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In Wroclaw, Poland is a lively terraced house that reflects the youthful energy of the couple who owns it. Designed by Znamy się for the owners, and their two dogs, who love to cook, entertain friends, and play board games. Drawing inspiration from the whimsical world of Playshapes (wooden blocks that can be moved, layered, or combined), this modern home now boasts a fusion of structures, forms, and vibrant colors that bolster creativity, socializing, and play.
The new interior holds many elements that allow the owners to play with form. Moveable furniture sets the stage with shelves on wheels that enable the couple to create flexible arrangements and new spaces. The kitchen island is not only the place for food prep and cooking, it stores board games and houses water dispensers for their beloved dogs. The dining table’s top lifts to play games and work puzzles.
Geometric shapes and a strong palette of colors intertwine forming layered spaces rich in textures and visual intrigue. The inclusion of lots of wooden elements gives nod to Playshapes, while adding organic charm.
Three shelves set within a blue painted alcove hold a large selection of plants and objects for a touch of biophilia.
The square dining table lives under one of the hanging grids that holds plants. Similar gridded structures live alongside the wooden staircase adding a pop of color while providing safety for those climbing the stairs.
The bathroom features similar wooden cabinets as the kitchen island with geometric patterns adorning the fronts. An inset cabinet is painted a playful pink on the inside, pairing nicely with the black and white floor tile.
Photography by Migdal Studio.
During her MFA, Francophone writer Emilie Moorhouse serendipitously discovered the works of a little-known Surrealist poet, Syrian-Egyptian-English Joyce Mansour, who chose to write exclusively in French. Mansour, a glamourous, married woman who came of age as an artist in 1950s Paris under the wing of André Breton, existed as a kind of glitch in the French literary scene—an upper-class, Arab, apolitical woman who refused to become a sex object while making unapologetically sexual work. Emerald Wounds (City Lights Books) is the result of Moorhouse’s deep dive into the fringes of Francophone literature, translating Mansour’s wide-ranging poetry and asserting her right to be known. In this career-spanning edition, Mansour exists as a writer’s writer, a reluctant feminist, an Arab Jew, and most blatantly as a kind of queer “uber-wife,” pissing in her husband’s drink while flying on the freeway between sex and death.
I recently spoke to Moorhouse on Zoom about the life and work of Joyce Mansour as her Wi-Fi was being changed—the warbling sound of a hole being drilled somewhere above.
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The Rumpus: How, technically, did you find Joyce Mansour?
Emilie Moorhouse: I was taking a translation course—this was in 2017, and the #metoo movement had just exploded and I thought, “I need to translate a woman who is controversial, someone who the literary establishment doesn’t approve of” which, okay, many women have not had the approval of the literary establishment. But I think I was looking for raw emotion, for a woman who could express her sexuality and who could speak her truth whether it fit in with the times or not. So that was kind of the criteria that I set for myself. And I did find quite a few women like this in Francophone literature, but in the Surrealist tradition or practice, a lot of it is stream-of-consciousness writing. And so, what Mansour was writing was naturally uncensored.
Rumpus: Reading Mansour’s origin story as a writer, I found it obviously compelling but also kind of curious, because there’s this story of her being in a state of grief, both from her mother dying when she was fifteen and from her first husband dying when she was eighteen, and the story is that her grief forced her to write. It was either the madhouse or poetry. That’s obviously a very compelling story behind a first book, right? Especially with the title of Screams from a beautiful, foreign, young woman in 1953 arriving on the Parisian literary and art scene. I wonder if there’s anything problematic in this origin story in your opinion. Is it constructed? Or do you think, in an alternate timeline, Mansour could’ve just been a happy housewife with her rich, much older, French-speaking second husband?
Moorhouse: Well, I think she would have been involved in the arts. There is this really strong personality in Mansour. And as much as she was shaped by the events of her youth, she does have such a rich background as well. She was bilingual before she met her second husband, speaking fluent English and Arabic. So, she obviously had this very rich and interesting life, you know, in tandem with these early events. But at the same time, and I’ve never heard it mentioned in any of the interviews, or, in any research that I did, that she was writing poetry, prior to these events. I guess life is life.
Rumpus: So, in sticking a little bit with her biography before getting to the work, when reading about Mansour’s second husband—which sounded like a problematic relationship in that he had lots of affairs—I feel like in a way that Mansour had this despairing, mourning and grieving personality versus a kind of desiring personality, especially desiring of men who she couldn’t really possess. Do you feel that her second husband supported her, especially the notion of the confessional in her work? I wonder if he even read her work?
Moorhouse: Yeah, I also wondered about that. I know that her son read her work and he actually helped correct her grammar, her French mistakes. And I do know that she never discussed her first husband with her second husband but that her second husband sort of swept her off her feet. He kind of gave her life again after the death of her first husband. But her second husband was not someone who was initially very involved in the arts. Apparently, André Breton hated him! Breton did not consent to Mansour’s husband, basically. He came from a very different world than Breton.
Rumpus: I have a lot of questions about the relationship between Mansour and Breton. In Mansour’s poetry, there’s a lot of female rage against the husband or the lover, even as she is taking pleasure in them. It reminds me of the line in one of her poems: “Don’t tell your dreams to the one who doesn’t love you.” I wonder if there’s this irreconcilable split in Mansour’s life between her domestic life and her artistic life. I was thinking a lot about Breton and his mentorship of her in this way. I think it’s interesting in your intro that you state that they were definitely not lovers.
Moorhouse: I was never able to explicitly find any information that Mansour and Breton were sexually involved, and one of her biographies explicitly states they were never lovers. I think Mansour’s artistic side was really nourished through Breton. They went to the flea markets of Paris every afternoon together in search of artwork. And I do think that Mansour’s second husband, through Mansour, started to develop a greater appreciation of artwork. But it wasn’t something that he was involved in initially and so I really don’t know how present he was in her artistic practice.
Rumpus: You label Mansour’s poetry as erotic macabre. Can you break that term open a bit? I am thinking of her work’s relationship to 60s and 70s French feminism (like écriture feminine) but I’m also thinking of the somewhat contrasting pornographic strain in her work, akin to Georges Bataille.
