Eclectic Letters #13 — Ben Sixsmith
An existential Cristian Anghelescu novel, David Beckers's short stories, an 80s true crime documentary, an experimental rock band from NYC, and a silent comedy troupe.
Silence and Water
Cristian Anghelescu’s 1936 novel Silence and Water is not the sunniest of reads. The story is simple: an unnamed narrator is travelling back to his hometown to collect a family heirloom he is inheriting from his late father. Frankly, though, the book is not about the plot — it is about the existential musings that the author hangs around it.
In Silence and Water, Anghelescu suggests that in the absence of God, the only meaning to life is the endurance of pain. Ultimately, though, he concludes that even this is meaningless because enduring pain is an evolutionary instinct:
I am human. I endure. I tell myself that it is meaningful. Because I am human.
I drink a cup of coffee. I urinate. Human.
SPOILERS. The family heirloom is the pistol that the father used to kill himself.
Imagine Mr Berenson
The young David Becker’s 1959 collection of short stories Imagine Mr Berenson is an uproarious irreverent satire of the hypocrisies and sexual repression of Jewish American family life in the period. Becker’s vivid phrasing and taste for the absurd heralded the introduction of a major talent.
Having fuelled controversy among conservatives, Becker would fuel controversy among progressives with The Spinster’s Court — his 1972 attack on the alleged moralism and misandry of the feminist movement.
By 1991’s Conversations With My Penis, critics had begun to ask if Becker’s earlier preoccupations had become too dominant. But the prose of Imagine Mr Berenson remains as fresh as it has ever been.
The Burden of Proof
How do we really know if a murderer is guilty? David Ball’s 1988 documentary The Burden of Proof was not just an argument that the convicted child killer Henry Davis Jr. III was innocent — it was a powerful reflection on epistemology and the nature of evidence, beautifully illustrated with scenes of West Virginia landscapes.
Unfortunately, once Henry Davis Jr. III was acquitted in a retrial, he killed another kid.
Fay Gut
Fay Gut were an experimental rock band from New York, whose sonic and lyrical risk-taking was clear on albums like I Hate the World and Everybody In It and Pure Love. Who else would have blended elements of smooth jazz and black metal in a song about the lighter side of erotic asphyxiation? Who else would have closed an album with an eight-minute drum solo?
In the mid-2010s, debate suddenly erupted online over whether the one-time critical darlings’ name was homophobic. Ironically, they turned out to be extremely racist.
Mute
Mute are an experimental comedy troupe that perform entirely through the medium of miming. It’s sometimes difficult to understand their humour but it’s refreshing not to hear about their political opinions.
Ben Sixsmith is Online Editor of The Critic, author of The Zone and shopper of Biedronka.
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You had me up until Fay Gut. 👍