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I've been expanding my reading into genre fiction outside of my accustomed fantasy / SF world: Westerns, mysteries, spy fiction, etc. I want to get a feel for how good storytelling works, within the discipline of a well-defined set of conventions and expectations. How does the author build suspense and interest, for example, or dole out information to the reader at the appropriate intervals? (L'Amour tells us first that Mart was "the closest thing Jim had to a friend", and then that Mart had six gunfight kills "that Jim knew about". We later learn that Jim himself killed a Mexican bandit, and then five of the bandit's henchmen; so if we do the math, we see that the two men seem to be about equally matched as gunfighters ... just in case Jim should prove to be something other than a friend.)

Composing the write-ups is an exercise that helps me keep my reading skills sharp: testing myself to see if I know the basics of the story - the names of the characters, the setting, the sequence of events, and in general simply the plain meaning - the p'shat as we say in Hebrew - of the story itself.

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I went to the dentist's office yesterday for a cleaning. It was an hour to do the upper right quarter of my mouth, with a fair amount of small talk with the hygeinist along the way. Conversation in a dentist's chair is, of necessity, largely a monologue: the dental professional chats about her weekend, her social life, her favorite coffee, while I respond encouragingly with "Uh-huh ... uh-huh ... oh? ... aha! ... uh-huh" and so on. In other words, it's very much like a lot of relationships I've been in.

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I've got quite an assortment of writing projects loaded on LivingWriter now, and I like the ease of navigation where you can sort the Manuscripts list by Title, Last Modified, or Created. Last Modified is useful because it puts the MS that you've most recently worked on at the top so that you can come back to it easily.

But what if you want to make sure none of your projects get neglected? I got the idea from my day job, where my work entails keeping track of the help tickets in my queue; I don't want to let any of them go unattended for too long, because my boss will see those statistics. The ticketing system (ServiceNow, affectionately known in the business as SNOW) offers several ways to sort your workload, including "oldest on top", which is the one I generally use because it lets me see at a glance which ticket has gone the longest without my attention. I wanted to apply the same principle to my writing projects, so I submitted a feature request to LW, and I heard back right away from a very nice customer service rep who said they will consider incorporating that in the next update.

They say if you aspire to write professionally, you should think of your writing as a job, and that's my way of doing it. [520]

This story was first published in 1949 - 1950 under the name Jim Mayo. The story opens as Jim Gary, traveling solo westward for reasons not yet disclosed, encounters three men and joins them in taking shelter from an approaching thunderstorm. The sandy-haired man, apparently the leader, is Red Slagle; the big one is Tobe Langer, and the smaller one (and skilled cook) is Jeeter Dirksen. The presence of a shotgun - not normally carried by cowhands - makes Jim Gary uneasy.

The cattle all carry a fresh Double A brand, and are being driven towards the ranch of that name near Salt Creek. This, too, is odd: if the cattle are carrying the Double A brand, why are they being driven toward the place of their supposed provenance?

[SPOILERS FOLLOW]

(I could not immediately discover whether Salt Creek is a real place or not. If so, it would no doubt have been familiar to midcentury fans of the Western genre. If "half of Texas and all of New Mexico, or most of it" would lie behind Jim at the end of his westbound trip, then the location must be in southwestern New Mexico.)

A further ominous development occurs when Jim Gary, riding the second night watch (relieving Tobe Langer), spies a mysterious horseman, the stranger's face illuminated by a flash of lightning. When Jim relates this incident to the other men, they are clearly worried, though they won't say why.

(The thunderstorm, in addition to providing a general atmosphere of foreboding, serves to drive the characters together for shelter, and, through the lightning, to reveal what would otherwise have remained hidden.)

A flashback illuminates some of Jim Gary's own past. We learn that is riding west to meet his acquaintance Mart Ray at that same Double A Ranch, where Jim expects to find a job waiting for him. Mart had been a friend of Jim's father, Steve Gary, a well-known gunfighter. Mart Ray himself was also a gunfighter, with six kills "that Jim Gary knew". Mart's observation of Jim's character is that the apple seems to have fallen far from the tree, and that Jim - who readily admits to being conflict-averse - gives the appearance of being "a little bit yaller." (I love it that all the cowboys talk exactly like cowboys are supposed to talk.)