Moorhouse: I do see it as both. I think she gets inspiration from both. Bataille was very erotic macabre, or maybe he’s a little bit more twisted than that even, but this whole idea of la petite morte (death is orgasm), I do see influences from that in her work. But I don’t think Mansour was loyal to any kind of movement. I mean, she was obviously very loyal to the Surrealists, but when she was asked to write for a feminist magazine, she bristled and said, “Feminism, what do you mean?” I think Mansour liked to remain independent and have her creativity be independent from these different movements. She was apolitical. And I think some of that comes from Mansour’s experience in Egypt, being exiled because she was part of this upper-class Egyptian society, her father was imprisoned and most of his property and assets were seized by the government and apparently, he refused to ever own a house again and lived the rest of his life in a hotel. Then you have the Surrealist movement, which Joyce Mansour was a part of, which was more aligned with anarchism. She was kind of caught between two worlds.
Rumpus: It’s interesting, this idea of Mansour being apolitical and having a sort of disconnect from feminism, because it seems to bring up things around the Surrealists having issues with women, with women being objectified or fetishized in their work, this idea of “mad love” trumping all, even abuse. And so, if we just, say, insert Mansour into our present-day politics—and this is a totally speculative question—how do you feel she would fit into our polarizing and gender-fluid times?
Moorhouse: Well, my impression of her work is that it is very gender-fluid, she plays around with gender in her writing quite a bit, so I feel like she absolutely would, in a way, fit into our now. In terms of the political, that’s a good question because, yeah, everything is very polarized and politicized today. Also, I don’t know that she wasn’t necessarily political. I think she obviously sympathized with many progressive movements and that’s clear in her writing. That includes feminism. She was openly mocking articles that appeared in women’s magazines imposing unrealistic housewife-style standards. She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings. But I think outside of her art, Mansour wasn’t necessarily willing to pronounce them. It was more like my art speaks for itself.
Rumpus: I think that’s probably still the best way of being an artist. And also, it’s not really a speculative question, because we will soon see how Mansour’s work is received with a younger, contemporary, potentially genderqueer readership, right?
Moorhouse: Yeah. I’m excited to see how her work will be received. I do feel that much of her writing is, in fact, very contemporary around gender. But she wasn’t intellectualizing it. It came out in her voice, which rejected any gender confines without having to announce that she was doing so.
Rumpus: Did you find as a translator that you had to make some harder choices around some of the more dated language, especially in terms of race? Terms that people don’t use anymore?
Moorhouse: There were certainly some words that gave me pause. The word oriental comes up a few times, and this is obviously a word that is dated, perhaps more so in English than in French. What is interesting for me though, is that when I read it in context, I think she is using that word in a way that acknowledges the history behind it, the colonialism, the fetishizing, the exoticizing. For example, Mansour speaks of “oriental suffering,” or of a “narrative with an Oriental woman.” I don’t think, even though she was writing in the 60s at this point, that she uses this word lightly. The way I read it, she uses it to evoke her own nostalgia, or longing for her life in Egypt. And to clarify, when Mansour uses oriental in French, it refers to the Near East. It refers to her own Syrian and Egyptian roots. She never returned to Egypt, so even though she did experience a lot of suffering there, she is still a woman living in exile. This is definitely a challenge of translating older work, especially with an artist who, I think, does not use these words lightly.
Rumpus: Interesting. Because what’s making headlines right now is this political urge to kind of clean up certain language that was used in literature in the past that is hurtful or flat out racist today. So, I still do wonder if there was this urge at all for you to clean up the language?
Moorhouse: I didn’t want the language to be offensive. I would hope that I’ve succeeded with that. I don’t want any dated language to draw attention to itself because that’s not what the poem is meant to do.
Rumpus: But the French is the same. You never changed anything in the French.
Moorhouse: No, I never changed anything in the French. I don’t think I’m allowed to do that. The French is word-for-word.
Rumpus: I think this speaks to its time. And it also—yet again!—points back to the Surrealist problems with women. I mean, sometimes Mansour’s work is so radical and standout, and there are also moments in it when it does feel a bit retrograde. I’m inserting her relationship with Breton in here again because I wonder if she was one of those women who lived as an artist aligning herself with powerful men?
Moorhouse: Well, I think that she would have definitely been outnumbered in those groups, right? I mean, women to men. I don’t know if she was loud, and what her personality was like surrounded by all those men. It’s hard to know. But she did smoke cigars!
Rumpus: Right. That is a very alluring look. Also, she was a mother. I think that’s kind of a big deal in a very male-centric artist’s space.
Moorhouse: Yes, and she was a very doting and overprotective mother. But, you know, even though Mansour may have aligned herself with Breton and other men, I don’t feel like she would have been one to just do things to appease them. And you can see that in her poetry, how she rejects the male gaze that objectifies her. So we can’t just put her in a box or in a category of militant feminist or someone who just goes with the old boys’ club, right?
Rumpus: Yeah, you’re right. She’s both an individual and of her time. In terms of her being a woman, what do you make of her disappearance in the canon? You talk about this in your introduction, her work being perceived as “too much.” Do you think this quality relates to the forgetting of Joyce Mansour?
Moorhouse: Being very familiar with the French culture, I would say yes. I use the word chauvinistic because I think that certain French literary elite have this very precise idea of what “French” literature is, and what “great” literature is. And mostly, it’s been men, White men, who write “great literature” and historically women were allowed to write for children. I think it’s a shame because there are so many Francophone voices that are just so rich, so different. And I think that some in the literary elite just don’t know what to make of these so-called different voices, so they kind of dismiss them. And it’s too bad, because these voices enrich the literary landscape. French literature has been very France-centric, right? Which, obviously, has its roots in colonialism. So even though Mansour was somewhat respected as a Surrealist, the wider French literary establishment very easily could have dismissed her. When I was working on getting some of the rights from one of her publishers—and it’s really hard to get through to them—when I finally had a conversation with them, even they dismissed her! This man said to me, “You know, Joyce Mansour would be nothing without Breton. Without André Breton, there would be no Joyce Mansour.” So even one of her publishers in this day and age still doesn’t take her seriously.
Rumpus: There is this suspicion that Breton created her?
Moorhouse: Yes, and that she’s only recognized to the limited degree that she is because of her affiliation with him.
Rumpus: It feels that this relationship with Breton is really at the crux of a lot for Mansour. I mean, he clearly was incredibly important to her, he was her mentor and she loved him, and I don’t know—these very close artistic relationships they can be difficult for others in the world to understand. Maybe it’s why #metoo resonates differently in France, to be honest. And now I’m thinking of Maïwenn and Luc Besson, which is totally different, but still. . . . When did André Breton die? Was it 1968?
Moorhouse: I think it was 1966. I’m not sure.
