Santa Ana Winds
Here's the first paragraph of Joan Didion's "Slouching Towards Bethlehem."

This is a story about love and death in the golden land, and begins with the country. The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific, but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. it is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows."

I read the book years ago, but I remembered Didion speaking poetically about the wind. The good news is I could use Amazon's new full-text search function this morning to find which book it was in and on which page. The bad news is, Amazon isn't showing you the page like they were a few days ago. (I own the book, so typed the quote from that.) I saw a story a few days ago that booksellers were saying the Amazon deal is stomping on copyrights or something. Shame. It was an awesome research tool.

Update: Apparently it's the Authors Guild that doesn't like the Amazon thing. Here's the background.
- posted by Amy @ 10/28/2003 10:43:00 AM