Eve Babitz

Eve's Hollywood

Macy HB

Her brilliant innocence is something that is so charming and so sexy and so purely about life that you have to have been there, you have you have heard her laugh, you have to have seen her roomful of flowers and her purple satin capes made in Rome lined with iridescent taffeta to know that it is possible, Anything is Possible and that a woman spun out into the finest silk makes the strongest rope. I waited until I got around her to eat caviar, otherwise, I knew I’d never get the point.

and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.

Our 18-year-old vast jadedness came out in little puffs from our ears, like steamboats.

There are some aspects of the East Coast which people from LA regard as color-blindness, just as I cannot understand, ever, about Harvard or Boston, a certain tunnel quality that cuts off periphery vision and stops one from looking across restaurants, I guess it is. Or not knowing where you’ll be in a month.

Her cheeks glowed out of girlish and adult confusion, the whole thing was a manic act of God.

Here she’d wanted this polished finish, and what it looked like she’d done was a jagged prologue.

Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.

i usually rate each short story or essay in collected works now and have it averaged as the final rating but, this one has too many and some are too short for me to really give my full thoughts to “rate” or critique it. 

in turn i will say the parts which i liked the best which is any essay mentioning stravinsky (as a big fan of him lmao) and anything mentions of books or literary figures. i like the mention of writers ive read from like joyce carol oates and the black water reference i caught since i recently finished it. authors im excited to read from especially colette and graham greene, as well as some fitzgerald works i have yet to get through. for example the diamond as big as the ritz and tender is the night (which is taking me since 2024 to finish lmao).

the hollywood branch library is obviously my fav essay here.

Nica

i usually rate each short story or essay in collected works now and have it averaged as the final rating but, this one has too many and some are too short for me to really give my full thoughts to “rate” or critique it. 

in turn i will say the parts which i liked the best which is any essay mentioning stravinsky (as a big fan of him lmao) and anything mentions of books or literary figures. i like the mention of writers ive read from like joyce carol oates and the black water reference i caught since i recently finished it. authors im excited to read from especially colette and graham greene, as well as some fitzgerald works i have yet to get through. for example the diamond as big as the ritz and tender is the night (which is taking me since 2024 to finish lmao).

the hollywood branch library is obviously my fav essay here.

"Journalist, party girl, bookworm, muse, artist: by the time she'd hit thirty, Eve Babitz had been all of these things. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing Duchamp over a chessboard and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, it turns out that Babitz was a writer with stories of her own. In Eve's Hollywood she gives us indelible snapshots of southern California's haute bohemians, of surpassingly lovely high school ingenues ("people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West") and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of burnt-out rock stars in the Chateau Marmont. In her deceptively conversational prose, we are brought along on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight: to a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a rollerskating hooker, through the Watts Towers, and shopping at Central Market. This "daughter of the wasteland" is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all, but a glowing landscape, swaying with fruit trees and bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and Santa Ana winds. By the end, there is little doubt that Babitz herself is proof there's more to Hollywood than meets the eye"--

mina nayeri

joan didion's sexier cousin ... gorgeous vignettes of ojai and sunset blvd and hollywood high hazy enough to make just about anyone fall in love with LA

eileen sheats

esperanza 

Laura Mauler

The author likes to name drop, but all the people she mentions stopped being famous 50 years ago so it's worthless. I mean, who the fuck is Stravinsky? 

The author also says many times throughout the book that she looks like Brigitte Bardot, but I looked up pictures of her from her prime years and she looks as much like Bardot as I do. Perhaps she is not referencing beauty but big tits, which she does indeed have, but big tits does not a Brigitte Bardot-look-alike make, darling! 

4 stars for the chapters about being a teenager, Le Conte and Hollywood High, bunny shoes and stacked hair and dancing the Choke.

1 star for everything else, it was super boring. I'll be very kind and round up to 3 stars but maybe I'll change it later.