What we learn next about Jim - and what Mart doesn't know - is that shortly prior to the time of the story, Jim had found himself in a spot of trouble after dancing with a Mexican woman in a bar. (Those alluring, dangerous, foreign women again. Jim could have saved himself some trouble if he'd read his Proverbs.) This flirtation led to a gunfight with a Mexican man who came in second place in that contest, and was revealed to be the notorious Miguel Sonoma. A band of Sonoma's men then attacked Jim Gary at his ranch, and when the smoke cleared, Jim had equaled Mart's body count.

Hence, the need for Jim to make westward expeditiously. Jim, suspicious of the business of the three men, starts asking questions, and in the process his own identity is discovered - "You're that Jim Gary."

At this point, Jim realizes that his prior acquaintance with Mart Ray and the Double A might be bad for his health. However, he does have one card up his sleeve: information asymmetry. The Jim Gary that Slagle's men know is the Jim Gary that was described to them by Mart Ray ("a little yaller"), not the Jim Gary who shot down six Mexican bandits. And so, swallowing his pride (Jim is a little insecure), he realizes that it is to his tactical advantage to allow his adversaries to underestimate him.

That afternoon, Mart Ray, having ridden out from the Double A to meet them, surprises Jim Gary, just as Jim is getting a close-up look at the Double A brand freshly stamped over the Slash Four and is putting, well, two and two together. Mart Ray must have been a party to the theft of the cattle, along with the other three men. That would make himself, Jim, an accomplice. Jeeter Dirksen confides his own misgivings about the operation to Gary. That evening, the sound of a gunshot from the hills further arouses the suspicions of Jim and Jeeter, both of whom declare their intentions to quit.

The section ends with Tobe Langer and Jim Gary having words and throwing hands, at the end of which the big Tobe gets a taste of what Jim is made of (and of his own nose).

The following morning, Jim makes a discreet excursion into the hills to investigate the source of the gunshot; sure enough, he finds a dead horse and a dead man - evidently the figures he had seen before in the lightning. The horse had been stripped of its Mother Hubbard saddle (the lightweight type prized by cowboys for its usefulness on long cattle drives, named for its resemblance to the bonnet worn by pioneer women), no doubt the same saddle that Jim had spied earlier in Red's possession. Papers on the dead man's body identify him as Tom Blaze - the owner of the Slash Four.

Jim returns to Red and again expresses his intention to quit, and demands his pay immediately; questioned by Slagle, he matter-of-factly confronts Red with what he knows. Slagle, momentarily caught off guard, protests that Gary will have to wait until they arrive at Salt Creek to collect his wages when they are all paid at the Double A by Mart Ray (who by this time has disappeared again).

That afternoon, the four men are surrounded by a dozen horsemen (and one woman) who demand that they stop and surrender themselves. Jeeter Dirksen makes a run for it, but he doesn't get far. The leader of the posse is addressed by the young woman as "Uncle Dan" - he's the brother, and she the daughter, of the late Tom Blaze. They are looking for Tom's killer, and they figure they've found him.

Up until now, Jim Gary has maintained an almost Stockholm-syndrome-like effort to keep a good opinion of Mart Ray, but now he cannot escape the fact that Mart has set him up to take the punishment for the theft of the Slash Four cattle and the murder of Tom Blaze. Now it is Gary's word against that of Ray - who is now claiming never to have met Jim Gary.

The captive Gary names a distinguishing scar on Ray's body, and challenges him to remove his shirt to show it. Things happen fast after that: the cornered Ray challenges Gary to a gunfight, and learns belatedly from one of the other men that Jim Gary is the man who shot Sonoma.

In the end, Mart Ray gets his justice in lead. Red Slagle, who had been standing behind him, suffers a bullet wound, but he'll live long enough to strength-test the length of rope that the posse brought for this occasion. In a final act of decency, Slagle pays Gary his 40 dollars in wages: "By the looks of that rope, I don't reckon I'll need it."

