The way Eve Babitz wrote about art in Los Angeles was art in itself

Try to remember when you didn’t know about Eve Babitz. They were interspersed with excerpts from Eve’s 1977 book “Slow Days, Fast Company,” still long out of print when Zoe was putting her own book together. “Eve’s Hollywood” is itself an afterimage of a Los Angeles that would never exist to me, but it got me thinking about avocados and what my neighbor did for a living. She had even choicer words for her ex-boyfriend Walter Hopps, describing his “Clark Kent glasses that chopped his face into rectangular squares and made him seem as square and cool as celery.” Around the same time that Eve’s books were being republished, Boris Groys, another favored purveyor of media theory that I like to punish myself with, wrote that “traditional art produced art objects. She tried to explain to me what it was like to know about Eve Babitz in the early aughts: “I was completely floored and dumbfounded that she was not in the canon — she wasn’t even in libraries.” Zoe did eventually meet Eve, in her characteristically sleuthy way, bartering an artwork in exchange for information on her whereabouts from a fellow artist who did not want to be named.