March 4, 2022

I want to talk about the Aesop fable I heard on a recent Blindboy podcast episode at some point. But today, I'm going to just paste into here an email I sent to my book club (to which only two people have actually show up so far, ha). I liked it: 

Hello! 

In case it's of interest, I wanted to tell you a little bit about why I chose Villette for the next book club. Maybe I can sell you on giving it a shot. 

I first heard of Villette when I read How To Suppress Women's Writing (1983) by Joanna Russ. The relevant chapter, "She Only Wrote One Good Book," is available here. (As a side note, Russ's novelette We Who Are About To is *eye emoji* *eye emoji*.) 

An excerpt for TLDR: 

"I think it no accident that the myth of the isolated achievement so often promotes women writers’ less good work as their best work. For example, Jane Eyre exists, as of this writing, on the graduate reading list of the Department of English at the University of Washington. (This is the only PhD reading list to which I have access at the moment. I mention it not as a horrid example, but because it is respectable, substantial, and probably typical of first-rate institutions across this country.) Villette does not appear on the list. How could it? Jane Eyre is a love story and women ought to write love stories; Villette, “a book too subversive to be popular,” is described by Kate Millett as “one long meditation on a prison break.”"

Well, if Kate Millett likes it... eh? eh? 

Also, I liked the last book club book (The Argonauts) which includes stuff on Dodie Bellamy's The Buddhist, which I really liked. And I read an interview with Bellamy where she says, "Fans of the buddhist should read Charlotte Brontë’s Villette[....]"

So here we are. 

Happy reading, 

Amy

Okay, now BLog Time! 

Babitz, Eve – SEX AND RAGE 

Published: 1979

Read: 02/2022

This “novel” is about a woman named Jacaranda Levin, a stand-in for Eve, who’s a party girl and hangs around with a bunch of rich and stylish monsters. She calls this crew “the barge.” She realizes she’s an alcoholic. She’s off the barge. She gets a book deal. She gets sober. She goes to New York for a week. She comes out of it alive. Her main adversary is a man named Max, who she’s at first very close with and then very afraid of. I found it useful to be reading Hollywood’s Eve by Lili Anolik at the same time. She decodes some of the characters. Max is a man named Earl who put Eve off visual arts forever with the spare remark, “Is that the blue you’re using?”

I was disappointed in this book, especially compared to Eve’s Hollywood. I felt a sliding who cares.  Just read this New Yorker article by Jia Tolentino on it. And she drops some of the following really quite good quotes: “luck is like beauty or diamond earrings: people who have it cannot simply stay home.” “Along with the opium, champagne, brandy, and cocaine, Jacaranda and Etienne would clash by night, sometimes till dawn, when they’d walk along the dewy lawns (she never knew whether he owned or rented this paradise) towards the view and watch L.A. turn blush-pink, then yellow, then smog.”

        Tolentino here, with the quotes from Eve: She starts imagining that she and her new friends all live on a “drifting, opulent barge.” One night, she has fourteen of “some cocktail called a White Lady” and starts to feel like she might be doomed. “So many of the ones like her, the ones who were brought aboard to amuse the barge, disappeared,” Babitz writes. “They O.D.’d on Quaaludes or Tuinals or got hepatitis and had to retire forever, or they became like Marianne, a zombie girl she’d known, who would drop her purse in public and have to spend an hour finding the things and putting them back in.”

        And: Jacaranda imagines how Max sees her: “a rare enough thing—a native-born Angeleno grown up at the edge of America with her feet in the ocean and her head in the breaking waves.” She has a full bookcase, “no sense of ‘sin’ and no manners.” 

Her memoirs and essays are bettttter. 

Rating: ★★