Saturday, October 10, 2015

Maybe We Won't

I seem to be entering some "Hollywood" phase in my reading. Ha ha! Who cares? Not even me! Well, I care that I have sputtered to a (temporary?) halt in my reading of THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY and THE FAERIE QUEENE and maybe THE DECAMERON. This one Hollywood book (sorry, one Hollywood trilogy) is just (so far) crass people doing awful things (as Lee Durkee warned me; but maybe it's because he warned me that I can keep reading it while he could not) - everything from proudly and theatrically farting during a fancy dinner party (pardon my own crudeness in recounting such behavior!) to sociopathic violent crime against women, which the book (I may be misinterpreting) appears to shrug off as a given (or is it making "subtle commentary"? I am surely too dumb to know)... and then I went to Square Books and picked up EVE'S HOLLYWOOD by Eve Babitz, which Megan Abbott recommended, and the Library of Congress says it's fiction, but it doesn't look like fiction to me, maybe we'll find out, or maybe we won't. HERE ARE THE STATS. Ha ha! Excuse my typographical laughter. I'm kind of stuck early in "Day Five" of THE DECAMERON, so less than halfway through. "Day Three" was a rollicking endorsement of adultery! While "Day Four" had some of the horrible fascination of the Grand Guignol. And... I forget where I was going with this. Like, maybe, "Day Five" is boring. I think I'll be able to pick up THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY again. It doesn't have a plot or anything. I'm on page 548, which sounds pretty good, but that's only the halfway mark. You don't care, I don't care, nobody cares. Here are some pictures of Eve Babitz.