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Maybe you're happy, but I hope you're sad
I understand the entire point of this profile of 1980's Bennington is the writers who came out of it and that she herself went to the Catholic University of America, but by the end it really sounds like a Liz Hand novel.
After establishing that Norman Lindsay's Man and leopard-woman in a room (1900s–10s) which I first saw elsenet without sourcing was not the product of extractive AI, I particularly admire the naturally occurring gloves on the leopard-woman and I expect the next drawing in the sequence to have shown his dressing gown in shreds and no leopard-woman to be seen.
I am not any more pleased with this month after hearing that Joan Plowright just died.
After establishing that Norman Lindsay's Man and leopard-woman in a room (1900s–10s) which I first saw elsenet without sourcing was not the product of extractive AI, I particularly admire the naturally occurring gloves on the leopard-woman and I expect the next drawing in the sequence to have shown his dressing gown in shreds and no leopard-woman to be seen.
I am not any more pleased with this month after hearing that Joan Plowright just died.
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By Lili Anolik. Because of course it is.
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I'm unfamiliar with her. Does she normally write articles that come out sounding like Liz Hand novels?
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On reflection I have no idea if my reaction and yours are at all congruent, as I've never read a Liz Hand novel.
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An intensity of artistic atmosphere and hothouse relationships suffused with some degree of decadence in a charmed/cursed space of time that decades after the fact everyone is still processing is one of the recurring motifs in her novels, novellas, and short stories; sometimes it comes out as horror, sometimes as nostalgia, sometimes just as sorting, and frankly even the making of divisive roman à clef art out of this period of one's life would fit into a story by Elizabeth Hand. In full disclosure, I am almost a pandemic behind on the majority of her bibliography, but my previous experience was generally enthusiastic.
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So many bullets dodged!
I was terribly jealous of Bret Easton Ellis when Less Than Zero came out, because he's my age and also from the Valley, and I'd written a novel about me, my private school friends and rock'n'roll musician friends, but I couldn't get it published (though I had interest from a publisher at one point).
I didn't know you'd written that novel. I'm sorry the interested publisher didn't follow through!
Also, I went to school with Quintana Dunne (and we both went on a school trip to Greece in 1979)!
That's neat! Where in Greece did you go?
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That sounds pretty great.
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The year of the salmon-hat might be just the right time to launch a cursed psych-folk band, you never know.
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This is amazing--it could be one of those delightful five minute art fandoms next Yuletide!
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I would love that!
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It TOTALLY does.
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I feel validated!
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It's smugger than Liz Hand. Only one of them would have made it to graduation, with terrible and beautiful psychic wounds.
I particularly admire the naturally occurring gloves on the leopard-woman and I expect the next drawing in the sequence to have shown his dressing gown in shreds and no leopard-woman to be seen.
Mraow.
I am not any more pleased with this month after hearing that Joan Plowright just died.
Damn.
I want to have Orson Welles's Moby-Dick, with Plowright as Pip.
Nine
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Well, the ones interviewed are the ones who made it out alive.
I want to have Orson Welles's Moby-Dick, with Plowright as Pip.
I wish she'd gotten to run the National Theatre!
*hugs*
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Oh, I would not have -- I would have listened to the wrong voice in the autumn woods -- but I'd have had a wild, full-throated time [Edit: I came back to say this does not only mean Selkie, you slut, stop biting randos ] until my scholarship ran out, and you'd have a little clothbound book of my scintillating short stories in your office safe, in the many-windowed office from which you ran a cabal and looked dapper doing it. Blood sacrifice would likely be involved, but whatever. I'd do my level best to pop up out of tropical seas where your yacht was.
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Nine
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Thanks for passing this on.
Nine
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[I know that painting because it features prominently in Greg Egan's short story "The Caress".]
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It definitely feels like a modern variation on the Decadent/Symbolist Sphinx, although I don't know if a variation on Khnopff or Moreau specifically. I was expecting to discover it had been commissioned as a magazine illustration for a weird tale and apparently it was just drawn on the artist's own time. [edit] It wouldn't quite suit a reprint of Esthner M. Friesner's "Simpson's Lesser Sphynx" (1984), but I would be tempted.
