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

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Undeniably the work of a native, in love with her place. This quality of the intrinsic and the indigenous is precisely what has been missing from almost all the fiction about Hollywood...the accuracy and feeling with which she delineates LA is a fresh quality in California writing. 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. Anolik, Lili (March 2014). "Eve Babitz on Being Photographed Nude with Marcel Duchamp". Vanity Fair . Retrieved March 1, 2014. People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles. People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it. It’s very easy to stand L.A., which is why it’s almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained, to say nothing of lovers. Logical sequence, however, gets lost in the shuffle. Art is supposed to uphold standards of organization and structure, but you can’t have those things in Southern California—people have tried. It’s difficult to be truly serious when you’re in a city that can’t even put up a skyscraper for fear the earth will start up one day and bring the whole thing down around everyone’s ears. And so the artists in Los Angeles just don’t have that burning eagerness people expect. And they’re just not serious . It makes friends of mine in New York pace and seethe just remembering the unreasoning delight one encounters with the cloudlike marvels of Larry Bell.

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. Babitz, Eve (November 3, 1999). Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night (First Printinged.). New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9780684833927.

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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. 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.” Ciuraru, Carmela (October 28, 2015). "Review: New Novels by Paul Murray, César Aira and Others". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. Holter, Andrew. "The RS500 #188: Buffalo Springfield, "Buffalo Springfield Again" (1967)". Rolling Stone. Archived from the original on December 30, 2021 . Retrieved December 30, 2021. 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.

a b Nelson, Steffie, L.A. Woman The Los Angeles Review of Books, December 18, 2011 Nelson, Steffie (December 18, 2011). "L.A. Woman". Archived from the original on January 22, 2013 . Retrieved May 1, 2012. Eve intelligently and openly said things that some people might feel shame just thinking about — let alone saying out loud. In 1997, Babitz was severely injured while in her car when she accidentally dropped a lit match onto a gauze skirt, which ignited and melted her pantyhose beneath it. [17] While her lower legs were protected by the sheepskin Ugg boots she was wearing, the accident caused life-threatening third-degree burns to over half of her body. [4] :357–358 Because she had no health insurance, friends and family organized a fund-raising auction to pay her medical bills. Friends and former lovers donated cash and artworks to help pay for her long recovery. Babitz became somewhat more reclusive after this incident, but was still willing to be interviewed on occasion. [6] In a 2000 interview with Ron Hogan of Beatrice magazine, Babitz said, "I've got other books to do that I'm working on." [2] When Hogan asked what those books would be about, Babitz replied: "One's fiction and the other's nonfiction. The nonfiction book is about my experiences in the hospital. The other's a fictionalized version of my parents' lives in Los Angeles, my father's Russian Jewish side and my mother's Cajun French side." [2] These books had not been published as of 2019 [update]. a b Lambert, Molly (October 7, 2019). "The Perseverance of Eve Babitz's Vision". The Paris Review. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. Definitely my favorite aspect of the book was Babitz's writing style. Not only was she hilarious with her witty remarks, which were often found in parentheses, but it was also atmospheric and inviting in the way it described the glamor of LA and all its inhabitants. I particularly liked how she characterizes LA through little vignettes of places like the Emerald Bay or Bakersfield and zooms in to show how life manifests itself differently in those settings. Also, I must mention how almost each essay is dedicated to a certain person and I just love seeing this little personal insight and wondering what she might mean. It adds to her mystique in my opinion and the fact that she chose each essay specifically for one person to experience makes me ponder why those exact essays.However, even though I really enjoyed this book, it had a couple of shortcomings. Firstly, I thought the latter essays were inferior to the first couple. I somewhat felt they were a bit long-winded and perhaps a bit self-indulgent, whereas the others were more like thematic depictions of 70s LA. I also thought the book maintains mostly one tone throughout the book (a positive one), and though I understand this was deliberate and that the point of the collection was not to critisize the scene and rather indulge in its glamour, I think this "one-noteness" of it diminished my enjoyment of it. 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. Babitz] achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe. Kakutani, Michiko, "Books of The Times; Los Angeles Middle Agers Fighting the Old Ennui," New York Times, October 1, 1993