by Eve Babitz
Active as a writer in the 70s and 80s, Babitz was a feature writer for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Vogue and Esquire, with a good portion of her journalism and essay writing covering Los Angeles in its most chaotic , boundary pushing years. Slow Days, Fast Company is a collection of magazine pieces, reissued a few years ago by NYRB Books , the terrain being California, the place where it seemed everyone had come from everyone else to make a last stand to be something bigger than normal before resigning themselves to their fate.
These are wonderful pieces , with Batitz maintaining a beautifully modulated tone in her first person narration of non fiction events: she is skeptical while being sympathetic, bracingly honest but hardly heartless, full of wit but seldom cruel. What comes across through the scattered subjects here is how well she presents her lack of experience or her presumptions about locations and relationships she's about to enter and credibly reveal how much she'd learn. Her piece on the city Bakersfield is a revelation of serene sympathy for a people and the community they live in, and a stand-out article is a recollection of the heroine death epidemic that seemed to be everywhere in the bad old days; Babitz recollects on her relationship with Janis Joplin , who, Babitz writes, seemed to have everything after much struggle as a woman and an artist, but resorting to heroin to fill a void her material success couldn't heal. More moving is the memory of an actress friend named Terry , a delicate creature who flitted about the edges of acting success in Hollywood, who couldn't refrain from a drug that was killing her by the noticeable inch. I recommend this to anyone who yearns for more brilliant writing about the middle part of the 20th century. With Didion, Wolf, Mailer, Babitz, I think, is essential reading for the curious.
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A lucid and at times even lyric essay, poet Ben Lerner addresses the love/hate relationship everyone else besides poets themselves have with what's been gratingly called "the highest art". Taking his cue from Plato, who distrusted poetry because it presented worlds that are false and meant to seduce impressionable minds that need a hard understanding of how reality operates, Lerner quickly sketches that distrust of what poets have to say as things that are meaningless, garbled, wishy-washy, utterly unmasculine and prone to "feminine" emotionalism and yet....he also conveys the idea that great portions of a distrustful readership cannot leave the form alone, who keep returning to it to for solace , assurance, spiritual connection of a sort that they can't achieve from the worship of money, sex, and success. Lerner doesn't have any answers I detect, and his examples are at times wholly anecdotal. This essay, in fact comes off in the end as a bit of a wallow, an attempt at ironic distance against a despairing that poets can do nothing except deem to confirm the worst sentiments of a perpetually discontented audience. But in all, an enjoyable examination of the problem , if ultimately fatalistic.
