EVE BABITZ SAID
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EVE BABITZ SAID
When people are still talking about the biographical essays of a Los Angeles party-girl from the 70s, it's our recommendation that you read them. Within Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A., funny it-girl Eve Babitz has a passage on every page worth underlining, worth reading aloud, worth keeping close. Giving the good passages (and there are many) pause is to appreciate a gossipy, indulgent moment in analog that is harder to come by these days; a literary sensibility that is truly pen to paper; or, perhaps, one typewriter key at a time. Her sharp observations evoke a nostalgia for a never-known California in readers below a certain age; hers is a sensibility you can get close to only by reading about it. We pulled 5 of our favorites for you, but connect them together with the essays themselves—witty observations about life, about love, about fame, and always about L.A.
1.
ON FAME: "I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about."
2.
ON BORING MEN: “I've often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death. Sometimes one hardly even notices it's happened, that moment, until some careless remark arouses one's suspicions. I have found that what usually brings this lethargy on is if the woman displays some special kindness. Like making dinner.”
3.
ON FRIENDSHIP: "Shawn is one of the few men on earth who does not take the opportunity to kick you when you're down. He makes your faults sound like the inevitable by-products of how brilliant you are. And for the very first time in my life, I began to deep-down know that even though I was not as thin as George Harrison, it was going to be alright. In fact, it might even be funny."
4.
ON HAUNTING: “Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
5.
ON PUNS: “It wasn’t the way he looked that made him impossible. It was what he said. It was his sense of humor. He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.”
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