I can't go to bed with John Wayne, so I do the next best thing: I go to bed with my girlfriend, who once met the great man. That's how much I love westerns.
I went to UC Santa Cruz, overlooking the Bay of Monterey and Santa Cruz, in 1969. Back then, the city was part-hippie, part-surfer, but mostly retired chicken farmer.
I still see the world as a place of bitter irony and black humour, failed hopes, dashed plans. I hope to make my work sparer, to outgrow my desire to show off.
If someone like my father chooses to criticise Israeli policies, it's not because he is a self-hating Jew, but because he is not prepared to live in a state of self-denial.
Many years ago, when I lived in the mini-Siberia they call East Anglia, I was awakened in the early hours by the sound of a pantechnicon being loaded. Peeping through the curtains, I observed the grocer doing a runner with all his chattels and his family.
My history was the Western. I grew up with the Lone Ranger, the Cisco Kid and Bonanza. I felt as much a child of the West as someone born in Montana or Wyoming.
Tel Aviv is buzzing with so much life, you could bottle it and sell it as honey, and even Jerusalem has a certain fizz. But if you want to see anger, go to Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem on a Friday afternoon.
The idea of the split personality is as old as Genesis. For a start, Eve was manufactured from Adam's rib. Then there's Cain and Abel, twins at war. They were followed by Esau and Jacob, likewise divisible into hairy and smooth types.
The word 'western' usually refers to movies, of course, but there is a literary tradition of the same name that pre-dates the moving picture and retains its vitality yet.
In 1966, I bought my parents a carriage clock for their silver wedding anniversary. It was last wound 30 years later, in December 1996, the month my father died.
I owe my discovery of the Hot Club of Cowtown to Kinky Friedman, leader of the Texas Jewboys. When I saw that Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys were headlining the 2003 Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, I thought it my duty to check out the band that had inspired the Texas Jewboys.
Hinde Esther Singer was born in Poland on March 31, 1881, the daughter of Bathsheva and Pinchos Mendel Singer. Bathsheva was an intellectual, but both Bathsheva's father and her husband disapproved of erudite women.
Heinrich Heine once imagined the exiled Israelite as a dog who regains his stolen manhood only when he embraces the Sabbath bride. I see western swing performing a similar function in hardscrabble Texas, turning dirt-poor hired hands into Dapper Dans with magic feet at the Saturday night hoe-down.
Everyone in Tel Aviv knows Yosl Bergner. In 2006, the mayor made him a Freeman of the City. Now he carries a card which allows him to park his car anywhere with impunity. If only he could drive.
Every year in late June, Custer's Last Stand is reenacted on the high plains of Montana. When Custer led out the 7th Cavalry in 2003 - the year I witnessed it - the audience stood and cheered with turbo-charged patriotism.
Even when she was alive, Esther Kreitman's novels, short stories and translations received far less attention than the work of her famous brothers, I. J. and Isaac Bashevis Singer.
Deadwood lies at the northern tip of the Black Hills, where the land is ancient and rubbed smooth by time. The Black Hills are more rugged at their southern extremity, where bare granite forms pinnacles and spires.
Back in 1948, a monomaniac called Korczak resolved to impose Crazy Horse's likeness upon a mountain. It took 50 years to complete the head, which measures 90ft from crown to chin. By comparison, the four presidents at Mt Rushmore seem modest.
Babies are born bow-legged in South Dakota. By the age of 12, they can purchase guns. At 14, they can take their driving test. Fortunately, since the geographical area of South Dakota can accommodate both France and Germany, but has a population of only 750,000, the chances of hitting anything are pretty slim.
At school, I never had a hold on English history, and cheder was a place run by sadistic incompetents, so I felt alienated from the Jewish part of my past.
