🫖 If you thought I would be well-rested and eager to write again after my week off, you would be sadly wrong. I believe it was this 2010 Celebrex advertisement that invented the concept that a body at rest stays at rest, while a body in motion stays in motion. Speaking of math and science, today’s Tea is a niche, callous and completely unnecessary graph plotting out the positions of various white women of literary acclaim. I might regret this! Also, it’s riddled with block quotes. It just turns out that everyone said it better than me this week. 🫖
Night Thoughts
The night before leaving Germany, I took a melatonin, went to sleep and woke up in a sweat two hours later “with lots of ideas.” I literally could not stop opening my notes app to jot down unsavory jokes and questionable writing ideas. Most do not hold up in the light of day.
Most notably, I had an idea for a graph to plot out some of the literary figures that have been on my mind. I narrowed down the list to Eve Babitz, Joan Didion, Kathy Acker, and Erica Jong. They were all born within a 13-year window with overlapping relevance in the bicoastal midcentury art and writing worlds. Though, I think my choice of subjects shows more about my biased interests than anything else. So here it is.
Along the X axis, we have a continuum from “anorexic” to “sexual.” You may notice that these are not (entirely) related. They are both terms of the flesh, but I apply them to more symbolic associations. That, my dear reader, is because I am operating on instinct. I am the king of my own Substack. Allow me to define my terms.
By anorexic, I’m not referring to the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. Yes, my definition has to do with skinniness (though every person on the graph was straight-sized), but it’s more of a reflection of spiritual discipline and sexlessness. The ladies on the left were starving hardos.
Sexual has to do with sex and sexiness, but not just that. It refers more to a general warmth and looseness and freedom. And, like, big titties.
The Y axis is simpler, but equally arbitrary. As above, are those “I would want to be friends with;” so below, “I would not want to be friends with.” I idolize all of these people. But, admiration does not always translate to the desire to share a bottle of wine and shoot the shit.
Histories
I first discovered Didion through a high school English teacher (hi, Ms. Bayle!). We were addressing that thorny topic “The American Dream,” and she assigned “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” the essay that opens Slouching Towards Bethlehem. One surprising revelation was that another one of my high school English teachers was a character in the essay: “Debbie,” the daughter of Lucille Miller, convicted of killing her husband in 1964. Debra Miller shared her side of the story in this LA Times op-ed, published a month after Didion’s death.
Bethlehem floored me, and Joan remained a star in my eyes as I imagined myself retracing her tiny footsteps during my four years at Berkeley.
I read Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying during my senior year of college, researching for my thesis on swear words in twentieth-century novels. I had selected my first two novels and was seeking a third text to round things out. I’ve always had a penchant for threes. My advisor suggested Fear of Flying and it immediately filled the void. I was stunned to find uncanny similarities between the protagonist’s background and my own experience. Reminiscing about her time in grad school, she reflects:
Meanwhile, I sweated in the stacks of Butler Library writing a ridiculous thesis on dirty words in English poetry (or, as my uptight thesis adviser had titled it: “Sexual Slang in English Poetry of the Mid-eighteenth Century”). Even then I was a pedantic pornographer.
My own ridiculous thesis on dirty words was titled: “Bad Words in Good Books: The Subtle Influence of Gender on Language.”
I came across Kathy Acker a few months ago when someone (or some Substack, more likely), recommended this 1984 documentary about her. I’ve been on an 80s New York kick. I’ve been interested in exploring the last generation’s artistic landgrabs in Manhattan, as we navigate the increasingly stale discourse around [beeep] square (Chinatown). In the doc, Acker describes the Lower East Side as “the last poor section left of this part of Manhattan. And I’m living here now because it’s the only place I can afford… to have this much space.”
Babitz is my newest acquaintance: I just finished her book Slow Days, Fast Company, which earned a spot on last week’s reading rec column, if you’re intrigued. She was a chaotic artist, writer and Hollywood party girl with an exceptional knack for capturing place in her writing. Her biographer Lili Anolik described her as a “low-high, pop-trash, bohemian-aristocrat by birth.” Sexy! She is hilarious and problematic and name drops her celebrity lovers and cuts to the chase.
Apologia
Let’s dig into the graph. From a bird’s eye view, there are a few things I notice. For one, the two writers I would hypothetically want to befriend are from California, whereas the other two are from New York. West coast bias shines through! Also, it’s interesting that authors on each hemisphere of the friendship line had commentary on their anorexic or sexual counterparts. More on that later.
I. Joan
Joan is an obvious candidate for the left side of the graph. I’m forever scarred by her morning routine shared in the documentary The Center Will Not Hold. Writer Susanna Moore was living with the Didion-Dunnes in their Franklin Ave house and recalled:
She would come down fairly late in the morning—I’d be in the kitchen—She’d have a cold Coke in the bottle from the refrigerator. She would be wearing sunglasses, silent … There would always be a big case of canned, salted almonds, which her mother sent her for Christmas each year. It had to be more often because she ate them so quickly. And, she would open a can, I remember the sound. I’d sit there with my coffee, and she’d sit there in her sunglasses with a Coke and the nuts, but neither of us speaking.
The woman was hard-boiled, that’s all I’ll say. Aside from eating like a little bird, Joan also embodies a certain literary asceticism. A woman Hemingway in dark glasses. A champion of clipped, clean sentences. A cold mirror, reflecting her subjects rather than inviting the gaze to the hand that’s writing.
It’s tempting to think that I wouldn’t want to be friends with Joan because she was cooler and skinnier than me. But, by all accounts she was lovely. While I found Jia Tolentino’s post (below) to be kind of insufferable and exploitative, it still demonstrates Didion’s warmth and decency.
