Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A. Reviews

• 
  emma

  "Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hairdos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt."
  
  have you ever read anything so perfect in your life?
  
  that's just a goddamn random paragraph of this.
  
  this book is so funny, so striking, gripped me from the first line, not even 200 pages but feels immersive, like everything, just excellent, eve babitz forever.
  
  bottom line: a book so good it reduced me to babble.
  
  ---------------
  currently-reading updates
  
  cool girl summer
  
  ---------------
  tbr review
  
  treat people with kindness. you never know what they're going through. for example, every day i have to resist the urge to buy every book in this edition
• 
  leah

  reread this and had a great time
  
  ———
  
  i’ve always been interested in reading some eve babitz, especially as she’s widely compared to (and often noted as the antithesis to) joan didion, and i’m so glad i picked this one up because i ended up loving it! ‘slow days, fast company’ is essentially a biographical essay collection all about babitz’s life in 1960s-70s los angeles. babitz is the perfect 70s la party girl, detailing her days spent running around la, bumping into the famous or the almost-famous.
  
  although she very clearly loves la, her observations about the city and its culture are saturated with her quick-wit and dry humour, and i found myself wishing my copy wasn’t a library book so i could underline all the parts that made me laugh. her writing is so easygoing and gossipy that it just feels like one of your friends is catching you up on their latest escapades. her descriptions of la are so vivid and atmospheric that it makes you nostalgic for a time and place (in my case) you’ve never been.
  
  if any book was going to convince me to sacrifice free healthcare and move to america, it’d be this one - along with
  just kids because i can’t decide between new york or la
• 
  Jim

  In the 1960s and 1970s, when I used to dread the approach of another lonely weekend, I wished I could meet a girl like
  Eve Babitz, intelligent, articulate, and drop-dead beautiful. And there she was, living just a few miles from me in Hollywood while I was in Santa Monica. Describing a friend of hers, "she lacked that element, raw and beckoning, that trailed like a vapor" behind her.
  
  Like her first book, Eve's Hollywood,
  Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. is a series of seemingly biographical essays with an admixture of fiction. Where the first book talked about Eve's teeny-bopper years in the 1960s, in her second she becomes the lovely, knowing score girl that everyone wants to meet ... and bed. She hung out with the likes of Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, artist Ed Ruscha, and gallery owner Walter Hopps.
  
  What she writes about in Slow Days, Fast Company is about her friendships and relationships with people who are usually not identified with their last names; and even their first names could have been modified. In the end, it doesn't matter a bit. Eve knows success, and how it twists people so they becoming boring "celebrities" who rely on drugs and booze to get through the day. She writes;

  But everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever, Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you're forty-five. It's common knowledge.

  Eve Babitz knew herself far better than most people, and she had a wicked sense of humor, as in this exchange:

  The very next night I was having dinner with this fashionable young rich man who looked at me as I smoothed some paté over some toast and said, "You better watch out with that stuff. It'll make you fat."
  
  "Well, gee," I said to him, "there are so many perfect women, it's just horrible you have to spend time sitting here with me."

  Horrible indeed! No use being morose about it, however. Even if I never found an Eve Babitz, I can appreciate her discriminating mind even at this distant remove. This is a girl who did not believe in the viability of most relationships: "The real truth is that I've never known any man-woman thing to pan out (it may pan out to them, of course, but couples in middle age who don't speak to each other are not my idea of a good movie.)"
  
  Eve Babitz in her time and place -- Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s -- was as good as they come. She is in many ways the best that Los Angeles has to offer. If you read her books, I think you will understand why.
  
• 
  ana

  girlboss bohemian to crusty conservative pipeline
• 
  mina

  sharp, glamorous, and a little sad. eve seemed so cool before she became a conservative…
• 
  Peter Landau

  For the last 15 years I’ve lived in Los Angeles. Now I want to get out. It’s a good time. We just sold our house and my wife completed her masters, plus she hates her job. There are the kids, but I didn’t ask them to be here. They just stuck around. Now they’re an anchor around our necks. Why can’t we just pull up stakes and move this circus elsewhere? I know, I know, better than most. My parents relocated from New York City to the suburbs when I was eight and I’ve only just come to terms with the move. I’m 53 years old. I guess such experiences build character.
  
  Speaking of characters, Eve Babitz. She's the naked lady playing chess with Duchamp in that famous photograph, but that was only the beginning of her illustrious career. She’s a writer, and a very good one, who’s enjoyable company if a bit decadent. I found myself eagerly devouring her prose at the beginning and then getting a little sick to my stomach three-quarters in, but that’s my constitution, not her talent.
  
  What Babitz has done is rekindled my love for Los Angeles. I never hated the place like the cliched New York transplant. There’s as much culture here as anywhere, and the physical beauty is perfectly balanced by the banality of its freeways and strip malls. But the sun is oppressive and has the effect of following you everywhere with its burningly indifferent eye. I never doubted Los Angeles' vibrancy, but it’s a megacity and as such overwhelming and just as provincial as New York City.
  