Rumpus: Because it’s interesting, I was thinking of Mansour’s 1960s publication White Squares and her last work from the 1980s, Black Holes. Her later work is really kind of dark. My favorite line from one of her late poems is: “The world is a shitting bird.” I mean, I don’t want to say that Breton had an unnatural or too strong of a hold on her or a shitty hold on her, but maybe he did. Maybe her work matured after Breton’s death. Maybe it got even wilder.
Moorhouse: Yeah, I mean, I definitely do see that difference between her earlier work and her later work. It’s not just that the poems in her earlier works are shorter. The later ones are more macabre and her identity is more explicit—both her Jewish identity and her Egyptian identity. Also, Mansour evokes disease and aging and the history of cancer in her family. She died of cancer, like her mother did, and I don’t know if her battle was a short one or drawn out. There is another collection of her poems—prose poems that we couldn’t publish because of copyright—but there’s one about the hospital, and it sounds like it’s her visiting someone in a hospital and it’s very much about the human body falling apart and this industrialized hospital where all bodies are falling apart together.
Rumpus: Her mixing of the sexual body and the dying body is so powerful. I love Mansour’s use of urine, actually. Sometimes, it is this incredibly liberatory thing, like, pissing in the street. And then it’s poisonous, or it’s hedonistic, she’s drinking it like honey. Piss is this ubiquitous substance and act in her work. I love that.
Moorhouse: It’s almost like the soul, your soul comes out in your urine. What else can I say about that?
Rumpus: Nothing. That’s perfect. Your soul is in your urine.
***
Author photo by Selena Phillips Boyle
We are off today and tomorrow for the US Independence Day holiday. Also included, a song that hews carefully to archaic rules about prepositions at the end of sentences.
The post Off for the US Holiday — More Grammar appeared first on The Scholarly Kitchen.
Derrick Brooms was appointed executive director of the Black Men’s Research Institute at Morehouse College in Atlanta, effective August 1. Dr. Brooms joins Morehouse from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where he is a professor of Africana studies and sociology and the associate department head of Africana studies. His research primarily centers on Black men and boys’ pathways to and through college, their engagement on campus and identity development, as well as their lived experiences and representations in the media. He is the author of several books including Being Black, Being Male on Campus: Understanding and Confronting Black Male Collegiate Experiences (SUNY Press, 2017) and Stakes is High: Trials, Lessons, and Triumphs in Young Black Men’s Educational Journeys (SUNY Press, 2021).
Dr. Brooms is a graduate of the University of Chicago, where he majored in African and African American studies. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Loyola University Chicago.
Sherrilyn Ifill is the inaugural holder of Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at the Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C. Professor Ifill most recently served as the seventh president & director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund. Earlier, she was a professor at the University of Maryland School of Law in Baltimore for 20 years.
Professor Ifill is a graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She earned a juris doctorate at New York University.
Aisha Ali-Gombe, an associate professor of computer science and engineering at Louisiana State University, was named the director of the university’s new Cybersecurity Clinic.
Dr. Ali-Gombe is a graduate of the University of Abuja in Nigeria, where she majored in computer science. She holds an MBA from Bayero University in Kano, Nigeria, and a master’s degree in computer science and a Ph.D. in engineering and applied science from the University of New Orleans.
Virginia Woolf, wearing a fur stole. Public domain, courtesy of wikimedia commons.
On August 3, 1917, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary for the first time in two years—a small notebook, roughly the size of the palm of her hand. It was a Friday, the start of the bank holiday, and she had traveled from London to Asheham, her rented house in rural Sussex, with her husband, Leonard. For the first time in days, it had stopped raining, and so she “walked out from Lewes.” There were “men mending the wall & roof” of the house, and Will, the gardener, had “dug up the bed in front, leaving only one dahlia.” Finally, “bees in attic chimney.”
It is a stilted beginning, and yet with each entry, her diary gains in confidence. Soon, Woolf establishes a pattern. First, she notes the weather, and her walk—to the post, or to fetch the milk, or up onto the Downs. There, she takes down the number of mushrooms she finds—“almost a record find,” or “enough for a dish”—and of the insects she has seen: “3 perfect peacock butterflies, 1 silver washed frit; besides innumerable blues feeding on dung.” She notices butterflies in particular: painted ladies, clouded yellows, fritillaries, blues. She is blasé in her records of nature’s more gruesome sights—“the spine & red legs of a bird, just devoured by a hawk,” or a “chicken in a parcel, found dead in the nettles, head wrung off.” There is human violence, too. From the tops of the Downs, she listens to the guns as they sound from France, and watches German prisoners at work in the fields, who use “a great brown jug for their tea.” Home again, and she reports any visitors, or whether she has done gardening or reading or sewing. Lastly, she makes a note about rationing, taking stock of the larder: “eggs 2/9 doz. From Mrs Attfield,” or “sausages here come in.”
Though Woolf, then thirty-five, shared the lease of Asheham with her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell (who went there for weekend parties), for her, the house had always been a place for convalescence. Following her marriage to Leonard in 1912, she entered a long tunnel of illness—a series of breakdowns during which she refused to eat, talked wildly, and attempted suicide. She spent long periods at a nursing home in Twickenham before being brought to Asheham with a nurse to recover. At the house, Leonard presided over a strict routine, in which Virginia was permitted to write letters—“only to the end of the page, Mrs Woolf,” as she reported to her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies—and to take short walks “in a kind of nightgown.” She had been too ill to pay much attention to the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, or to take notice of the war. “Its very like living at the bottom of the sea being here,” she wrote to a friend in early 1914, as Bloomsbury scattered. “One sometimes hears rumours of what is going on overhead.”
In the writing about Woolf’s life, the wartime summers at Asheham tend to be disregarded. They are quickly overtaken by her time in London, the emergence of the Hogarth Press, and the radical new direction she took in her work, when her first novels—awkward set-pieces of Edwardian realism—would give way to the experimentalism of Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway. And yet during these summers, Woolf was at a threshold in her life and work. Her small diary is the most detailed account we have of her days during the summers of 1917 and 1918, when she was walking, reading, recovering, looking. It is a bridge between two periods in her work and also between illness and health, writing and not writing, looking and feeling. Unpacking each entry, we can see the richness of her daily life, the quiet repetition of her activities and pleasures. There is no shortage of drama: a puncture to her bicycle, a biting dog, the question of whether there will be enough sugar for jam. She rarely uses the unruly “I,” although occasionally we glimpse her, planting a bulb or leaving her mackintosh in a hedge. Mostly she records things she can see or hear or touch. Having been ill, she is nurturing a convalescent quality of attention, using her diary’s economical form, its domestic subject matter, to tether herself to the world. “Happiness is,” she writes later, in 1925, “to have a little string onto which things will attach themselves.” At Asheham, she strings one paragraph after another; a way of watching the days accrue. And as she recovers, things attach themselves: bicycles, rubber boots, dahlias, eggs.