In 'Man Riding West', the key plot point is that Jim Gary's character has evolved in the time since he was first described by Mart Ray to Slagle's men, so we (the reader) know that Jim is a more formidable adversary than either Slagle or Ray suspects. So it is universal in its appeal, I think, in that probably all of us want to believe in a stronger, more heroic, and as yet undiscovered side of ourselves, that the rest of the world does not suspect. [1284]

It's been over a month since I posted to my online journal, but it's been a busy month, and a good one. The big news is that I've gotten settled into a daily outdoor walking and running routine, and I've been losing weight. I started with daily walks (about 20 - 30 minutes) around the beginning of August, and I didn't expect it to have a noticeable impact on my weight, but it did. After hovering around 185 lbs. for years, I'm now solidly under 180, currently around 176 - 177, and continuing to see a steady downward trend.

Daily runs, as well as walks, have now become a fixed habit, and if I don't get at least one run (and ideally two, morning and afternoon) done during the day, I feel like I'm missing something. I feel really good after running, physically and mentally, and the feeling is sustained throughout the day. I think running really does re-wire your brain in a positive way.

Also I'm getting more conscientious about housekeeping, and investing some time every day to make my apartment and bedroom a little bit more clean, tidy, decent, and fit for human habitation.

And I'm in the process of re-working my writing habits and my online presence. I've cut way back on my consumption of short-form social media (facebook and X), and I feel way better for it. My head is so much clearer. I have maintained several old-school, long-form blogs over the past 20 years or so; I've taken all of these temporarily offline, but that's a step towards a full re-launch of my online writing presence, notionally some time between the upcoming Hebrew new year and the turn of the civil year.

I have a number of writing projects in mind, and a bunch of material from past years that I've saved and would like to edit and re-work into a polished, presentable form. (Much of this stuff has appeared on my LiveJournal / Dreamwidth pages.) Possibly I'll create one location for my creative writing (fiction), another for write-ups of books I've read, and perhaps another for essays.

To help me organize all this material, and to facilitate creating new stuff, I've been migrating my old writing to LivingWriter, which I highly recommend. (I'm composing this entry on LW now.) LW offers a browser interface, a mobile app, and a desktop client (which is useful if you have limited internet access, or simply prefer to take your computer offline to avoid distractions while you compose). You get a real-time word count display and word count tools, grammar and style tools, and access to a number of writing templates such as the Save The Cat model.

What all of this means is that I'm focusing on slowing down when I compose, so that I can be more meaningfully productive and create something that I'm happy with, and that other people might find worth reading. [488]

I've been re-reading 'Elijah's Violin' (the story) in the Howard Schwartz collection of the same title, and jotting down some notes on it. I'd previously read and annotated the story a couple of years ago, and had supplied invented names for the characters (partly for an original treatment of the story, but mostly just to keep the characters straight). This time round I just used abbreviations to identify the persons and things: E = Elijah, EV = Elijah's violin, EVB = Elijah's violin bow, EVBH = Elijah's violin bow hair, K1 = first king, K2D = second king's daughter, etc. One thing I had noted in my earlier round with the story was that the first time D3 (the King's third daughter, the POV character of the story) asks the Old Woman for something, it is for something her father wants (he has asked D3 to supply a specific request); while the second time she consults OW, it is for something she herself wants (the Prince's healing). The EVBH are used twice, by different parties but with similar effect (first time by K1 to free K2D - I always picture her like Han Solo in carbonite - and the second time by D3 to revive the P).

It's interesting that the story is fairly complicated - first there's K1's quest for EV (not for E himself, whom he actually meets first, but for the V from which E has been somehow separated), then there's D3's acquisition of the object - but the story is only half over. The "imprisoned melodies" haven't been set free simply by D3 picking up the bow and sawing away. Instead, the violin's magical music summons P, and it turns out that this is where the real story happens. The older sisters (D1 and D2) are perhaps overprotective, but I think that's understandable especially if there is no mother figure present. (I think we are entitled to wonder whether OW is in fact the mother, who has been somehow banished, but there's no direct evidence for this in the text.) In a conservative, traditional society, a young lady having a strange man in her bedchamber unbeknownst to the family is not a small matter, and frankly I'm a little skeptical of D3's judgement in the whole thing.

