Overtime Writer

Hi, welcome to Ruth Margalit's blog, where I write about the small things that fill my days. Thanks for reading.

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Writing is an act of pride. I’ve always known that, and so for a long time I hid the fact that I was writing, especially from the people I loved. I was afraid of exposing myself and of others’ disapproval. Jane Austen organized herself so that she could immediately hide her pages if someone came into the room where she had taken refuge. It’s a reaction I’m familiar with: you’re ashamed of your presumptuousness, because there is nothing that can justify it, not even success. However I state it, the fact remains that I have assumed the right to imprison others in what I seem to see, feel, think, imagine, and know.

A beautiful interview with Elena Ferrante. 

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The Legacy of a Soccer Tragedy - The New Yorker

How the Hillsborough stadium disaster changed England’s soccer culture forever.

They were called "drunken fans" and "tanked-up yobs." This week, justice was finally awarded to the Hillsborough victims' families, 27 years after the disaster. My piece in The New Yorker.

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Running on Empty, my Postcard from rural Nepal, in Harper’s.

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I knew who I was this morning, but I've changed a few times since then.

Lewis Carroll. And my coffee mug.

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No numbers except for zero

All the numbers on my keyboard except for zero stopped working (a long ago spilled drink). Instead of fixing the problem, and waiting five business days while the laptop was at the lab, I decided that I don’t need numbers. I’d spell them out instead. At first, when I needed to email my phone number to someone, I googled a number chart and copied and pasted the numbers I needed from there. Each digit looked different, as if I were writing a ransom note. Filling out my credit card details was a chore—on the plus side: my online shopping has gone down significantly since then—but doable. Still, when I tried to log onto a new wifi network and had to type in numbers for the password, I was stuck. I couldn’t google them. So I created a word document where I now have all the numbers and their shift-options pre-saved. Turns out that the open parenthesis and exclamation point are often harder to do without than the numbers themselves. All I have to do now is keep that number file open in the background of whatever I’m working on. The problem is that the document keeps jumping at me. A mindless bureaucratic jumble. Such as now. When I have the first line of a story ready, but when I turn to my computer the first thing I see is:

 123456789

@#!$%^&*()

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I recently spent an evening at the 92nd Y speaking with Sayed Kashua about his new book, “Native.” Sayed spoke openly about mental censorship, writing away from home, and the experience of being a Palestinian expat in the Midwest. Here’s the video.

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One exists most of the time in morose discontent with the sort of work that one does oneself, and wastes vain envy on all others.

A letter from T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, 1924. Via the Paris Review.

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It would be easier if I could shrug off my home town the way some of my American friends seem to do, to treat it with a mixture of wonder and bemusement. I envy those friends. It seems healthy and independent to me, this shedding—a step toward becoming a fully formed adult. But Jerusalem doesn’t allow that, somehow. It has a way of raiding your insides. Auden, in his elegy for Yeats, spoke of the 'raw towns that we believe and die in.' He was referring to Yeats’ Ireland, and to the inner workings of poetry, but, whenever I read it, I think of my home town. Everyone I know who grew up in Jerusalem loves it or hates it (or both) with a zeal that can only be described as religious. It’s an unforgettable place. Not in the florid sense of the word, as in exceptional, but in the most literal one: it can’t be erased from memory.

I wrote about my Jerusalem childhood, in light of recent events.

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The perfect short story, by Lydia Davis.

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A lot of this view lately, but my profile of the writer Sayed Kashua is finally out in this week’s issue of The New Yorker, and I’d love for you to read it.

[annfriedman]

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From “Women In Dark Times.”

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A smart new book that examines the lives of Rosa Luxmeburg, Charlotte Salomon, Marilyn Monroe, and the “curse of perfection.”

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“Down on the beach, blue canvas chairs and umbrellas defended their small claims of oceanfront, where mothers pretended to read and not gossip about gossip—local gossip, celebrity gossip—and fathers checked watches and humored their gossipy wives until it was time for tennis or golf. The adults who were not yet mothers or fathers lounged about like minor gods, plucking tans from the sky, their secondhand freedom lustily inhaled by young and old alike. Dead ahead played the world’s widest Cinemascope: the sea.”

From  “Member / Guest,” by David Gilbert. Photo by Karine Laval.

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Amazing response to the Confederate flag debate from Georgetown law professor Paul Butler. (Via Dave Weigel)

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(via Sylvia Plath’s Sketches)

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The last things you want to see in your biography.