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Between 1915 and her death in 1941, Woolf filled almost thirty notebooks with diary entries, beginning, at first, with a fairly self-conscious account of her daily life which developed, from Asheham onward, into an extraordinary, continuous record of form and feeling. Her diary was the place where she practiced writing—or would “do my scales,” as she described it in 1924—and in which her novels shaped themselves: the “escapade” of Orlando written at the height of her feelings for Vita Sackville-West (“I want to kick up my heels & be off”); the “playpoem” of The Waves, that “abstract mystical eyeless book,” which began life one summer’s evening in Sussex as “The Moths.” There are also the minutiae of her domestic life, including scenes from her marriage to Leonard (an argument in 1928, for instance, when she slapped his nose with sweet peas, and he bought her a blue jug) and from her relationship with her servant, Nellie Boxall, which was by turns antagonistic and dependent. Most of all, the diary is the place in which she thinks on her feet, playing and experimenting. Here she is in September 1928, attempting to describe rooks in flight, and asking,
“Whats the phrase for that?” & try to make more & more vivid the roughness of the air current & the tremor of the rooks wing <deep breasting it> slicing—as if the air were full of ridges & ripples & roughnesses; they rise & sink, up & down, as if the exercise <pleased them> rubbed & braced them like swimmers in rough water.
But the “old devil” of her illness was never far behind. If, in her diary, Woolf could compose herself, she could also unravel. There are jagged moments. She could be cruel—about her friends, or the sight of suburban women shopping, or Leonard’s Jewish mother. And she felt her failures acutely. In the small hours, she fretted over her childlessness, her rivalries, the wave of her depression threatening to crest.
Her diaries’ elasticity, their ability to fulfill all these uses, is, as Adam Phillips notes in his foreword to Granta’s new edition of the second volume, evidence of “Woolf’s extraordinary invention within this genre.” The Asheham diary was one of her earliest experiments in the form. She was reading Thoreau’s Walden and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Grasmere journals, marvelling at those writers’ capacity for a language “scraped clean,” their daily lives, and their descriptions of the natural world, intensified for the reader as if “through a very powerful magnifying glass.” Yet the life span of her own rural diary was short. In October 1917, upon her return to London, Woolf began a second diary, written in the style of those which preceded her breakdowns. Her Asheham diary she left stowed away in a drawer. (When, the following summer, she reached for the notebook, writing in both concurrently, it was the only time she kept two diaries at once.) In her other diary, the ligatures loosened, and she began developing the supple, longhand style she would use for the rest of her life. Her concision was gone, though her Asheham diary had left its mark. In London, she continued to open each day with her “vegetable notes”—an account of her walk along the Thames, or a note about the weather. And she described everything she saw with the curiosity and precision of a naturalist’s eye.
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In the long and often fraught history of the publication of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, no one has known what to do with such a sporadic notebook, seemingly out of sync with the much fuller diaries that came before and after it. Following Leonard’s selection of entries for A Writer’s Diary, which was published in 1953, work on the publication of her diaries in their entirety began in 1966, when the art historian Anne Olivier Bell was assisting her husband, Quentin Bell, in the writing of his aunt’s biography. As parcels of Woolf’s papers arrived at the couple’s home in Sussex, Olivier—the name by which she was always known—realized the scale of the project, which involved organizing, noting, and indexing 2,317 pages of Woolf’s private writing. She leaped at the chance, “largely,” she later reflected, “because it gave me an excuse to read Virginia’s diary, which I longed to do.” So began nearly twenty years of scholarship, culminating in their publication, in five volumes, by the Hogarth Press, between 1977 and 1984.
It was a laborious process. Working first from carbon copies—which needed to be pieced back together after Leonard had gone through them, with scissors, to make his selections —and later from photocopies (the manuscript diaries were moved in 1971 from the Westminster Bank in Lewes to the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library), Olivier set about constructing her “scaffolding”: she took six-by-four-inch index cards, one for each month of Woolf’s life, and recorded on them the dates in that month on which Woolf had written an entry, where she had been, and who she had seen. Olivier spent long hours in the basement of the London Library, consulting the Dictionary of National Biography for details of one of Virginia’s friends, or decaying editions of the Times for a notice about a particular concert at Wigmore Hall. And there were decisions to make. What to do with Woolf at her most unkind, or snobbish? Olivier devised some basic rules for inclusion: she pinned a piece of paper above her desk that read ACCURACY / RELEVANCE / CONCISION / INTEREST. She decided there was little point in upsetting those friends still living, and cut any particularly unflattering descriptions. And Woolf’s Asheham diary—“too different in character” from the other diaries, she noted, and “too laconic”—didn’t merit publishing in full. The second volume, from the summer of 1918, was omitted completely.
This summer, Granta has reissued Woolf’s diaries and billed them as “unexpurgated,” a promise that has caused no small stir among Woolf scholars, who had thought Olivier’s editions were complete. The new inclusions are, in fact, mostly minor: a handful of comments about Woolf’s friends, written toward the end of her life, including an unpleasant description of Igor Anrep’s mouth. Otherwise, Olivier’s volume divisions remain unchanged, her notes and indexes intact; it is as much a reproduction, and a celebration, of her scholarly masterpiece as of Woolf’s diaristic eye. The most significant addition is Asheham. For the first time, Woolf’s small diary—the last remaining autobiographical fragment to be published—appears in its entirety. And yet those readers turning to Granta’s edition for details of Woolf’s country life in 1918 must skip to the end of the first volume, and look for her diary beneath the heading “Appendix 3.”
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Appendixes can be awkward, unwieldy things. They serve a scholarly function—to present information deemed unsuitable for the main body of a text, like an attachment, or an afterthought. And an appendix is an especially odd place for a diary, putting time out of sequence, disrupting the “current”—as Woolf liked to call it—of everyday life. The remaining paragraphs of the Asheham diary have been relegated behind the main text; they sit quietly, unobtrusively, documenting a life as minute and domestic as before. Returning to the house in 1918, Woolf records her days, the winter melting into spring—the last of the diary, and the war. Out on her walks, she sees “a few brown heath butterflies,” the air “swarming with little black beetles.” She spends afternoons on the terrace, the sun hot, “had to wear straw hat,” and in the evening, she and Leonard sit “eating our own broad beans—delicious.” There are more local intrigues: the coal from the cellar goes missing, a mysterious plague kills the farmer’s lambs. Day by day, she watches a caterpillar pupate. The news is better from France. Still, the German prisoners work in the fields. “When alone, I smile at the tall German.” But her entries are thinning. By September, there is “nothing to notice” on the Downs, or “nothing new.” Even the butterflies are less brilliant—a few tortoiseshells, some ragged blues. Finally, toward the back of the notebook, she lists the household linen to be washed.
