Perhaps two or so years ago, I had written a post on this blog titled "Krakauer, Penn, McCandless, and Me." It was a comparative review of Sean Penn's movie version of Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book Into the Wild, a monograph that chronicled the life and death of Chris McCandless, painting a stern but sympathetic portrait of a young, doomed soul yearning for true independence. It was also a meditation on people like McCandless, and their similarities to and differences from yours truly.
That post received a few insightful responses, but I'm now unable to find it. Every attempt to search for it has turned up nothing, and I fear that, in one of Blogger's major outages over a year ago, the post was simply eaten. This makes me wonder whether any other posts have similarly gone missing, and now I'm a bit paranoid. I'm also sad that I can't find the post; it was one of my better pieces.
UPDATE: Never mind. I found it: I had written the post on Kevin's Walk. Thanks, Bing. You did better than Google in helping me find my post.
_
Did you recently read the piece on IO9 (one of my favorite sites) about McKandless? How he likely was poisoned by the seeds he was eating and that they rendered him unable to get up and move and thus look for food/assistance? Thus he starved to death...
ReplyDeleteSad...
Mike,
ReplyDeleteI was reminded of McCandless when I saw that Dr. Vallicella had linked to a followup article by Jon Krakauer about McCandless's death. Without looking, I'm going to guess that the New Yorker and the IO9 article are the same one.
You might try the waybackmachine at the internet archive (archive.org)where they archive the internet.
ReplyDeleteJoe,
ReplyDeleteThanks, but as I wrote in my update to the post, I found my essay over at my other blog.
(cue sigh of relief)
Yes. The IO9 piece comes from the New Yorker piece.
ReplyDelete