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*hugs*
Definitely finding something to watch for her memory.
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I think of Didion when I think of, like, oh fuck, this referent has changed meaning since I would last have used it, but Alice Munroe before we knew the truth, that specific public image. The writers I compare Babitz to are Le Guin, Francesca Lia Block, and Colette.
I gave your mother Eve Babitz for Christmas this year. I would never voluntarily purchase Didion for anybody.
If I had not been reading a library copy of the Anolik book on Babitz and Didion, it might have lost a couple of pages from sheer wrath.
So I'm glad she can paint a picture, but I wouldn't swear it has any relation to anything a reasonable person would accept as fact.
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That is frustrating to hear. I had not encountered Anolik previously, so had no reason to mistrust her arrangement of interviews. I wonder then if she got to Bennington via Quintana Dunne. Which pages would have gone the way of the dropkick if you had actually paid money for them?
(Didion, like Munro, falls into the class of nationally famous literature I can't actually remember ever reading. My mother has been enjoying Eve Babitz, whose remembrances of Hollywood apparently chime interestingly with one of my mother's people who made it their home in a slightly earlier, overlapping era.)
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What I am saying here is that, on a personal level, Joan Didion is essentially a conformist. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, though it makes her less congenial to me personally.
Lili Anolik somehow manages to miss that Eve Babitz wasn't.
Men, individually or multiple-- the concept of family at all-- were not necessary to Eve Babitz' self-conception, or to her concept of herself as an artist. When she decided during her college-age years that what she was going to do with her life was become an adventuress, she meant like Madame du Barry or Moll Cutpurse or Aphra Behn: there were men, there were lots of different men, there were even important men who were perceived as being her patrons or the causes of her fame and notoriety, but none of them were central to her life, even if they were brilliant artists in their own right. Babitz never for one second considered, or would have considered, marrying any of them in any sense that would mean real partnership, which in her time period meant that she never married, since she did not have to to accomplish her ambitions or survive. She never mentions wanting children, and I don't think she ever did, but if she didn't and became pregnant she would have aborted without compunction, and if she had wanted kids she would have borne them as a single parent. Those decisions were hers and hers alone, as was everything else about the way she lived, the sex she had or didn't, and the art she made. And she would not have considered there to be a moral element about these choices. Didion, I suspect, finds it virtuous to have married. Babitz would laugh at that concept, and/or be sickened by it, and she would have had to have someone explain it to her, because it would not be something she'd figure out by herself that anybody could really believe.
And I don't know how this is possible, except that I've seen it, but Anolik just misses entirely that Eve Babitz was not psychologically dependent on any conception of men. She consistently mistakes the Cat Who Walks By Herself for Anaïs Nin, and you know how I feel about Anaïs fucking Nin. And every time Anolik does it I want to throw something and scream and tear out the page, leaving very few pages left sticking to the binding. Anolik, as far as I can tell, just still lives in a world in which the artistic and emotional lives of all women are centered around men in some way, and simply does not get that this is not how Babitz works, when it is one of the most refreshing and endearing things about Eve Babitz. Babitz shares with Louise Brooks the quality of just completely breezing past massive quantities of bullshit that just about everyone both among her contemporaries and even since falls into, and also with Louise Brooks the quality that some people physically cannot see what they are looking at.
Babitz is a touch more cynical than Brooks, but Babitz was a romantic, so maybe the confusion is somewhat more understandable. The thing is, though, when I say Romantic, I mean the capital letter, because Babitz' love affairs were meant to be dramatic and massive and sublime and sturm und drang and riding off on a white horse with a gallant guerilla leader to succor the losing side in the Spanish Civil War (she was upset about being too young to do this), and also ending without changing or affecting anything about her essential personality one iota. And always ending.
Babitz read Colette as a teenager, and took her as very good advice, which is only the plain truth.
It may have literally happened, but I can't imagine Joan Didion reading Colette.
If Anolik has read Colette, she didn't learn a damn thing from it.