In any case, D3 finally manages to find P, and to deploy the magical EVBH, so that the lad is restored to health, and then we finally get to the happily-ever-after part. Clearly OW's goal was to get D3 happily matched and married, by means of EV. But the process also had the effect of forcing D3 out of her home (and perhaps cloistered existence) and into the world. [440]

The Orthodox Union Nach Yomi (Daily Bible chapter) cycle has left the Books of Kings and is now in Isaiah. (With all respect, that fellow had rather a lot to say.) I started Kings with teeth gritted in a sort of "let's get this over with" frame of mind. So many names to learn, so much violence, so many lives and battles and events coming onto the stage and leaving it. Lots of people with the same or similar-sounding names. It looked like a big chore. And yet, now that the daily chapter cycle has moved on, I find that I don't want to leave Kings.

What makes the Book of Samuel memorable is, largely, the figure of King David. He is one of the most revered and beloved kings in the Jewish tradition. Surely his son Solomon, who was the wisest of all men and who merited to build the Temple, should be at least equally renowned? But David is real for us, I think, because Samuel gives us such a rich and detailed picture of his internal struggles as an individual. That's what makes him real for us, and that's what makes him memorable.

Kings doesn't give us that. What Kings gives us instead is something different: the internal struggles of a nation. The first and foremost of these is, of course, the Divided Kingdom itself: this is the very reason why Jews are called Jews, and it is here in Kings that we learn of it. This is the overriding and overshadowing reality of the Jewish people throughout the historical era, from the beginning of written history as we know it until the present day. We also have the struggles among the classes of the Hebrew people: kings, prophets, priests, sages, warriors. And, foreshadowed by the Exodus in the Torah but made explicit and palpable in Kings, there is the collective near-death experience. For the Northern Kingdom of Israel, it was more than a *near* death experience in the end. And for the Judahites, or Jews, the reprieve from Sennacherib's siege only meant being delivered into another captivity fifteen years later. So the question of national survival was paramount.

Kings lacks the narrative sophistication of Samuel, but I'm beginning to think it doesn't need it. Maybe the importance of this book is in its mundane details: the lives and deaths of the twenty kings of Israel and the nineteen kings and one queen of Judah. Most of them were bad. Even the good ones were deeply flawed. But I'm going to figure that the spare accounts of their lives and deaths are here to tell us something. (I can't help noticing the parallel between the twenty monarchs of each nation, and the twenty generations from Adam to Abram.)

The books of Early Prophets - Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings - are among the most violent in the Hebrew Scriptures. I sometimes tell people that Early Prophets is the Game of Thrones of the Bible. But I'm finding that I want to take my time with the spare prose of Kings and really get to know these people, because I figure they might have something to teach us. [530]

Over Shabbat I read two stories - 'The Tale of the Scribe' by Agnon and 'The Unseen' by Singer - that both concern childless couples. In 'Scribe', the scribe Raphael and his wife Miriam lead exemplary lives of holiness, with no children: "Because the Holy One, blessed be He, desires the prayers of the righteous, He closed her womb." But it takes more than prayers to make a baby, and as we read the story we realize that Raphael is so obsessed with his regimen of holiness and purification that he can't bring himself to consummate the marriage. Miriam dies suddenly one day, and Raphael apparently follows soon after. In Agnon's trademark sly irony, the pious tone of the narrative is undercut by the very mundane reality of the couple's fruitless marriage.

In 'The Unseen', Nathan and his wife Roise-Temerl don't have that problem. They enjoy good food and drink, sleeping late, and the occasional bath together. They're good people whose only sin is moral weakness, but that is enough. Sloth and gluttony open the door to other sins: while Roise is away visiting her dying sister, Nathan (under the prompting of the Evil Spirit, who narrates the story) has an affair with the servant girl Shifra and divorces Roise, who then remarries unhappily to a man named Moshe. Then the divorced couple - now forbidden to one another - re-unite in a series of secretive, degrading trysts in an abandoned building; Nathan only learns of Roise's death when he sees the funeral procession from his darkened window. The title of the story is ironic: at first "the Unseen" appears to refer to the Evil Spirit, who "sees and is not seen"; but in the end, it is Nathan, living his last days in darkness and shame, hiding from the sight of the community, who is truly the unseen. [311]

Boarding School

This writer's experience with boarding school (and life after it)

[https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/went-boarding-school-why-apologise-090000692.html]

got me thinking about my own time growing up and my school years. Annie Hayes writes

'My roommate, Lily*, had a rocky start to university life. As soon as her parents left, she started to cry. She had never left home. I empathised with her. I knew my boarding school experience had set me up for living miles away from my family, something she would have found much harder than me.'

