Eve's Hollywood

Over at The Second Pass, my new home away from home, Deborah Shapiro writes a terrifically entertaining essay extolling the virtues of a neglected Los Angeles memoir:

While so many writers have found material in L.A., frequently depicting the city as a land of corrosive sunshine or soul-draining sprawl, few have written with such authority and affection for so mythologized a place. Babitz not only understands but enjoys the nuances of L.A., and she doesn't get hung up on the fact, as she notes in Slow Days, that, "In Los Angeles, it's hard to tell if you're dealing with the real true illusion or the false one." She seems captivated rather than frustrated by the way the place resists reason. On a well-prostituted corner of Sunset near her home in Hollywood, she observes a tall, slender woman wearing barely-there cut-offs and a halter top, on roller skates, with a dog on a leash; Babitz wonders to what "prurient interest she was trying to appeal" and then figures, "Perhaps she was just out skating her dog."