Her attention had begun shifting elsewhere. In London, she was becoming intensely preoccupied with the Press, and with writing shorter things, impressions and color studies—the pieces that will make up her first book of stories, Monday or Tuesday, published in 1921. And yet, if one looks closely, one can see the diary in some of these stories; something like an underpainting.
Take, for instance, Katherine Mansfield’s visit to Asheham in August 1917. The diary’s summary of Katherine’s visit is brief: her train into Lewes was late, so Woolf bought a bulb for the flowerbed; later, the two writers walked on the terrace together, an airship maneuvering overhead. Yet from letters, we know that the manuscript for Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” was almost certainly brought out. In it, we can see the imprint of Asheham, its reversal of scales, its teeming insect life. In the story, which was published in 1919, human life takes place off center, in the murmur of conversation wafting above the flower bed, while the “vast green spaces” of the bed and the snail laboring over his crumbs of earth loom largest of all. The story, though set in Richmond, captures the atmosphere of Asheham. Its form, like the other stories in Monday or Tuesday, owes much to the episodic structure of her diary, in which impressions are hazy, words come and go, and attention is both microscopic and abstract. And its authorial presence mirrors the one we find in the notebook—a writer who is both there and not there, looking and noticing.
Toward the end of 1918, as Woolf’s convalescence comes to an end, so does her Asheham diary. Back in London, she muses on the project she has kept going for two years: “Asheham diary drains off my meticulous observations of flowers, clouds, beetles & the price of eggs,” she writes in her other, longer diary, “&, being alone, there is no other event to record.” It has served its purpose, paving a way back to writing after illness, of nursing her attention back to life. Though it was later forgotten, it always stood for one of her quietest and arguably most important periods, between her first attempts at writing and those fleeting experiments which determined the novels that came afterward. And it continued to be a storehouse for images to be drawn upon later—her nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, carrying home antlers, like those in the attic nursery in To The Lighthouse; a grass snake on the path, like the one Giles Oliver crushes with his tennis shoe in Between the Acts; a continuous stream of butterflies and moths.
Harriet Baker is a British writer. Her work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and Apollo, among others. Her first book, Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, will be published by Allen Lane in March 2024.
Rushdie’s fifteenth novel casts doubt on the very production of historical knowledge.
The post Really Unreal: Salman Rushdie’s “Victory City” appeared first on Public Books.
— The Supreme Court’s Allen v. Milligan decision should give Democrats at least a little help in their quest to re-take the House majority, but much remains uncertain.
— As of now, the Democrats’ best bets to add a seat in 2024 are in Alabama, the subject of the ruling, and Louisiana.
— It also adds to the list of potential mid-decade redistricting changes, which have happened with regularity over the past half-century.
— The closely-contested nature of the House raises the stakes of each state’s map, and redistricting changes do not necessarily have to be prompted by courts.
Landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions can sometimes be categorized as either beginnings or endings. Take, for instance, a couple of past important decisions that at least touch on the topic of redistricting.
In 1962, the court’s Baker v. Carr decision was a beginning: After decades of declining to enter what Justice Felix Frankfurter described as the “political thicket” of redistricting and reapportionment, the Supreme Court opened the door to hearing cases that argued against the malapportionment of voting districts. A couple of years later, the court’s twin decisions of Reynolds v. Sims and Wesberry v. Sanders mandated the principle of “one person, one vote” be used in drawing, respectively, state legislative and congressional districts, kicking off what is known as the “reapportionment revolution.”
More recently, the court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision represented an ending: The court threw out the preclearance coverage formula of the Voting Rights Act. Prior to that decision, certain states and jurisdictions (mostly but not entirely in the South) had to submit changes in voting procedures, such as redistricting plans, to the U.S. Department of Justice for preclearance. The court said that this method of determining which places needed preclearance was outdated, and Congress has never mandated a new preclearance formula. So prior to the Shelby County decision, a state like Alabama would have had to have cleared its new congressional district map with the Justice Department. In 2021, it did not have to.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Allen v. Milligan last week is neither a beginning nor an ending, although Republican authorities in Alabama and others surely hoped it would represent a form of the latter. Rather, the case is best thought of as a continuation of current law and how the Supreme Court interprets current law — namely, that Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and the so-called “Gingles test” that undergirds it still exists in the same way we understood them prior to the Milligan decision.
The Gingles test is a three-pronged assessment, laid out as followed in the 1986 Supreme Court decision Thornburg v. Gingles (we’re quoting directly from that decision). These are the conditions that need to be in place in order for a federal court to order the creation of a new majority-minority district:
— “First, the minority group must be able to demonstrate that it is sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district.”
— “Second, the minority group must be able to show that it is politically cohesive.”
— “Third, the minority must be able to demonstrate that the white majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it… usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.”
Basically, the thing that was surprising about Milligan is that Democrats and their allies thought it was going to be bad for their side to at least a certain degree given the conservative makeup of the court. Instead, the Supreme Court didn’t really change anything.
We are not lawyers, and we will not pretend to be lawyers. Racial redistricting jurisprudence is, to us and likely to many others, confusing. Following discussions with some people who follow redistricting matters on both sides of the political aisle, we’re going to try to assess the fallout from the decision. Let’s start in Alabama and work our way to other states. This is not intended to touch on every single state with potential redistricting legal action that may or may not be impacted by Milligan; rather, we just wanted to hit the highlights of certain states and what the state of play in each is:
— In the Milligan case, a District Court found that Alabama’s congressional map likely violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act by creating a single district where Black voters made up a majority when it should have created two. Alabama is just over a quarter Black, but Black voters constitute a majority of just one of the state’s seven districts (14%). Those who sued over the map persuasively showed that it’s possible to draw a second Black district that satisfies the conditions of the Gingles test. What the actual map will eventually look like remains a mystery, but the likeliest outcome seems to be that instead of Alabama having a single, overwhelmingly Democratic district (the current 7th District, represented by Democrat Terri Sewell), the state seems likely to eventually have two districts that Democrats are favored to win. This is now reflected in our Crystal Ball House ratings — after the decision last Thursday, we tweeted that we were moving one unspecified Alabama district from Safe Republican to Likely Democratic. We say only Likely Democratic because it’s possible that this new district would not be an absolute slam dunk Democratic victory (or perhaps AL-7 would be reconfigured in such a way that it would be borderline competitive).
