David Foster Wallace Appreciation
The rising moon looks like it doesn’t feel very well. – Infinite Jest
On Friday, September 12, 2008, novelist, essayist, professor David Foster Wallace hung himself in his home in Claremont, California. 46 years old, Wallace’s literary achievements included the enormous novel Infinite Jest as well as short story collections Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion; and essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
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What do we do with something that is gorgeous and almost even ideal but sounds or looks or smells or seems to imitate another, thus eliminating itself as an ideal? Does the work in question become superfluous? Immaterial? But in the works’ (and all works’) defense: Is David Copperfield all that different from The Odyssey? One sweetheart all that different from another? What isn’t, finally, imitation?
The first sound on People in Planes’ second LP, Beyond the Horizon, is a sinister and foreboding organ, sustained. It is, like the best parts of the LP, an anomaly. It is the sludge that hangs around the band’s sound that is most interesting on Horizons. A solo in “Better than Life”; the guitar fuzzes in the corners of “I Wish You’d Fall Apart.” But the esoteric or marginal is not the band’s chief intent; that is to rock. And they do. But a tepid sort of rock; similar to a dirty Collective Soul riff: somehow genuine while drowning in a sea of embarrassing attention-seeking. But that is creation itself, no?