. If the article said, "Here's what it's like to talk to Dave," then the writing style would be more appropriate. As it is, it gets in the way of finding out "what happened." Note that, say, A Beautiful Mind was not written in the form of a schizophrenic's paranoid ramblings, no matter how much that would reflect John Nash's personality during segments of the book.

Please. The writing is sophomoric ... I mean the writing is purple, like the sun setting behind a gauze of pacific clouds.

Or perhaps people don't like being annoyed by things they read, regardless of what the reason may be for the annoyance.

Visceral description has its place, but it needs to be used sparingly. This guy's prose runs so purple it verges on eggplant (or, as he'd probably say, aubergine). And the various slips in and out of Aussie vernacular are jarring. I understand the intended effect, but it's like salt on your scrambled eggs: a little bit goes a long way. Too much, and the salt's all you can taste.

He can turn a clever phrase, but he tends to indulge himself. When he does, he gets way too cute. He's got the descriptive power to be a great writer, but he needs to be a better self editor.

Reading this story reminded me of my endurance-slog through the first few chapters of A Game of Thrones. George R. R. Martin is a fantastic storyteller, but he's also a serial adjective abuser. Same thing here. The story almost gets lost in the words. What we gain in postcard moments, we lose in pacing and flow.

Stephen King recently rewrote the Gunslinger (first dark tower book) by mostly deleting the florid "serial adjective abuse". He goes into it in detail in the forward. The result isn't Hemingway, but it is more readable, and actually feels richer as more is left for your brain to fill in.

I gave up trying to follow it. It sounded like it might be interesting, I just couldn't follow the thread and maintain any interest. There seemed to be no structure to the narrative.

I tried to read the article while eating lunch, and had to stop (reading and eating). Does the word "florid" apply here?

It does. Probably 'purple prose' as well.

Isn't that the point? The author does more than just describe Dave's rambling brand of monologue; he translates that experience perfectly in the writing style.

I clicked the link without reading the comments and had the same thought straight away. Couldn't make it past the fifth paragraph despite trying my best.

Haha it seems a lot of people here did... Validating in an odd sort of way.

phew, now I feel better. Being a non native English speaker, I was wondering if the problem was my understanding of the language or the writing style.

probably both :)

Despite its disjointed nature I found that some interesting notions and feelings made their way out of the text and into my brain. I might even say that it was good. Definitely worth the effort for me.

It's bad design for mobile on top of poor prose. I can barely scroll to read it.

The most impenetrable book I remember reading was A Tour of the Calculus by David Berlinski. Here's a representative sentence:

  Unlike Euclidean geometry, arithmetic rises directly from the wayward 
  human heart, the lub-dub under the physician's stethoscope or the lover's 
  ear (sounding very much like the words "so soon, it ends"), impossible to 
  hear without a mournful mental echo: 1, 2, 3, 4, ..., the doubled sounds, 
  that beating heart, those numerical echoes, cohering perfectly for as long 
  as any of us can count.

I enjoyed it! To each their own, I guess.

I was wondering why it took me so much effort to read this. I am interested in the story, but it's very tiring to get through it.

He hardly disappeared:

Dave did not cultivate this garden. Normally, about a dozen backpackers would arrive throughout the year as part of the Willing Workers on Organic Farms WWOOF program.

Based on the title, I thought the article was about Tom Neale, who was the real deal: http://www.janesoceania.com/suvarov_tom_neale/

Right, anywhere with a WWOOF host is not very remote!

For people unfamiliar with WWOOF, it's basically accommodation around the world on organic farm oriented properties for a few hours of work per day. You supposedly get to learn lots about different types of farming, meet people, and explore for less than it would otherwise cost. A friend of mine from California went through New Zealand WWOOFing a couple of years back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWOOF

I found this NY Times article from a few years ago, "Embracing a Life of Solitude" (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/garden/15alone.html), a better read on the same theme.

" A marketer by trade, he’d tried to dabble in mineral exploration in Papua New Guinea. He lost all of his wealth, about $10 million, when his private venture went tits up. He thought the episode absurd—on paper he’s worth big bickies, then suddenly he’s not"

There is a lesson about diversification and eggs in one basket in there somewhere.

How many of you read the whole thing? I dropped after " the kind often found in sinewy men of a certain age and outlook." It does not hold your interest.

I read it to completion. It certainly did hold my interest, though I don't claim to have any insight into yours.

The voice isn't unfamiliar to me (I read it with the diction of a good friend who has an Australian's Australian accent) and I found it compelling throughout.

I read far too much of it, but not the entirety. It was a chore to read as far as I did, and I probably should've stopped sooner.

The ending is good, imo.

I did. I try to read everything to completion instead of flitting around the web like a chicken with it's head cut off.

Really? Everything? Despite the fact that 90% of writing on the web (like 90% of everything else) is crap?

Yes, it takes practice, but it's worth it.

[Robinson Crusoe was] our first realistic portrayal of the radical individualist

I'd say the Taoist ideal that emerged in China ~2000 years earlier would better fit that bill.

Living like this requires chutzpah more than hard work, wisdom, or skill, especially on a pension. It's too bad there aren't enough beautiful developed locations for everyone to live out his decades slowly dilapidating through misuse and neglect. Perhaps after the robots replace us, our last descendants will live like this. They too might babble constantly in cargo-cult theories about a world their previously-tenuous understanding of which has at last escaped them completely. Until then, however, good grief.

If you are interested in dessert island life, this is a wonderful read: "An Island to Oneself" http://www.amazon.com/An-Island-Oneself-Tom-Neale/dp/0918024...

The writing is so confusing to follow, I gave up after the first paragraph. I'm assuming there was a guy who wanted to get away from it all, so he went to an island to be alone?

The style reminds me of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea.

Why do this title reminds me Magnotta

http://digitaljournal.com/blog/2957

While articles like this are interesting, what in the world does it have to do with Hacker News?

I don't know, it depends, is there wifi on the island? :)

McDonalds charman, dude.

Russel Crowe, dude.

"The Google Guys", dude.

It's like, totally West Coast.

Brogrammer!!!!

Lemme repeat this: BROGRAMMER!

I suspect it is because many hackers find themselves in the same state as the author of being disillusioned / burned out and looking for meaning at some point in their life. I'm not sure if spending a week with Dave would be the best solution if you are in that position.

Two eyes shined greenly.

Muhahahaha

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