  But there’s a poetry here, especially in its changing colors, a quality Babitz captures better than any other writer of Los Angeles I’ve read. As she moves about the city and into the desert to the ocean and parties in-between, her color commentary is funny and opinionated. I don’t always agree, but I wouldn’t turn down an invitation from her. The place she describes is crystal clear, but the time of SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY: THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND L.A. is lost to history, embedded in the amber of her prose. The 1970s are long done except in the imagination of those who never lived then. They should step away from their keyboards and talk a walk around Los Angeles now. There’s a lot to see.
• 
  Elyse Walters

  Audiobook….read by Mia Barron
  …..5 hours and 32 minutes
  
  As much as I enjoyed “Eve’s Hollywood” by Eve Babitz, I liked this book/audio-even MORE!!!
  
  The collection of these non-fiction essays, were just so wonderfully sensuous.
  During the 1960s and 70’s it seems as though there wasn’t anyone she could not have seduced.
  
  It was so beautifully written— she was a totally captivating writer…..and just so engagingly fun to spend time with.
  I can’t think of any other author who was such a stand for the city of Los Angeles like she was. I can’t think of anyone -living today who is.
  
  At times she was dead-pan and hilarious—but always she was so darn smart and filled with vitality…..
  and unguarded in the best of ways.
  Eve intelligently and openly said things that some people might feel shame just thinking about — let alone saying out loud.
  She was unapologetically candid about sex, drugs, art, music, her relationships, her family, her body, her judgments, and her life in Los Angeles.
  She ‘opened’ up space for other people to be more of who they were.
  
  I’m not done with this author yet—I’d like to go through all of her books.
  
  Eve died in December 2021 -at age 78 - from complications with Huntington’s disease.
  
  
  
• 
  lou

  i was so excited, to read my first babitz, i had a lot of expectations, and this for sure didn't disappoint me. i loved the way she described Shawn and Mary, and it kind of made me fall in love with both of them, the descriptions were truly beautiful and i can't imagine how they felt when they read that and then being able to say that someone captured you the way Eve did. i didnt know how much i liked "gossip" kind of stories till i read this, i stayed late at night just to see what she had to say about a city that i never thought as interesting (it's just the us in general ngl) and people that i didn't really care. I'll for sure continue reading more about her since i loved the way she described things, like she was just trying to explain something to one of her friends, but, more eloquent of course. (4.5 but a 5 just because)
  
  sep 6 - sep 9
• 
  Nicky

  Well crafted short stories about life in 1960s-70s LaLa Land and the famous, semi-famous and wanna-be famous.
  
  So awesome that NYRB Classics has republished this collection as Eve Babitz was not just a Hollywood IT girl. These are sharp, witty and intelligent observations of her life and LA.
  
  “Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt.”
• 
  ilen

  babitz, the epitome of cool funny it girl
• 
  Tosh

  A classic Southern California book of fiction, or is it a memoir of sorts? Eve Babitz is a combination of Marcel Proust and F.Scott Fitzgerald. Her observations of life in Los Angeles and slightly beyond that city, is razor-focused, and her mini-portraits of various friends and lovers are masterfully written. I mentioned Proust, because she has a knack for documenting her times. Perhaps even journalistic skills in capturing in a few strokes or words, a complicated personality. F Scott, because she writes about class - or the people in her world - which are artists, musicians, and they tend to be successful, yet they wander from one local (Southern California) location to the next. I read Eve's Hollywood, and liked it very much - but I feel "Slow Days,..." is a much better book. For those, who collect Los Angeles literature, this is pretty much of a must-have and must-read.
• 
  Casey Aonso

  havent read this since highschool, i feel like i appreciate (and relate) to babitz’s writing so much more now or maybe just in a different way than when i was a teenager. nonetheless she’s got such a way with words and im too stupid to explain how i feel when i read her work
• 
  Chris Via

  Video review:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVsWI...
• 
  Sonia

  this book was such a delight... babitz is the perfect breezy 70s LA hot girl, and her narration style is so light easygoing that you rly feel like you’re a sexy 20-something doing quaaludes and seducing men and having threesomes and then going home and sitting on your cute porch with some coffee the next morning. i also really loved reading about her love for LA, which i personally can’t imagine loving myself (esp contemporary LA), but i have plenty of nostalgia for the hot dry california summers of my childhood so it was lovely to read about. 10/10
• 
  julieta

  I had never read Eve Babitz or even heard of her, but NYRB is always a sure way of getting to any author or work. I found this in an airport, and read it knowing I would find something good, but this is even better than I thought. I don't think I have many references of women authors writing about California this way, and with this combination of fiction and memoir sort of. This was a great surprise, she speaks of things that I love to hear about, love, sex, fame parties, but she's also just damn smart and very likeable. Is that california? maybe, but I love her.
• 
  Caroline

  gossipy and indulgent, druggy and blissful, the kind of casual pleasure afforded by the unconsidered privileges of white beauty—still a pleasant world to live in, for a time, until you consider the powers that enable the pleasantness
• 
  Emma Hamilton

