The US West has long evoked fantasies of climatological stability: the aridity of the Southwest; the soggy Pacific Northwest’s endless rain; the “humid fallacy” that Mike Davis has argued inaccurately overlaid a Mediterranean climate onto Southern California. Davis' derivation from a uniformitarian geological model is less apposite for the earthquake-prone landscape of Southern California than the dramatic alternations of a catastrophist sensibility. Davis thus points not simply toward a more accurate description of the material conditions of the US West, but to the narrative rhythm of its climate, which unfolds across long stretches whose consistency challenges narrative interest until punctuated by the sudden violence of a shift in weather. Alongside two other central figurations of the US West – the Garden of the World and the Great American Desert – this chapter tracks this rhythm through western American literary history.

This chapter brings Strauss’s music into constructive dialogue with Hollywood film, via the persona of Erich Korngold. It examines Korngold’s historical connection with Strauss through the former composer’s operas and concert works, before exploring the ways in which Strauss can be heard in the film scores by Korngold and his contemporaries in the 1930s and 40s. The use of one particular Straussian harmonic trait – third-related triadic sequences (of both octatonic and hexatonic variety) – is highlighted in Korngold’s scores and traced in more recent film, including in the output of John Williams. Williams’s use of what Frank Lehman calls "chromatically modulating cadential resolutions" can also be found in Strauss and Korngold. The chapter concludes by suggesting that hearing Strauss in Korngold and Williams is just one way of constructing a Straussian Text, one that reveals the power of seeking to encounter Strauss’s music in varied and surprising contexts.