5 ideas
Babitz frames the whole 1977 collection as stories told to an unnamed lover, so each episode is a performance for one listener rather than a report. The sketches move through Hollywood parties, Bakersfield, Palm Springs, Laguna Beach and a Santa Ana wind season. Read together, they show how a place becomes legible through one person talking to another she wants to keep.
Babitz treats the Santa Ana winds as a force that changes how people behave. The hot, dry wind raises the city's baseline of restlessness and recklessness, and it stands in for what happens at parties and in affairs.
Babitz sets trips away from Hollywood, to Bakersfield and the desert, against the city's performed glamour. These plainer, hotter, less self-conscious places expose what the glamorous centre hides, including the region's farm and working base. You understand a glamorous city by looking at the places it ignores.
The title names a rhythm of idle, sun-slowed time punctuated by intense, fast-moving people and encounters. Pleasure comes from the contrast: long stretches of lounging make the bursts of company, sex and gossip vivid. Leisure is not empty time. It is the setting that lets charged social moments register.
Babitz writes about parties, beauty, flirtation and gossip with full attention, treating surfaces as where a culture's values show. Taking the supposedly shallow seriously exposes status games, desire and loneliness that a weightier register would overlook. The light tone carries the observation rather than evading it.