Maybe you're happy, but I hope you're sad

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

So Didion has a problem which in some ways I don't blame her for and in other ways I do, a thing that a lot of female artists have fallen into over centuries: she feels that on some level she is not complete without a man. Not that he needs to be a great artist himself, a common further trap within the trap, but that being married, specifically to a man, was necessary as the center of her psychological life. And Didion's best work, from everything I can tell, is centered around her nuclear family and the griefwork around the death of her daughter, which is neutral as a fact by itself, except that I think there is a level on which she could not permit herself to do that sort of work about anything other than, specifically, her nuclear family, approved and permitted by the society around her.

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.