— A federal court in Louisiana made an analogous ruling in that state, which is politically similar to Alabama. Louisiana is about a third Black, but only one district (the 2nd, held by Democrat Troy Carter) is majority Black, so the state has five Safe Republican districts and one Safe Democratic district. Again, the endgame here very well could be that Democrats end up getting another seat, but we want to see how things play out. Louisiana uses a unique “jungle primary” system, in which all candidates compete together in the same primary, with a runoff required if no one clears 50%. Does that have an impact on the eventual jurisprudence here, or on how a newly-drawn district might perform politically? Or does Louisiana’s system help Democrats, given that because of the jungle primary — which in 2024 will occur concurrent with the November general election — filing deadlines are late in Louisiana, which gives this case extra time to wind through the legal system in advance of the 2024 election. It may be the case that despite Louisiana being similar to Alabama, the Gingles test may not force a second majority-Black district there in the same way as might happen in Alabama — or that is at least what state Republicans want the U.S. Supreme Court to ponder. (Democrats and their allies of course disagree and see Alabama and Louisiana as very similar — that makes sense to us, too, but we shall see.)
— This case also could force changes in Georgia, although it seems possible that a new map there wouldn’t actually change the partisan balance in the state, which is 9-5 Republican following a GOP gerrymander there in advance of the 2022 election. In other words, perhaps a currently Democratic seat in the Atlanta area could be altered to satisfy a court order to add an extra Black seat without actually giving the Democrats an extra seat. Court-ordered redraws do not always lead to changes to the political bottom line: North Carolina Republicans were ordered to redraw their congressional map because of racial gerrymandering concerns in advance of the 2016 election, but they did so in such a way that they were able to preserve their 10-3 statewide majority (we’ll get back to North Carolina later).
— A federal court also ruled against the South Carolina congressional map earlier this year, but it did so in a different way than in the Alabama case. Unlike in, say, Alabama and Louisiana, it might be difficult to satisfy the Gingles test in South Carolina to add a second Black district because of the compactness prong of Gingles: The Black population share in the state is very similar to Alabama, but Black South Carolinians are just more geographically spread out. So when thinking about Milligan’s ramifications, we aren’t including South Carolina in our calculations, based on our best understanding. The U.S. Supreme Court is slated to hear this case in its next term.
— The situation is also different in Florida, where there is ongoing litigation over the partisan gerrymander successfully pushed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) last cycle. Among other things, that map undid a Safe Democratic, substantially Black (but not majority Black) district that ran from Jacksonville to Tallahassee. The state Supreme Court in Florida may order that district restored in some form — although the court is fairly aligned with DeSantis, so we wouldn’t necessarily bet on it — but, if it does, the court’s decision would be based on particulars in the state constitution, amended by voters in 2010 to prevent gerrymandering, as opposed to federal law (Democratic analyst Matt Isbell had a good rundown of the situation there if you’re curious).
— Texas also comes up in discussions of the ripple effects of the Milligan ruling, but the situation there is more complicated in part because the discussion is more about Latino voters than Black voters, and Latino voters are not as politically cohesive as Black voters are — which, again, may complicate a court using the Gingles test to force a redraw there.
So what’s the upshot here? Again, and we have to stress this even though it’s an answer that won’t satisfy anyone, we are just going to have to wait to see how things shake out. But we do think some of the post-Milligan analysis that suggested that Democrats could enjoy a windfall of several seats in time for the 2024 election is, at the very least, premature. That may happen, eventually, but at the moment we’re most focused on the likelihood of a single extra Democratic seat in Alabama (which is now reflected in our ratings) and quite possibly Louisiana (which is not reflected in our ratings, at least for now).
One other thing to remember — just because Democrats got a ruling that they liked here does not mean that this very conservative court is going to start ruling for them on related cases in the future. As others noted, the key vote in this 5-4 decision was probably Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who left some breadcrumbs suggesting that Alabama just did not make the right arguments in this case. This is part of the reason why we are not making a ton of assumptions right now about what is next in states beyond Alabama.
Speaking of future Supreme Court decisions, Milligan was not the only important redistricting-related case in front of the court this term: We are still waiting to see what the Supreme Court says in Moore v. Harper.
That case is about the North Carolina state Supreme Court’s intervention against a Republican gerrymander in advance of the 2022 election. That intervention turned what would have been a 10-4 or even 11-3 Republican map in North Carolina into what became a 7-7 tie in November 2022, saving the Democrats several seats. Since then, Republicans have taken control of the North Carolina court, which already overruled its previous decision that defanged Republican gerrymandering efforts. So Moore v. Harper appears very unlikely to have any practical bearing now on North Carolina itself: Republicans are going to have the power to restore a gerrymander there.
The importance of the case from a redistricting perspective, then, is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will impose constraints on state judicial interventions against congressional maps. We have no idea what the court is going to do — it might just punt the decision given that North Carolina’s Supreme Court reversed itself after it changed from Democratic to Republican in 2022. However, the U.S. Supreme Court may issue a decision that impacts the ability of other state courts to intervene against gerrymandering. That could have ripple effects, like in Wisconsin, where the state’s new, Democratic-leaning state Supreme Court may be tempted to rule against Republican partisan gerrymanders later this year. Stay tuned.
Since the Supreme Court’s aforementioned Wesberry v. Sanders decision, which applied the concept of “one person, one vote” to congressional redistricting, there have been 30, two-year congressional election cycles (every even-numbered year from 1964 through 2022). Based on research I did for my history of recent House elections, 2021’s The Long Red Thread, at least one congressional district (and often more) changed from the previous cycle in 23 of those 30 election cycles. Most of these changes (though not all) were forced by courts. The 2024 cycle will make it 24 of 31 cycles, with potentially several states changing their maps in response to court orders. We bring this up to say that despite the now-familiar rhythm of all the states with at least two districts redrawing to reflect the census at the start of every decade, it’s common for at least some districts to change more often than that.