  This was REALLY hard for be to get through despite the short length. Although I do admire Babitz’s writing ability, I found myself extremely uninterested in the stories and it’s characters. I was expecting a raunchy tell-all of living in Los Angeles at this time but was ultimately bored.
• 
  s.

  dnf @ 65%
  the fact that i couldn't get myself to trudge through this extremely short book :// expected to love this but it just didn't work for me
• 
  daniella ❀

  It's fascinating how I experienced California through Eve's words. She is the ultimate "hot girl doing hot girl things" and I wish I have a friend like her. I could listen to all her stories and gossip all day. Love how she adds glitter to the ordinary.
  
  Eve Babitz, no one does it like you did. I love you and your mind.
• 
  Ingerlisa

  Thought I would love this but just couldn’t connect with it and it was pretty dull.
• 
  Suzanne

  Just finished re-read of new edition from the New York Review of Books. So glad this book is back in print. It has always been my favorite of hers.
  ****************************
  For anyone who loves L.A., Eve Babitz is more fun to read than any other local author about this crazy and unique environment we Angelenos occupy physically and psychologically, the reality and the mythology of it all. For me, she is the quintessential L.A. writer - the blog below says it best: "she gets it."
  http://literateinla.blogspot.com/2008...
  
  Now that I am in a mood for an Eve Babitz binge, I am distressed to learn her books are all out of print. There is no justice.
• 
  Nicola

  Wonderful. I wasn't anticipating such lyrical prose, or such a good sense of her personality. A wee bit Didion, a touch of real-life Valley of the Dolls, I loved it.
• 
  Ebony (EKG)

  Eve Babitz is a true hot girl
• 
  aitana ☾

  i really don’t know what to say, no one is doing it like Eve Babitz
• 
  andreea.

  "I was a difficult, mean bitch, whose cat, it was rumored, bit men. (And whose cat did.) I lived on a street in the middle of Hollywood with an abundance of palm trees and my orange sunsets over the jacaranda branches. Shawn’s always trying to smooth things over and I’m always trying to rumple them up."
  
  "When I was twenty-eight, I decided to make serious stabs at adulthood, and I plunged into fatal misadventures which nearly killed the poor men because all I did was spend their money, vamp the landscape, cry, and say, “I hate San Francisco.” [...] After my second K.O., I packed everything I owned back in my car and drove south, back to L.A., knowing that I was never going to grow up like you’re supposed to."
  
  "It's well known that for something to be fiction it must move right along and not meander among the bushes gazing into the next county. Unfortunately, with L.A. it’s impossible. You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost."
• 
  Candice

  Swimming against the tide with this one. Much better than Sex and Rage, and I don't know if part of my dislike was that I listened to it as an audio book where the tone of the narrator was lascivious, jaded and scornful, although in fact that is mostly the tone of her writing. She's a good writer, and I admire her observant insights and lovely turns of phrase, but in the end it's a memoir and I don't really like her. Her characters are all essentially superficial which illustrates the superficiality, naked ambition and indulgence of the LA culture, at least her LA, I guess, and unlike Didion's critiques which had more historical breadth and depth, Babitz strikes me as petulant, manipulative, disappointed, and essentially sad, adulating the town on one hand and trashing it with the other. But my criticism is not for her writing.
• 
  sarah

  4.5
  eve babitz fully emulates and portrays her 'it' girl persona in this book while showing everyone why it was her brain and heart that charmed people into orbiting around her
  
  "I mean, look at me, the only thing one can think about me is sex." Eve says about herself and I wouldn't belittle her allure to that one thing. Sure, she was beautiful and one to leave an indelible mark on the men she encountered, but from her ability to put words together, the way her mind works, the way she's able to personify the city of los angeles in a way no one else has been able to, she shows the depth of her soul and her wit.
  
  she made L.A. the center of her world and gave it its own flesh.
• 
  etherealacademia

  eve’s writing is engaging and she makes some insightful observations but many of these stories were difficult to get into and lacked depth. bakersfield and dodger stadium were especially boring to me. also i know this was written in the 70s but it still feels wrong that the author would say things like “i hated turquoise and cactus and leathery-skinned ind*ans wrapped in pastel flannel plaid blankets from JC Penney’s. Let people from New york and detroit adore Ind*ans and load themselves with squash blossoms and weaving...” (babitz, 97). this is just racist, stereotypical, and anti-indigenous
• 
  Kathleen

  Start to finish, this book by Eve Babitz is wonderful.
  
  "Arrogance and conceit and remarks like that one are much more fun than starving all the time. Once it is established that you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily, factory-like perfect...you can wreak all the havoc you want."