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Eve Babitz Loves You
Or at least I feel that way
“I wish I knew what you were looking for/I might have known what you would find.” — The Church, “Under the Milky Way Tonight.”
I feel this way quite a lot these days. Sometimes I think I’m looking for validation after all these decades. You know, 10,000 claps for a single piece. Maybe two acceptances in a row before a rejection, or maybe even one.
At other times I think I’m looking for a writer who wants me to see what I don’t want to; who wants me to travel with her to places I’ve long consigned to irrelevance or have cast off as glitzy nothings full of gilded no-ones.
When I find someone like Eve Babitz, I think I might have made it in the sense that I forget about all time and space when I’m reading her nonfiction, which might be her point. She often forgot those things, too, even though in her loosely connected Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (NYRB Classics 2016), she shows us hazy, Santa Ana images of Bakersfield, Palm Springs and the Chateau Marmont. More than these places and times that envelope her and us, she shows us people who both know, and don’t know, how to dress or drink and sometimes lie on the beach or in bed (isn’t it the same thing?) in various configurations that only occasionally have something to do with love and desire.