Beyond the states mentioned above, at least some of which will have new maps next year, Ohio is also likely to have a new map that quite possibly will be better for Republicans than the current one, which the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional but which was eventually used anyway in 2022 (just like in North Carolina, the Ohio Supreme Court has since changed in such a way to make it more amenable to GOP redistricting prerogatives going forward). Democrats in New York are trying to force a new map, in part because of changes to that state’s highest court that may make that court more amenable to Democratic redistricting arguments than the previous court, which undid a Democratic gerrymander. The particulars in both states require longer-winded explanations that we’ll save for another time.
And aside from the changes forced by courts, one also wonders if we will eventually see a redistricting technique that at one time was common but really has not been in recent decades: a state legislature enacting an elective, mid-decade remap without prompting by the courts.
The most famous modern example of this is when Texas Republicans redrew their state’s congressional map following the 2002 election. That gerrymander, which is most closely associated with former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R), came after Republicans took full control of Texas state government in 2002. They replaced a court-drawn map that reflected a previous Democratic gerrymander and imposed their own partisan gerrymander, turning a 17-15 deficit in what had become a very Republican state into a 21-11 advantage. Georgia Republicans did something similar later in the decade, though to much less effect; Colorado Republicans tried to but were blocked by state courts — some states do not allow mid-decade redistricting, but others do (there is no federal prohibition on mid-decade redistricting). North Carolina’s looming redraw is somewhat similar to those in Texas and Georgia from the 2000s: The voters changed the political circumstances — Republicans taking control of Texas and Georgia state government in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and Republicans flipping the North Carolina Supreme Court in 2022 — paving the way for the partisan gerrymanders that did (or will) follow.
The redistricting stakes are extremely high at a time when U.S. House majorities are so narrow. Democrats won just a 222-213 majority in 2020, and Republicans won the same 222-213 edge last year. It’s possible that the net impact of mid-decade redistricting — including some of the changes we’ve laid out above — could be decisive in who wins the majority next year. It may also prompt other states to try to go back to the redistricting well without prompting by courts — and if they determine they can based on state law — if they believe that new maps could make a difference in determining majorities.
The debt ceiling legislation would end the pause on student loan payments on Aug. 30 at the latest.
— In last night’s high-stakes state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, Democratic-aligned Janet Protasiewicz comfortably dispatched former Justice Daniel Kelly, giving liberals a 4-3 majority on the court.
— Compared to some previous Democratic-aligned judges, Protasiewicz had a more “nationalized” voting coalition, although she still carried several Republican-leaning parts of the state.
— A liberal state Supreme Court could revisit redistricting-related matters, to the benefit of Democrats, although there are a lot of moving pieces. With that in mind, we are downgrading our rating for southeastern Wisconsin’s 1st District from Safe Republican to Likely Republican.
| District | Old Rating | New Rating |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) | Safe Republican | Likely Republican |
In Wisconsin last night, Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former state Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly in what became a nationally-watched (and very expensive) race. Importantly, Protasiewicz will be replacing the retiring Pat Roggensack, a conservative veteran of the court — this will give the court’s liberal bloc a 4-3 majority on the bench. During the campaign, Protasiewicz was clear that, if elected, she would side with Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) over the Republican leadership in the legislature when it came to high-profile issues like abortion or gerrymandering (more on that later).
In our write-up last week, we called Protasiewicz a mild favorite: though the race was hard to nail down exactly, we wrote that we expected anything from a double-digit Protasiewicz win to a slight Kelly win. A commanding Democratic win would have followed the pattern of 2 of the last 3 state Supreme Court races (2018 and 2020) while the 2019 race offered a template for a Republican-aligned upset.
The result last night was nearly a carbon copy of the 2018 and 2020 results: Protasiewicz won by 11 points, or about the same margin as now-Justices Rebecca Dallet and Jill Karoksfy, who she will soon join on the bench.
Though former President Trump’s indictment happened a day after we put out our analysis last week, it was something that would, according to some punditry, rally Republicans. But, as we’ll explore here, last night’s returns offered scant evidence that Kelly disproportionately benefited from any Trump-inspired backlash.
One of our other pre-election predictions held up well: high turnout was a hallmark of last night’s election. In February’s primary election, roughly 960,000 votes were cast. As of this writing, that number roughly doubled in the second round, with close to 1.84 million votes cast. 2023 featured the second highest-turnout April state Supreme Court race of the last decade, falling only behind 2016. About 1.95 million votes were cast in that 2016 race — importantly, it was held in conjunction with the presidential primary that year, where both sides saw competition.
Though turnout was down slightly from 2016’s contest, it rose in 10 counties. Dane County (Madison), which is one of the two Democratic powerhouse counties in the state, was among those 10 — it easily had the largest increase, casting 23,000 more votes than in 2016. The county that saw the largest decrease was actually the state’s other blue bastion, Milwaukee, which tallied 45,000 fewer votes this year. But that Milwaukee decline was not necessarily to Democrats’ detriment. Kelly earned only half as many votes in Milwaukee (124,000 compared to 63,000) as Justice Rebecca Bradley, the conservative that year, while Protasiewicz garnered 17,000 more votes there than JoAnne Kloppenburg, the liberal candidate who lost statewide by 5 points.
As noted earlier, in terms of the percentage margin, 2023 lined up nicely with the toplines from 2018 and 2020: in all 3 instances, the Democratic-aligned judges won by about 11 points.
Conveniently, for the sake of comparison, Kelly was the conservative candidate in both the 2020 and 2023 elections. Last week, we wondered whether the increasingly partisan nature of state Supreme Court elections, coupled with the expected high turnout this year, could lead to a more “presidential” coalition. As Map 1 shows, that was basically the case.
Protasiewicz fared about half a percentage point better than Karofsky overall but lost ground in 59 of the state’s 72 counties. The 3rd District, which takes up a large swath out west, illustrates some of the gains Kelly made in non-metro Wisconsin. According to our rough unofficial calculations, Protasiewicz carried the district by about 10 points — which is quite respectable, considering it gave Trump a 5-point margin and flipped to Republicans last year. But in 2020, Karofsky would have carried the 3rd District by closer to 15 points (the seat was barely altered in redistricting).
Though we flagged the area as a potential Democratic cause for concern — mostly because it torpedoed their chances in 2019 — Protasiewicz performed well in metro Milwaukee. As the third image on Map 1 illustrates, Milwaukee County was the sole county where Protasiewicz improved by more than 10 points on Karofsky’s showing. In fact, Protasiewicz swept all 19 municipalities within the county — this has likely not been done by a Democratic or liberal candidate since 2017, when Evers was reelected in a 40-point landslide to his previous position, state Superintendent of Public Instruction.
