Evaluations

Rick Wright is dead.

Of course, so is David Foster Wallace, but "David Foster Wallace is dead" just seemed too obvious. And also wrong, in that he's not someone who was likely to come up in regular conversation. It was Monday morning when I first read of his death, suicide by hanging. A few queasy hours later I dialed up the library site and requested Infinite Jest, his runaway best-seller, which will probably not be available for at least three weeks, if I am reading the data at the library site correctly, which I hardly ever am.

Afterwards I dialed up the Wikipedia entry on the tome, which is (it would seem) exhaustive, wherein I found a fair amount to entice. Which is by way of saying I felt OK about the prospect of reading the thing. Yesterday I went looking for several of the collections-- Hideous Men, the thing on media, a collection of miscellaneous essays-- all of which are non-existent and severally requested in our library system, not an uncommon phenomenon around here. After this I decided to settle for whatever excerpts I might find. Everything I found was, I submit, unreadable. Sloppy, redundant, disingenous, blathering, unreadable. The worst was an excerpt from the essay he wrote about going on a sea cruise, which was included to illustrate his cowbell-- the use of footnotes to provide content, which in fact is nothing fucking new-- in which he described the difference of being "at sea or at land." I suppose he considered "at land" to be a stylistic flourish, but really, why? For the love of God, why? "At sea" has always been adequate for "at sea," and "on land" has always been fine for "on land." And "at sea or on land," well, Jesus, Mary at Joseph. Wasn't that good enough for him? The only other explanation was that it was a sloppy-ass mistake, and if that's the case, then fuck the fucking fucker.

Inbetween came the real revelation, not to say the Director of Alienation. This cat came from a high-powered academic family, did a high-wire adademic routine in grad school, got published in all those high-powered journals no one ever reads, did the first novel, which got great reviews but was not a best seller, threw everything but the kitchen sink at the second, which got great reviews and did become a best seller, and then went to settle into an academic role 80% diminished from the demands of his previous career. As a rock star he only had to teach one section of creative writing per term two, if he absolutely had to. He mixed observation with philosophy with irony and preached against the use of irony in literature, which, of course, was meant to be ironic. And he did so from some of the finest bully pulpits in America. He had it all, and I'm guessing he found out the hard way that sometimes all is too much.

He wouldn't be the first. Breece Pancake, Hemingray, Spalding Gray, Plath, hell? How long could the list possibly be? Might we include Socrates? I mean, what do we have besides Plato's word to say he was forced to drink the hemlock?

So I will get Infinite Jest, not to say that I will get it. More than likely I will dive in looking for the intriguing notions, hoping that I will not drown in his hyperboly, and I will report back on whether or not I have found salvageable wreckage.


So Godspeed, Rick. Rick Wright is dead, long live Rick Wright. And if you don't know who Rick Wright was, you really should.