January: sleeping and figuring things out
Suzanne Valadon, La chambre bleue
Last month, I read a bunch of books from the 1860s and played a game set in the 1860s and it all felt very coherent. “Ah,” I thought, “maybe I should write a little bit each month about art I liked, or disliked in a way I find interesting! Perhaps I will do this for a year! Perhaps every month will have its own theme!” Well, this month, I particularly enjoyed, or thought a lot about:
Eve’s Hollywood (Eve Babitz, 1974)
After Claude (Iris Owens, 1973)
The Parker Inheritance (Varian Johnson, 2018)
Essays Two (Lydia Davis, 2021)
Born To Die (Lana Del Rey, 2012)
Caprisongs (FKA twigs, 2022)
Well, maybe each month won’t have its own effortless theme. I guess there’s a little intermittent thread of sleepy beautiful women? Whatever: here’s what I thought about them all.
Eve’s Hollywood (Eve Babitz)
I have been to Los Angeles twice and didn’t take to it. I tried to walk somewhere, which was a mistake; I got drunk; I cried while I had a wee behind a palm tree; a eucalyptus dripped sap into my hair that I eventually had to cut out. A man invited me to have sex with him in the enormous spa set into the floor of his motel room, and I explained I had a boyfriend, and he said “yeah? I’m married!” as if this was a cool coincidence of little relevance to the matter at hand. He also warned me that if I crossed the road I would probably receive a fine for jaywalking. Actually a lot of people warned me about this, people I knew and friends and strangers on the street. The other thing that happened surprisingly often was that people complimented me on dressing nicely and/or being nice to look at despite being fat, which is a very specific compliment I have not received elsewhere.
As an experience, LA didn’t really work for me.
But partway through this collection of essays, which I read with a slight “ugh, LA though” thrum in my head, Babitz talks about the idea of not liking LA, and why people think that’s an interesting opinion particularly worth expressing, and how talking about any other city in the same way would be seen as obviously reductive. And: okay, I didn’t like the place, but she gets at the things about it that she finds beautiful, she makes a good case, and also she is specifically mean about people from London who make a point of not liking LA in a way that successfully made me feel just a little ashamed of myself. She’s good at being mean.
She’s really good as well on beauty and on the experience of liking beautiful things. The book as a whole is almost exclusively interested in things that are beautiful and glamorous, and in how that beauty and glamour is constructed, and how it makes people respond. I read a review claiming that Babitz is name-droppy, but I think that accusation misses the point of the beautiful things she engages with: sometimes those beautiful things are famous people, sure, but sometimes they’re girls Babitz remembers from her gym class at school, sometimes it’s her city, at one point it’s a mean-spirited but extremely attractive cat.
Babitz is dismissive and sometimes grotesque about a lot of things: inequality, Hinduism and Buddhism, fat people, people who aren’t fat but seem fat in the context of an LA bar where almost everyone is extremely thin, murder. She enjoys being shocking and uses shock as something to deploy with deliberate offhandedness, but there are things she says to shock that now do not, and things that perhaps were not meant to but do or do so in a different way to her intention. If I recommended this book to someone, I would do so with a bunch of warnings about reasons they might not like it or ways in which it has aged poorly. But it is absolutely full of good sentences, and good jokes, and interesting small and large things Babitz has noticed about herself and others. Here is a negative Goodreads review of if that made me laugh and laugh, because — well, it’s not wrong. If this review below makes you want to read the book more, maybe you should, you might love it; if it doesn’t, probably Babitz won’t work for you.
Goodreads review by user Noosha.
After Claude (Iris Owens)
After Claude is a weird book to read right after Eve’s Hollywood. It’s from almost the same time, it’s mean and perceptive in a similar way, its narrator Harriet is, like Babitz, funny and judgemental and sometimes cruel, there are tonal similarities as it starts out; but Harriet is also, it becomes clear, deluding herself intensely, is in fact constantly defending herself from any risk of even minor self-knowledge. She is interested in beautiful things but only to resent them. She sleeps a lot. She hates almost everyone, both categorically and individually; her life falls further and further apart and she is not sufficiently able to perceive her own weaknesses to do anything about it; she is very unfortunate and also very very awful. This is a weird book to read right after Eve’s Hollywood but it’s also a weird book full stop. The introduction to the edition I read was written by an old friend of Owens who confesses that at the time of Owens’ death they were no longer speaking, which feels almost too appropriate.
