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Theorists have wondered, does animal suicide mean suicide, meaning, do animals speculate about the future, meaning, do they understand death. I think what they mean is if animals know that death means the end..

I read Jean Chen Ho’s essay “Sex Work Is Care Work,” tender recollections about her Chinese American aesthetician and Korean hairstylist in L.A., weaved into reflections on the Atlanta shootings and sex work as care work.

Words reflect the world, which is to say nothing makes sense.

We come together. To love someone means to imagine their death. Two a.m. and you lie awake in fear of us. What if?

In this era of brevity in this era of metal in this era of abbreviation, yes, I’m trying to make you think of me longer. Yes, this whole time..

I like the idea of transportation as articulation, that the end of metaphor is a kind of arrival, like getting off the train at an unknown stop.

A complaint of privilege. We are such spending creatures. And when I say we are beasts, is that a metaphor?

.. it is not good for man to be alone, God said, but man is alone and there’s not much that God can do about it..

You know, it’s true what they say, power is isolating; the more responsibilities you have, the more alone you are.

The cover of the 2011 British edition of Play It as It Lays features not Joan but Eve, an outtake from the Wasser-Duchamp session. (How perverse. How poetic. A perfect example of what Andy Warhol called “[getting] it exactly wrong.”)

Eve Babitz On Justin Bieber’s third album: “So good, and he could get by on sheer cuteness if he wanted to.”

What we mostly talked about was the past. The things she said were invariably sharp and amusing. On the style of Edie Sedgwick: “She used to buy her clothes in the boys’ section.” On the sexual capacity of Harrison Ford: “The thing about Harrison was Harrison could fuck, nine people a day.”

- Eve Babitz

(Eve almost blew it up spectacularly anyway. In 2017, she got a friend from AA to log her onto Facebook, where she went on quite a spree. “Democrats started the KKK!” she wrote. And, “I love Rush Limbaugh!”

For instance, late in the Trump presidency, she began to believe that she and Trump were having an affair, and that she was meeting him for trysts at the very bungalow in the Beverly Hills Hotel where she met Ahmet Ertegun half a century earlier.

— Eve during the last years of her life, of the Trump presidency

Paul’s description of her MO at parties: “She’d bypass the host or hostess and first head to the buffet table and dive into it like Esther Williams on Dexamyl. She’d bolt if something made her uneasy, then barge back in and demand that I take her home. I’d ask her why. After all, we’d just gotten there, and she’d say, ‘So we can fuck!’”

The Year of Magical Thinking has to be art or it’s unforgivable. And, to me, it isn’t art.

For what it’s worth, I don’t like The Year of Magical Thinking. In fact, I hate it. I reject its fundamental narcissism. (It purports to be about Dunne, is really about Joan.) I reject its fundamental dishonesty. (I believe Joan feels grief at Dunne’s passing, but not only grief. alone was for her, I suspect, a kind of fulfillment—the answer to a wish or prayer—the same as it was for Eve.)

Thomson’s story shows what Joan was willing to do for the sake of her writing (anything) and what it cost her in a human sense (everything). When I said earlier that she’d crawl over corpses to get to where she had to go, I was, it turns out, speaking literally. The Year of Magical Thinking is her crawling over the corpse of Dunne, crying all the while, but still crawling, still getting to where she had to go.

If Eve is Joan’s ideal self, then Joan is Eve’s practical self. And the ambition of Eve’s practical self is assured and effective. Ambition coupled with stamina. A winner’s ambition.

Yet Eve is proof that being Joan’s ideal self is unworkable if being “Joan Didion” is also your objective. Being “Joan Didion” means winning, not just once but over and over, extending the streak whatever the cost.

“..Cassandra with a good haircut and the phone number of people at Paramount.” - Tennessee

“..Didion has, perhaps, witnessed a few burn victims and shudders at the vision, wonders how it might have affected her, how the clothes scented with Lanvin smelled when the petrol met the match Duras has seen the carnage; Didion resides on a hill, in a beautiful home with a good soup on the stove and keens about the arrival of carnage:..” - Tennessee

I love [Joan Didion’s] work, but I am aware that she is shrewd about her effects, her twists, her fillips, and her dry perceptions. While I feel that Duras has actually walked through a few fires, and now writes from the perspective of a singed victim..” - Tennessee

Joan Didion goes into hell(with Play It). But, in some ways, it’s easier to write hell than it is to write with that light, glancing, comic style [as Eve Babitz did]. I reread Slow Days, Fast Company, and, I have to say, that book is a revelation now. It’s one of the greatest books ever written about L.A., and it may be the key novel of Seventies L.A.” - Bret

“And I felt I could live the literary history of L.A. through Eve. So, I’d just finished my novel, The Mao Game, which Eve had worked on with me. And I said to her, ‘I’d do anything to have Joan Didion blurb it.’ I was like every other L.A. homo writer—I wanted to be taken seriously. Eve said, ‘Joan won’t do it. She doesn’t do anything..”

“I was young, and, I guess, horny for experience,” — Arthur Miller

“So it was gone before she got sober. She was putting herself through hell when she wrote S&R and LA Woman. And you’re right, they weren’t anywhere near as good as Slow Days. So, yeah, she’d already lost it. She’d lost it, and she knew she’d lost it, but she kept writing, wrote Black Swans, because what else was she supposed to do? She was Eve Babitz, even though she couldn’t be Eve Babitz anymore.”

“..She wrote that one book that was great, Slow Days. And my attitude is, why should people demand more of her? Look, Eve had this desperation when she was younger…Really, she tried so hard it almost killed her. She got sober, and the desperation was gone. And so it—her talent, or whatever ‘it’ is—was gone, too.”

- Laurie

..she mixes tenderness and loss and a kind of dumb courage as well as anyone I ever read.”

(Eve, as you can see, Reader, is as ambivalent about Joan as ever: the first reference is a kick; the second a kiss.)

*premise of the sentence stands but dear GOD Anolik stop calling me a reader !!!! OF COURSE IM A READER how ELSE is this book being read ???