II. Eve
Eve falls on the right side of my graph for obvious reasons. By her own account:
When you’re as voluptuous and un-hair-sprayed as I am, you have to cover yourself in un-ironed muumuus to walk to the corner and mail a letter. Men take one look and start calculating how they can get rid of obstacles and where the closest bed would be. This all happens in spite of my many serious flaws and imperfections, in spite of being much too fat and everyone else being just right.
Isaac read the new biography about Babitz, and informed me that apparently she was in a car smoking a cigarette and her polyester sweater lit on fire and she suffered severe burns and didn’t really go outside after that and became a big Rush Limbaugh listener. I like to think that the Limbaugh part may have had more to do with her Huntington’s disease.
Nevertheless, I hold the opinion that Eve would have been a delightful friend. I love the warm and exuberant way she talks about women: her accounts of her female friendships across the pages of Slow Days are just as evocative and romantic (if not more so) than her pursuits with the opposite sex.
Eve and Joan ran in overlapping circles in LA, and their tense relationship was the subject of this recent Vanity Fair article. In her first novel’s acknowledgments, Eve wrote a dedication “to the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not.” In a recently-uncovered, red-hot 1972 letter to Didion, Babitz wrote:
Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you are famous. And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size.
Harsh, but pretty funny. As a woman of 5’10”, I do enjoy a healthy skepticism of people who lean too heavily on emphasizing how itty bitty they are.
III. Erica
The bottom half of the graph is where things get a little more arbitrary and thorny. Fear of Flying coined the term “zipless fuck,” for the perfect, anonymous sexual encounter. Through its honest and vulgar depictions of female desire, Jong captured something fresh and relatively unrepresented in popular literature. Her writing is visceral and oozy:
What was it about marriage anyway? Even if you loved your husband there came that inevitable year when fucking him turned as bland as Velveeta cheese: filling, fattening even, but no thrill to the taste buds, no bittersweet edge, no danger. And you longed for an overripe Camembert, a rare goat cheese: luscious, creamy, cloven-hooved.
The protagonist Isadora, as a thinly-veiled representation of the author, represents the hungry, angry messiness that I characterize with the “sexual” side of my graph.
At first glance, I would think that Erica Jong might be someone I would want to be friends with. I loved her book not only as a topic for study, but also as an enjoyable page-turner. Nonetheless, something about her gives me pause. Maybe it’s her terrifying website (though I should hardly blame her, she’s 80). I can’t fully explain this one, it’s mostly just vibes. It seems she’s too busy to be my friend anyways with all those cappuccinos and grandchildren.
IV. Kathy
My experience with Acker’s actual writing is much more limited than the other three. By “much more limited,” I mean that I haven’t read a damn thing by her. My familiarity is limited to the documentary and her Wikipedia page.
It may come as a surprise that I put her on the anorexic side of the spectrum, rather than the sexual, as her writing was often very prurient. She definitely sits on the cusp, but I have a couple of reasons for placing her on the left. My first justification is that she was a bodybuilder, which falls on the side of being a junkie for discipline. In her words: “It’s just a hobby. It’s nice as a way of stopping writing a while and relaxing.” Is there anything more sexless than the idea of relaxing by weightlifting?
My second rationale is the way she seemed to take herself and her art so seriously. As Joan idolized Hemingway, Kathy’s role models were similarly masculine: Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.
Acker’s writing experimented with form, meaning and plagiarism, and the way she describes her work in the documentary is serious as a heart attack. This strikes me as a triumph of the cold over the warm, the thin over the thick. She narrates: “Writing must be a machine for breaking down, that is for allowing the now uncontrolled and uncontrollable reconstitutions of thoughts and expressions. All other kinds of writing simply express.”
In 1982, Acker released a chapbook called “Hello, I’m Erica Jong,” which is a pretty epic roast. Excerpted:
HELLO, I’M ERICA JONG. I’M A REAL NOVELIST. I WRITE BOOKS THAT TALK TO YOU ABOUT THE AGONY OF AMERICAN LIFE, HOW WE ALL SUFFER, THE GROWING PAIN THAT MORE AND MORE OF US ARE GOING TO FEEL. LIFE IN THIS COUNTRY IS GOING TO GET MORE HORRIBLE, UNBEARABLE… OH YES, MY NAME IS ERICA JONG I WOULD RATHER BE A BABY THAN HAVE SEX. I WOULD RATHER GO GOOGOO… YOU’RE LEAVING ME WITHOUT SEX I’VE GOTTEN HOOKED ON SEX AND NOW I’M…
Hilarious.
Finally, to explain why she sits below the X axis. She was a cool artist, and an undeniably cool person. A friend of David Salle and Robert Mapplethorpe. But simply enough, she seemed like a bit of an insufferable poor little rich girl. The way she talks about the Lower East Side, and “bums” and “junkies” and “hookers” feels like a bit of an unsavory pantomime, but what do I know? I admire her, but I feel like if we were in the same room, I would accidentally laugh at something she meant to be serious, and she would ask me to explain something I meant as a joke.
Song of the Week
🎶 “My Ever Changing Moods,” The Style Council 🎶
This song is to reflect on my own ever changing moods, which I grappled with in my writing this week. I imagine if I were to remake my graph in one week’s time, I might reassign every author to a different position. The music video is also an instant mood booster: something about Paul Weller in that little biking outfit…
🫖 Thanks for reading! 🫖
The idea that communicating with Kathy acker at a party would be clunky and horrifying is spot on. I have been unable to finish any of her books that’s I’ve started, yet I admire her because I relate to the fronts she put up under the guise of self-awareness. If she ever reaches even one level higher of posthumous fame everyone will realize how totally cringe she was methinks