The Parker Inheritance (Varian Johnson)
This is a children’s book in which two kids solve a mystery. The kids, 12-year-old Candice and 11-year-old Brandon, are excited readers and they know the “kids solve a mystery” genre; they talk explicitly about The Westing Game, which is the obvious reference point here, another kids-solve-a-mystery book with a mysterious benefactor and a letter and millions of dollars up for grabs.
The Parker Inheritance moves back and forth between Candice and Brandon in the present and their town’s 1950s history, a context whose racism and violence they learn more and more about as part of the puzzle they’re trying to solve. The clues of the trad puzzley bit of the book, the letters and hints and treasure-trail, are pretty solid: they work, they make sense on their own terms; they don’t quite have the in-sight-all-along clarity of the best of the Westing Game puzzles that the text evokes, but not many kids-solve-a-mystery books do. But alongside the where is the money puzzle — “what does this clue mean” — the kids are working on the why puzzle as well: why would someone leave their money like this, who were they, what happened? And this side of the story falls into place so well, Candice and Brandon puzzling it out alongside the more clue-y clues, the reader putting things together too, the history and its implications slotting into place alongside the present. I would not have expected “some pretty intense investigations of historical and contemporary racism and violence” to sit so comfortably with “kids solve a fun mystery to try to win millions of dollars”, which is traditionally a fairly light genre. If you like this genre or know a kid who does then The Parker Inheritance is great.
Essays Two (Lydia Davis)
A big big collection, mostly around translation and to a lesser extent language learning. I would like to thank Lydia Davis for including this explicit endorsement for not reading every word:
I don't often read very long books. In fact, I don't often finish even a much shorter book, even in English. I usually put it aside, however good it may be, after, sometimes, eighty or a hundred pages, or less, having in some sense not only absorbed its nature but saturated myself with it.
If there was ever a book to read some of, this is the one: because god, there’s so much of it, and as an essay collection on a single theme there’s naturally a bit of repetition. But I’d suggest skimming rather than just stopping partway through: it would be a shame to run out of enthusiasm before the end, where some of the best essays sit (one on translating Madame Bovary; one on learning Norwegian by just reading a book in Norwegian and figuring it out through logic, I have never felt as simultaneously impressed and aghast in my life).
Davis’s Essays is better or at least broader — better unless you have a very particular interest in translation, I guess. If you only read one six-hundred page collection of extremely meticulous Lydia Davis essays, make it Essays. But if you have read Essays and want more, then Essays Two will give you what you want.
Born To Die (Lana Del Rey)
Born To Die is ten years old this month! What an album. How absolutely flawless, other than the flaws it takes from the world and replicates and makes beautiful and perhaps, thereby, worse.
In 2012 Born To Die was a confusing album because we didn’t know for sure whether Lana Del Rey was deliberately portraying misogynist tropes or uncritically replicating them, whether her love songs to terrible men were genuine or critical, whether she wanted more than anything to be sleepy and rich and beautiful or whether she was building a character who wanted those things, but after a further decade of her work we can say with certainty that the answer to all of this is: uhhh
Two other thoughts:
1. This is a great companion piece to Eve’s Hollywood.
2. For years this was the album that I listened to when I needed to fall asleep in awkward places: on a train; in an airport; in a toilet stall at work, desperately hung over. Now, of course, there are newer, sleepier pop stars, but perhaps without Born To Die there would not have been.
Caprisongs (FKA twigs)
Until this album the FKA twigs song I liked most was “Water Me” back in 2013, which is a whole bunch of really good noises that do not quite wish to cohere into a pop song, and which instead remain as just the noises themselves in the process of getting wound up and slowly running down. The whole of Caprisongs feels like this to me, like the listener is walking through a pop song factory that is slowly breaking down, little phrases repeated, bits of conversation, clicks, thumps that come almost imperceptibly slower than I expect, casette-tape noises, echoes, songs that remain catchy for just long enough to set up some expectations that they then decline to fulfil. I like it a lot.
The strange factory gets it together for the length of a song here and there, I guess most notably with “Tears In The Club”, and I am a big fan of crying-in-the-club songs as a genre but for me this one works best not as a standalone song but as a kind-of moment in the middle of the album where things pull together into a kind-of hypothetical “this is what a pop song might sound like, it might have The Weeknd on it, it might have a regular chorus” — you know, like when flashing lights at a railway crossing come into synch for a moment but then they slip out again, like they were always going to, it wasn’t quite real; the contraptions make their good noises, the moment slips away.