Slow Days, Fast Company (New York Review Books Classics): The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

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In these ten cajoling tales, Los Angeles is the patient, the heroine, hero, victim, and aggressor: the tales a marvel of free-form madness. Like Renata Adler, Eve Babitz has fact, never telling too much”— Vogue Ruscha, himself kind of a faux naïf, seems captivated by Babitz’s ease, her unaffected self. “She was really intelligent and up-to-date, into out-of-the-way things, unpopular things, avant-garde,” he told me. “Our little Kiki de Montparnasse pulled it off.”

What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself. Solis, Marie (February 8, 2019). "Eve Babitz's Visions of Total Freedom". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. Anolik, Lili (March 2014). "Eve Babitz on Being Photographed Nude with Marcel Duchamp". Vanity Fair . Retrieved March 1, 2014.

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Li, Lucy, "Beyond Nude Chess: Eve Babitz Embodied Bygone L.A." toutfait: The Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal July 7, 2011 Babitz’s sentences—fluffy, golden, and spunky—which appear flippant…but like Marilyn Monroe infusing the ditz with closeted intellectualism, Babitz has a genius for revealing the depths of ostensibly shallow waters.”—Monica McClure, The Culture Trip Darling: I know you don’t care about the art of the novel but you might like the part about Forest Lawn.”

a b Green, Penelope (October 3, 2019). "The Eve Babitz Revival". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. The Eve Babitz Revival". New York Times. October 3, 2019. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 29, 2021. Her dishy, evocative style has never been characterized as Joan Didion-deep but it’s inarguably more fun and inviting, providing equally sharp insights on the mood and meaning of Southern California.”—Laura Pearson, Chicago Tribune a b c Babitz, Eve (2000). "Eve Babitz". www.beatrice.com (Interview). Interviewed by Ron Hogan. Archived from the original on March 27, 2016 . Retrieved September 24, 2015. Eve Babitz (May 13, 1943 – December 17, 2021) was an American visual artist and author best known for her semi-fictionalized memoirs and her relationship to the cultural milieu of Los Angeles.And because we already know this is a love story with no expected ending, the reader is allowed to tumble into these worlds. Basically, we follow her — sometimes into a short story, sometimes a vignette or five. As a result Slow Days, Fast Company tumbles sometimes too, but almost always delightfully. I mean this word. Wonder is important. Sometimes I wanted to argue with her — her being Eve, being Eve-as-protagonist — but I never felt lost or bored. She wants and she is frustrated, which are sexy moves in a pseudo-autobiographical narrative, because you can’t always get what you want so writing it down anyway is brave, and comic. “I wanted,” writes Eve, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz (2019). New York, NY: New York Review of Books ISBN 9781681373799 OCLC 1100441110 Babitz’ collection of essays, Slow Days, Fast Company, the best non-fiction written about the Joys of Sensuous LA, I have always thought right up there with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Likewise, in “The Garden of Allah,” she writes about everyone’s girl crush, Mary, “a laughing blond, beautiful dilettante who always said the right things.” Mary gives in and marries a man who doesn’t approve of her Los Angeles friends. “But it wasn’t just the money. I knew it couldn’t be just the money. It was that she was afraid of getting old without living out a girlhood fantasy of one day marrying and having children and a house and a business-husband.” The cumulative effect of withering pronouncements like these, scattered throughout both collections, leaves an impression on the reader. It’s as if Babitz is preserving her ability to unsettle by couching it in levity.

This is powerful. Eileen Myles immediately pins genre on her own work in a similar way, and so do third- and fourth-wave intersectional feminist zines, all narratives I hold in the highest regard. Of course, and just like Los Angeles, Slow Days, Fast Company is more than one thing. (I would never say “more than just a love story.”) It is also a map of Los Angeles, arranged in neighborhoods, monuments, and weather (Bakersfield, Dodger Stadium, Rain), and, like much of Eve’s work, an intimacy. Reading it is like sitting next to her at a dark bar or windy place, meaning the story is the thing and it’s probably mostly true but if it’s not, who cares. Because really, writing about, writing in Los Angeles any other way would be fake. “Los Angeles isn’t a city.Schudel, Matt (December 19, 2021). "Eve Babitz, who chronicled and reveled in Hollywood hedonism, dies at 78". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Archived from the original on December 20, 2021 . Retrieved December 20, 2021. Her dishy, evocative style has never been characterized as Joan Didion-deep but it's inarguably more fun and inviting, providing equally sharp insights on the mood and meaning of Southern California. although i’d go so far as to say that the moments she wrote about in those stories weren’t all that glamorous. trips to a farm and palm springs couldn’t interest me less if the friends and lovers she writes about are as boring as a trigonometry class at school and if there aren’t any insightful observations about the places she goes to. Reading Eve Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, '4/60 air conditioning' — that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair. PDF / EPUB File Name: Slow_Days_Fast_Company_-_Eve_Babitz.pdf, Slow_Days_Fast_Company_-_Eve_Babitz.epub

Pineda, Dorany (March 10, 2022). "The Huntington Library acquires archive of Eve Babitz, the late L.A. author". Los Angeles Times . Retrieved February 26, 2023.In the beginning of Slow Days, Babitz writes, “Perhaps if the details are all put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and in full, no matter how fast the company.” Its version of abstraction reminded me of another writer enjoying a renaissance this year: Clarice Lispector. Her fiction covers similar terrain, and there’s a strange, undeniable sisterhood in the way she displaces the reader with her language, using phrasing that is deliberately—misleadingly—lightweight. Both Babitz and Lispector play with the expectations surrounding their beauty; and both suffered severe burns later in life, damaging the good looks they were known for. Their superficial assets superseded their work, which would have been laughable were they not aware. Lispector had her own style of challenging this notion. Babitz’s was often in saying exactly what she saw—maybe embellishing it just a little. Her interest in appearances, and regard for her own, isn’t so simple. Olsen, Mark (December 18, 2021). "Author Eve Babitz, who captured and embodied the culture of Los Angeles, dies at 78". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on December 19, 2021 . Retrieved December 19, 2021. Kakutani, Michiko, "Books of The Times; Los Angeles Middle Agers Fighting the Old Ennui," New York Times, October 1, 1993 Eve Babitz". Simon & Schuster. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. to say the least — eve’s writing style is chatty, gossipy and it reads like you’re catching up with your “cool” friend. some of her observations and lines are hilarious, however, i do think that she’s given way more credit for her wittiness than she actually deserves. most of her writing consists of nothing but surface-level descriptions of la and society and passionless prose.