October 7, 2019 Arts & Culture The Perseverance of Eve Babitz’s Vision By Molly Lambert Eve Babitz. Photo: Mirandi Babitz. © Mirandi Babitz. And because we were in Southern California—in Hollywood even—there was no history for us. There were no books or traditions telling us how we could turn out or what anything meant. —Eve Babitz My god, isn’t it fun to read Eve Babitz? Just holding one of her books in your hand is like being in on a good secret. Babitz knows all the good secrets—about Los Angeles, charismatic men, and supposedly glamorous industries like film, music, and magazines. Cool beyond belief but friendly and unintimidating, Babitz hung out with all the best rock stars, directors, and artists of several decades. And she wrote just as lovingly about the rest of LA—the broad world that exists outside the bubble of “the Industry.” Thanks to New York Review Books putting together a collection of this work, we are lucky enough to have more of Babitz’s writing to read. Alongside the Thelemic occultist Marjorie Cameron (whose husband, Jack Parsons, cofounded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory) and the Bay Area Beat painter Jay DeFeo (Babitz’s romantic rival), Babitz was one of a handful of female artists associated with LA’s landmark Ferus Gallery, which showed local contemporary artists and launched the careers of people like Ed Ruscha and Ed Kienholz. Babitz knew (and dated) many of the Ferus personalities; she was a mainstay at their hangout, Barney’s Beanery. As she details in “I Was a Naked Pawn for Art,” the famous photo of a nude Eve playing chess with Marcel Duchamp was the result of her trying to make her married boyfriend, the Ferus Gallery founder, Walter Hopps, jealous. A bridge between the Beat movement and burgeoning sixties psychedelic culture, the Ferus group rejected all prescribed rules of art to follow a strict internal code of its own, dictated only by individual interests. What her boyfriend Paul Ruscha’s brother Ed did with paintings, Babitz did with essays. Reading her is like looking at Ed Ruscha’s gas station paintings. She makes you reconsider things you might have dismissed as ugly, strange, or even boring, and look at them as if for the first time to find that they are in fact the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen in your life. Everything Babitz writes is both pop and intellectual, shiny but deep, like an artificial-snow-flocked Christmas tree, every bit as real and sentimental for a Tinseltowner as a Douglas fir. She makes sure you are stimulated, and when she occasionally does say something portentous, you’re never far from a punch line. She always writes with an eye toward entertaining the reader because, well, Hollywood. Women are automatically dealt low culture; Babitz doubles down, writing about Archie comics, ballroom dancing, what it’s like to have big tits. She doesn’t care about being high art because high art is humorless. Read More
October 4, 2019 This Week’s Reading What Our Contributors Are Reading This Fall By The Paris Review Contributors from our Fall issue share their favorite recent finds. Jericho Brown I’ve spent the past few days thinking about a poem by Jericho Brown, published this summer in The Progressive. It’s an outtake poem, one that didn’t appear in his new book, The Tradition. That’s part of what I love about the poem. Its existence—in the world, but not in the book that contains five of its brothers—suggests to me the promise of continuity. The promise of continuity suggests that writers can see a project through to a kind of completion without the danger of having to be finished with that project completely. That, in the end, there does not have to be a finite end. According to Brown, the duplex form—his amalgamation of a ghazal, a sonnet, the blues, repeated and inverted lines, and syllabic verse, with a nod to the concept of a building with two homes inside—was ten years and a near-death experience in the making. I love the idea that Brown is still writing his duplexes—or at least that he is still revising and publishing as-yet-unpublished duplexes—beyond the limits of his book. It seems important that a created form doesn’t just stay in one project. That it becomes, instead, part of a Poet’s life project. That capital P was on purpose. I’m thinking here of a person who builds a life of poetry in many ways. The book is nearly closed on this summer. Most of the flowers in my garden have already started going to seed. But, tended correctly, a few seeds will overwinter. In the spring, I will revel in continuity. Until then, I will keep rereading this Jericho Brown duplex, and reminding myself of all that doesn’t have to be forever over. —Camille Dungy Like many, I’ve been watching recent events in Egypt with excitement and concern. Demonstrators are back on the streets, promising to bring down the regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, President Trump’s “favorite dictator,” whose policies of repression and corruption are eerily familiar to all Egyptians. But is there any reason to believe these protests, even assuming they continue to grow, will succeed better than the massive demonstrations of 2011 and 2013—precisely the ones that ended up ushering el-Sisi into power? I’ve been reading Arwa Salih’s The Stillborn, a series of linked essays on the fate of an earlier generation of Egyptian radicals, the student leftists of the late sixties and seventies whose movement ended in defeat, cooptation, or worse (Salih committed suicide in 1997, one year after the initial publication of The Stillborn). Salih wants to extract lessons from her history as a communist cadre, but her passionate and unsparing analyses—of left-wing elitism, lingering patriarchy, and the misjudgment of state power—make clear that most of these lessons will be negative. “One of my major concerns in writing the book,” she says, “was to draw for future generations the portrait of an inheritance that they must repudiate.” Samah Selim’s translation is as fiercely intelligent as the original; her introduction is among the best primers for the present that I’ve read. —Robyn Creswell Read More
October 3, 2019 Happily A Bluebeard of Wives By Sabrina Orah Mark Sabrina Orah Mark’s monthly column, Happily, focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Bluebeard Illustration, “What She Sees There,” by Winslow Homer, 1868 “Sabrina,” says my husband’s first wife, “is married to my husband.” I hear this through The Grapevine, a multibranched root system resembling the hearts of my husbands’ two ex-wives planted in the same plot of deep, fertile soil. Vines like earthy veins, growing tough and twisty. A friend brings me cuttings. I hold them to my ear and listen. I tell my husband I am writing about Bluebeard. “Oh fuck,” he says. I look in the mirror. I have become uglier and stronger. I look out the window. A white shed glows in my yard. I live in “the unguessable country of marriage.” “Bluebeard” first appeared in Charles Perrault’s seventeenth-century Tales of Mother Goose. A man with a blue beard, several missing wives, and extraordinary wealth gives his newest wife all the keys to all the doors of his very fine house. “Open anything you want,” he says. “Go anywhere you wish.” Except for the “little room,” he says. I ask my husband to clean out the garage, but instead, while I am gone for the summer with our sons, he builds in our backyard—dead center—a white shed. As the walls go up, his second wife drops their daughter off to live with us, possibly forever. She also drops off many boxes. Contents unknown. The garage is half empty now. The shed is half full. I call my mother. “Now there’s a shed in my yard,” I say. “Of course there’s a shed,” says my mother. “Better check it for wives.” There are doors no third wife should ever open. My husband, possibly the gentlest man on earth, came to me in a coat of old vows. I married him knowing he arrived with wives. Maybe I married him a little bit because the vows had somehow deepened the lines on his face. Like handwriting I wanted to read, but never could. I married him knowing, but I didn’t know the wives would keep growing in a locked room in my heart. Sometimes they move around, angrily. Sadly. Wives, like peeling wallpaper. Curling wives. Wives like skin. Wives who tell their daughters things that their daughters, my husband’s daughters, don’t tell me. That silence breathes inside me. “What did she say?” I am always asking. “What did who say?” my husband answers. “Perhaps,” writes Angela Carter, “in the beginning, there was a curious room, a room like this one, crammed with wonders; and now the room and all it contains are forbidden you, although it was made just for you, had been prepared for you since time began, and you will spend all your life trying to remember it.” I am not an incredibly jealous person, but it hurts to think of my husband saying, “I do. I do. I do.” Read More
October 3, 2019 First Person Dinner with Martin Amis By Julia Bell The one time I had an opportunity to meet Martin Amis, I ended up taking heroin instead. I’m not especially proud of this fact, it was a kind of accident, but also perhaps a lucky swerve from the more difficult experience of having to have dinner with Mr. Amis himself. It was the very late nineties and I was teaching undergraduate courses in creative writing and literature at the University of East Anglia. The university was, and still is, famous for having nurtured the talents of a generation of British writers—think Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro—and the department regularly hosted dinners for the writers who came down from London to give talks and public lectures. I was working, largely, in a world