Happy Birthday, Wallace Stegner

He would have been 101 today!

"If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone."

Wallace Stegner Apparently Liked Cars

I'm making myself read new books this summer, not just re-reading The Hobbit and Dune and other things on my shelf. I started with Crossing to Safety, in which I noticed uncomfortable similarities between the bossy wife and myself, and found this quote. [Set up: It's about two couples. One of the couples is rich and has this fancy old touring car, a Marmon.]:

Looking in under the propped hood, I could see that the engine was not twelve in line, as I had always half believed, but a V-16. It would have pulled a fire truck. At every stroke a stream of gasoline as thick as my finger must be pulsing through the carburetor. She panted at us in the whiskey-and-emphysema whisper of an Edith Wharton dowager. "Dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar," the Marmon said.

That quote is probably the funniest part of the book, which deals with polio, thwarted ambition, stomach cancer, etc., but I do recommend it. I think it's something I'll have to revisit in the future. Because re-reading is really where it's at.

Why I Still Live Here, Despite The Legislature

"Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from the arid lands and liked where I came from. I was used to a dry clarity and sharpness in the air. I was used to horizons that either lifted into jagged ranges or rimmed the geometrical circle of the flat world. I was used to seeing a long way. I was used to earth colors--tan, rusty red, toned white--and the endless green of Iowa offended me. I was used to a sun that came up over mountains and went down behind other mountains. I missed the color and smell of sagebrush and the sight of bare ground."

Wallace Stegner, from the essay collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. (The title's from the Big Rock Candy Mountain song!)