The first warm day

Here's what it's like on a warm weekend day in San Francisco -- hundreds of people sprawl on the grass in Dolores Park. I've never understood the appeal of sprawling on the grass in the sun, so I wasn't there. In fact, I consider it a success if I manage to avoid going out in the sun at all.

I was home doing nothing much at all besides listening to the ballgame and cleaning, looking forward to going out in the evening. I had a table reserved at an al fresco restaurant on the city's famous Belden Alley on one of the few warm nights of the year. (There are always only a few.) But it was not to be. Cris wasn't feeling up to going out, and neither was the guest of honor, a friend's mother visiting from France. So I canceled the reservation and will stick around the house, where it is quite warm.

Recently I've been reading Joan Didion -- first a few pieces from Slouching Toward Bethlehem, and then the novel The Last Thing He Wanted. And I've been amazed at how much I don't like the writing, because I used to think Slouching Toward Bethlehem was brilliance incarnate. Now it just looks impossibly mannered and almost precious.

This is from one of the most famous pieces in the book, an essay titled "On Morality":
 

At midnight last night, on the road in from Las Vegas to Death Valley Junction, a car hit a shoulder and turned over. The driver, very young and apparently drunk, was killed instantly. His girl was found alive but bleeding internally, deep in shock.	I actually like the casual reference to "his girl." You could say that in the 1960s. The term encompasses all the possibilities without specifically defining the relationship of the "very young" driver and "his girl," but "his girl" she was.
I talked this afternoon to the nurse who had driven the girl to the nearest doctor, 185 miles across the floor of the Valley and three ranges of lethal mountain road. The nurse explained that her husband, a talc miner, had stayed on the highway with the boy's body until the coroner could get over the mountains from Bishop, at dawn today. "You can't just leave a body on the highway," she said. "It's immoral."	There's an odd mixture of vagueness and specificity here. The location of the hospital is not described, but the base of the coroner is. The hospital, wherever it was, was exactly 185 miles away, not 180 or 200, but the scene of the accident was "three hours" from the town of Bishop.
It was one instance in which I did not distrust the word, because she meant something quite specific.	The writer puts herself in the position of going around trusting or mistrusting others' use of words, implying that she is possessed not only of a magisterial quality of wisdom and taste, but that others' misuse of language consistently disappoints her.
She meant that if a body is left alone for even a few minutes on the desert, the coyotes close in and eat the flesh.	Here she is being specific again, as if it were a virtue, but she's really just trying to shock.
Whether or not a corpse is torn apart by coyotes may seem only a sentimental consideration, but of course it is more: one of the promises we make to one another is that we will try to retrieve our casualties, try not to abandon our dead to the coyotes.	She really likes the word "coyotes," and also the pretentious phrase "of course," which she will use a few sentences later. Then there's the tendentious "the promises we make to one another," which sounds like something out of a John Kerry speech.
If we have been taught to keep our promises -- if, in the simplest terms...	Now she's going to suspend the Ivy League phrasing for a moment, because it's actually not useful when you want to say something plainly.
... our upbringing is good enough -- we stay with the body, or we have bad dreams.	Here's the repeated use of the word "we," which is the height of pretension, more than any exalted phrasing or two-dollar words. She doesn't mean the royal "we," she means "we Americans," or at least, "we Americans whose upbringing is good enough." But the more you read, the more you are convinced that no one's upbringing could possibly be good enough when Didion is listening and passing judgment.
I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code...	Oh for Christ's sake, shut up.
... that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, "wagon-train morality."	Coming from someone who sounds pejorative almost all the time, that's believable.
In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children...	No, really, shut up.

When I was in my 20s I loved this piece. I don't know what was wrong with me.

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