of men, most of whom were privileged white men. Although there were some female academics in the department, the main tutors in the writing department at that time were men, the writers who came to speak were mostly male, and the grand fromage of the whole department had developed something of a bad reputation with the ladies. It was the poisoned duckpond of the late twentieth century. And yet, it was the water in which I was swimming, and it’s hard to atomize the water while you’re trying to stay afloat. I was nervous about the dinner with Amis. What could I say to the self-styled bad boy of English letters, with whom so many of my male contemporaries were enamored? I was ambivalent about his lugubrious prose, and his caricatures of women and the working classes, and although I approved of his scathing critiques of capitalism, I was much less convinced by his worldview, and all the stories about his teeth and his sexual conquests. There was something cynical and self-serving about his work, and he depicted a world in which women were largely sexualized adjuncts to the male ego, or mysterious cyphers never to be fully understood. His work, and the cultural response to it, seemed to embody Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that “representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth.” Read More
October 3, 2019 Look The Ritual of American Racism By The Paris Review The multidisciplinary artist Betye Saar is best known for her assemblages: meticulous arrangements of found objects, religious iconography, and cultural ephemera that, together, interrogate the ritual of American racism. “Betye Saar: Call and Response,” the first of two major solo exhibitions this fall devoted to Saar’s legendary career, displays the artist’s work alongside her sketchbooks, which are filled with notes and detailed diagrams that look surprisingly similar to her finished pieces. It’s a rare and satisfying peek inside the mind of one of our greatest living artists. A selection of images from the exhibition’s catalogue appears below. Betye Saar, The Edge of Ethics, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. © Betye Saar. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA. Betye Saar, Sketchbook, 2009–10. Collection of Betye Saar. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. © Betye Saar. Photo © Museum Associates / LACMA. Read More
October 2, 2019 Conspiracy Are We All Living in a Simulation? By Rich Cohen In his monthly column, Conspiracy, Rich Cohen gets to the bottom of it all. The best conspiracy theories make sense of what has always seemed senseless. They let you believe you are finally connecting the dots, finding the missing pieces, experiencing the world as it really is. The most powerful theories—the mind blowers—name something you’ve always known, even if you hadn’t known it consciously, or did not believe it could be named. There is no invention, just discovery. The best explain why you feel like you’re being watched, have lived all this before, knew what would happen before the film even started. That’s the case with what’s become my favorite conspiracy theory: the notion, argued by futurists and tech visionaries, that we live not in the real world but in a simulation, an intricately detailed game cooked up by a demigod, hacker, or AI mastermind, which, if true, explains the uncanny sense that this is not my real life, that these are not my real memories. Or, as my friend Mark, standing on Oak Street Beach at 2 A.M. with Chicago aglow behind us, said, “None of this shit’s real, man. We’re all just figments in a crazy dream.” This idea that this is not the real world is way older than Pink Floyd (“We’re just two lost souls / swimming in a fish bowl”) and way older than the defining movie, The Matrix. You hear it in the Hasidic wisdom of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool”: “No doubt the world is an entirely imaginary world, but it is only once removed from the true world.” You hear it in the writing of the nineteenth-century naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, whose book Omphalos argued that the fossils that proved the world is older than the six thousand years of Genesis had been put in the ground by God to test man’s faith. You hear it in the Buddhist folk tales, most famously the “butterfly dream” of Zhuangzi, in which the author is uncertain if he is a man who dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he’s a man. It’s the uncanniness you experience not when you are drunk and not when are you are high, but when you are drunk and high, the insight you stumble across the way you stumble across certain bars only when it’s very late and you are very lost and absolutely need them to exist. It’s not that the stimulant creates the dream, but that it opens your eyes to the big truth you’ve been trained not to see. Read More