Our minds are wonderful explaining machines, capable of making sense of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena. and Esquire, and in the late 1960s designed album covers for the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Linda Ronstadt. By then, Babitz’s tidal pull—sumptuous prose organized into vignettes of hedonism without the weight of moral consequence—had lassoed the attention of bookish women, and, seemingly, everyone else too . The other quality of black swans is that the events themselves have wide-ranging, society-changing effects that go far beyond their initial apparent import.

ONE OF AUSTRALIA’S best-loved birds is also an important symbol in modern culture, having lent its name to a famous book, The Black Swan by scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb, which was in 2007 ranked by the Sunday Times one of the 12 most influential books since World War II.

These include positive Black Swans, like the invention of the Internet and the discovery of antibiotics, as well as negative Black Swans, like the 2008 recession. Taleb’s thesis, however, is that Black Swans, by their very nature, are always unpredictable—they are the “unknown unknowns” for which even our most comprehensive models can’t account.

Another way to scotch illusion is to resist confirmation, because "a series of corroborative facts is not necessarily evidence". Jim Morrison is dead in Paris, Babitz has given up drugs and drinking, and the nine stories collected here are reminiscent. A black swan is a highly improbable event with three principal characteristics: It is unpredictable; it carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random, and more predictable, than it was.However, as I’m reading The White Album right now — I just feel like give me the goods, I don’t wanna hear about what you were doing at the same time. Or gives every appearance of being one, her writing elevated yet slangy, bright, bouncy, cheerfully hedonistic—L.