Word: babitz
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Equally funny, and more irreverent, is novelist Eve Babitz' "Bodies and Souls," which defends and explores the Southern Californian cult of the body. "It has always seemed to me that sex (i.e. inspiring lust) was what L.A. was about," she writes. Babitz' memoir details her own quest to be "totally devastating when it came to pulchritude, blond-haired and smoldering...
...virtues of this eclectic collection is that no single impression of the city dominates for too long; Lynell George's "City of Specters," a stark essay on death in Black Los Angeles, serves as a sobering and understated counterpoint to Babitz' exuberant piece. "In junior high school we went to more funerals than weddings," George writes. Her memoir is filled with children for whom the "concept of life has never been more ephemeral...there is not the need nor time to pace and fret over a future that may never...
House film societies, which rely heavily on posters for advertising, may suffer financially from the new kiosks, Arthur D. Babitz '81, president of the Leverett House Film Society, said yesterday, adding that he will send a letter of protest on behalf of all the House film societies to Epps this week...
Imagine trying to be a regional writer in Los Angeles, the world's most celebrated suburb of nowhere. Eve Babitz -Hollywood born and raised-tries and immediately runs into a problem. "In Los Angeles," she writes, "it's hard to tell if you're dealing with the real true illusion or the false one." An author who distinguishes between true and false illusions must be carefully watched. Babitz calls the ten pieces in her book "tales," but they clearly belong to the mode of parafictions: a mix of autobiography, journalism and the techniques of the short story...
Still, as they say in Southern California, one must go with the flow. In Slow Days, Fast Company that flow is generated by Babitz's fresh, distinctive sense of place: "Outside it's turned pink and the jacaranda tree is magenta, and next door the fourteen-year-old Mexican girl has finished her paper route and swung her long California-bred legs off her bike and now throws a Frisbee at her brother's head, expertly...