Eventually Lily gets her own room, complaining that boarding school veterans like Annie have 'been given it all on a plate.' The assumption is that boarding school families must be wealthy, but I think there's another grievance at work here: Annie does have an advantage, because she got an early start with the experience of living away from her parents.

I think Lily envies Annie, though she can't admit it. She might not envy the boarding school experience itself, but she envies what Annie got from it: confidence and independence. While Lily was living at home with her parents, Annie was living away from home among other girls, in a structured environment. Lily accuses Annie of having "been given it all" exactly because this is the exact opposite of the truth, in terms of the two girls' experiences. However comfortable Annie's home life might have been, she clearly was not enjoying those comforts at St. Margaret's. Lily accuses Annie of being spoiled precisely because she worries that it is she herself who has been spoiled - literally rendered unfit for adult life. And none of this is Lily's fault any more than it is Annie's, it's just a perfectly normal human reaction.

Looking back, I think more time away from home (and away from my dysfunctional family) probably would have helped me, provided it was a healthy environment. There was brief talk of sending me to a prep school in Connecticut called Loomis-Chaffee, but that never went anywhere. Realistically, by the time I was high school age I was probably too much of a mess myself for it to have helped, even if I'd been magically given a scholarship.

But I think part of me always secretly envied young people who did have the chance to go to school away from their families. [302]

Work at the new-old job is going well. There's a paycheck lag as I go from weekly to twice-monthly pay, so it won't be until the end of June that I see my first full paycheck, but I'm prepared for that. It's going to be a little tight for the next couple of weeks but I'll do fine.

I'm 23 days alcohol-free now; my target is 40 days, which will take me right up to the end of the July 4 weekend. I am NOT planning to give up alcohol, but I do want to take a break from it for a bit. So I'm more than halfway to my goal now, and I feel fantastic!

Elijah: "No rain until I say so" (v. 1). Elijah's Boss hears this and says "Hey son of man, it sounds like you've forgotten Who sends the rain." God orders Elijah to go to the Wadi Cherith and wait there. God sends ravens to feed him solid food (like Rebeck in FPP) and he is to drink from the wadi until it goes dry. Then he is sent to Zarephath, where "I have instructed a widow to sustain you." (JPS has "feed" but it's לכלכל which is significant.)

Now Elijah's immediate problem is thirst, and the first words out of his mouth are "Please bring me a little water" (v. 10). The widow goes to get the water - the text doesn't say from where - and Elijah adds a request for bread as an afterthought.

The widow's problem is hunger - not thirst. She must have a supply of drinkable water, perhaps a cistern in her house. Not nearly enough for irrigation (that's why the drought is a problem) but enough to keep herself and her son hydrated for long enough that starvation will be their main concern.

So, what happens here is an exchange: the widow provides water, and Elijah furnishes solid food, by the grace of God, Whom he duly acknowledges (v. 14). Elijah is "sustained" with both water and solid food, and the widow's life and that of her son are saved (the son a second time in v. 17 - 23). And Elijah gets a lesson in humility - the widow isn't high-status, or even an Israelite - and accomplishes a kiddush haShem.

Wow, it's been over two months since I posted last. The big news is that I started a new job - or rather, got my old job back! I was effectively laid off from the engineering firm in Portland for about five months, but the recruiter called me in May and asked if I was interested in going back and I said yes. So I started back there at the end of May.

Also on the professional front, I've upgraded my employment profile with three new certifications - CompTIA Network+, Security+, and Data+. The first two are directly tied to my career in the tech support field, and the third is something I want to explore in terms of branching out in the broader IT career field.

I've started going back to staying strictly screen-free over Shabbat, after being a little bit OTD ("Off The Derekh") on that for a while. It is an adjustment, going without electronic communication for 25 hours (especially if you live alone and don't have a local community), but the improvement in my mental health and general peace of mind is noticeable. Charlie Kirk's posthumously published Stop in the Name of God is highly informative and inspirational.

I'm also taking this month of June to re-commit to my creative work.