Eve Babitz

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.

The World, The Flesh, and L.A.

Slow Days, Fast Company

sabs :)

Valentina

 He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.

"It's going to be dreadful so you may as well learn to enjoy it." 

You know, when you come to think about it, it's a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?

Since I've started carrying a book everywhere, even to something like the Academy Awards, I've had a much easier time of it, and the bitterness that shortens your life has been headed off at the pass by the wonderful Paperback. Light, fitting easily into most purses, the humble paperback has solved a lot of relationships for me that would have ended in bloodshed.

Amanda Autumn Berrey

“You be the man and that way you get to be the shit.” I had a sudden transplant of sense as I imagined myself “the man” and just how creepy I bet I could be: dodging emotional entanglements and lying and otherwise having a lovely time. Forgetting to phone.

Since it’s impossible to get this one I’m in love with to read anything unless it’s about or to him, I’m going to riddle this book with Easter Egg italics

The seduction of a non-reader is how I plan to tie up L.A.

it’s impossible to tell if one’s been inspired, or if it was the cocaine,

I think that the truth was that Stravinsky lived in L.A. because when you’re in your studio, you don’t have to be a finished product all the time or make formal pronouncements.

Slow Days, Fast Company quotes

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