In an era when, from election to election, Democrats have seen their most obvious gains come in the suburbs, last night’s result represented something of a change of pace. Compared to Karofsky, Milwaukee proper was one of the municipalities that shifted most to Protasiewicz, as Table 2 shows.
To be clear, Table 2 is not meant to single out Karofsky as a poor performer in Milwaukee (her numbers were quite robust), but it is more to emphasize how strong Protasiewicz’s showing was. In fact, Protasiewicz’s 81.9% within the city of Milwaukee was even stronger than the 80.1% two-party share that Joe Biden received there.
Aside from Menominee County, a small county in the north that consists of an American Indian reservation, the county that shifted most to Democrats since February’s first round was Waukesha, one of the Republican-leaning “WOW” suburban counties that border Milwaukee County. Six weeks ago, Waukesha County gave the Republican-aligned candidates a combined 64%-36% share over the Democrats. Kelly’s advantage there last night slipped to 58%-42%. In February, Kelly’s GOP rival was Judge Jennifer Dorow, who had a base in Waukesha and performed better than him in most Milwaukee metro counties. Given last night’s result, we have to wonder if Dorow would have been a stronger conservative candidate than Kelly. At minimum, Kelly likely suffered some defections from Dorow voters.
A notable result from last night — and one that Democrats will certainly try to replicate in actual partisan races — was that Protasiewicz narrowly carried the City of Waukesha, the largest municipality in the similarly-named county.
The victory by Protasiewicz opens the door to the Wisconsin Supreme Court to potentially intervene against the state’s congressional map, which is a version of a Republican partisan gerrymander. Other state courts have done so in recent years against both Republican and Democratic gerrymanders.
This has national implications given the closely-divided U.S. House. Despite being one of the nation’s most competitive states, Republicans now hold a 6-2 advantage in the state’s U.S. House delegation. After losing the red-trending Obama-to-Trump WI-3 in western Wisconsin last year, Democrats are now confined to just a pair of heavily blue enclaves centered around Madison and Milwaukee.
The current congressional map is actually one drawn by Evers. Following Evers’s decision to veto the Republican legislature’s maps during the post-2020 census round of redistricting, the state Supreme Court and its 4-3 Republican majority asked both sides to submit maps, but they asked for only minimal changes to the existing map. So the map, which is a Republican partisan gerrymander from a decade ago, was just tweaked. The court, in a 4-3 decision reached by the 3 Democratic-aligned justices as well as Republican-aligned Brian Hagedorn, picked Evers’s map. But, again, it’s still functionally a Republican gerrymander, although Wisconsin’s political geography also lends itself to Republican advantages in redistricting. Our understanding is that one might not expect a “fair” map, however defined, to produce 50-50 outcomes in a 50-50 political environment in the state, although we also don’t think a 6-2 Republican advantage in the congressional delegation and huge Republican state legislative majorities really reflect the political makeup of Wisconsin. (We analyzed the current map in depth last year.)
So we’ll see if the court decides to intervene now that Democratic-aligned justices are in charge. Protasiewicz does not take office until August, and litigation that would eventually lead to the state Supreme Court ruling against the congressional map remains only a hypothetical at this point, although a progressive law firm plans to ask the state Supreme Court to hear a redistricting case once Protasiewicz takes office, the New York Times reported.
Still, we are not going to necessarily assume that Wisconsin will have a new U.S. House map next year. There are a number of hurdles to be jumped first. That could include the Moore v. Harper U.S. Supreme Court case, which could end up constraining the ability of state Supreme Courts to intervene in cases regarding congressional gerrymandering. That case concerns the formerly Democratic North Carolina state Supreme Court’s intervention against a Republican congressional gerrymander there. But now that the North Carolina court flipped to Republican control last November, the new state court is rehearing a related case and may reverse the old decision. So it’s possible that the U.S. Supreme Court will just punt on Moore v. Harper following the change on the North Carolina court.
However, consider this possibility: What if the U.S. Supreme Court stands down on Moore v. Harper, and then the Wisconsin Supreme Court intervenes against its state’s congressional map? Couldn’t Moore v. Harper be revived, only this time as a Wisconsin case, as opposed to a North Carolina one? That is one of the moving pieces we’re keeping in mind as we think about the Wisconsin congressional landscape.
One other thing: As part of last night’s election, Republicans narrowly held a state Senate seat in a Trump +5 seat in a special election, which gives Republicans a supermajority in the Senate. That gives Republicans the power to potentially convict officials, such as Supreme Court justices, as part of an impeachment process initiated in the state House. State Sen.-elect Dan Knodl (R), who won the state Senate race last night, suggested the possibility of impeaching Protasiewicz in a pre-election interview. So a high-stakes battle over redistricting could also involve the “I” word. (And that doesn’t even get into abortion, the issue that likely played a huge role in Protasiewicz’s victory.)
We are making one rating change following the liberal takeover of the Wisconsin court. Rep. Bryan Steil (R, WI-1) moves from Safe Republican to Likely Republican. We considered listing Steil — Paul Ryan’s successor in the House — in our initial ratings, as he holds a district that is competitive on paper (Trump only won it by 2 points, and Protasiewicz carried it with about 53% in last night’s contest). The added uncertainty of redistricting gives us more reason to list it, as it’s possible that if the court imposes a new map and if it is in place for the 2024 election, both WI-1 in southeast Wisconsin and WI-3 in western Wisconsin could take on blue chunks of the Milwaukee and Madison areas, respectively. Those changes could seriously imperil newly-elected Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R, WI-3) and Steil in WI-1.
So they’ll both be Likely Republican for now, with the potential for much more dramatic changes down the line depending on how what appears to be a looming redistricting legal battle goes.
To reimagine a dated, 1970s ranch in Pleasanton, California, Destination Eichler partnered with Eyerly Architecture to bring this split-level house into today’s times. While the young family appreciated the 70s character of the home, they desired a fresh spin with added functionality seen in today’s builds. The updated abode now features modern details, mid-century furnishings, and a plethora of beautiful tile from Fireclay Tile.
A glass wall opens out from a multipurpose room offering views of Mount Diablo. The room’s other focal point is a double-sided fireplace that was updated with vertical wood slats and tile in a large, circular pattern.
The kitchen is renovated with light wood cabinets and a mosaic wall made with hexagonal tiles that complement the blue range.
The main living room features an angled wood ceiling and the other side of the double-sided fireplace. Clad in matte black tile, the fireplace has a minimalist aesthetic that is perfectly juxtaposed with the white walls and beams.
In the basement, which the original architect named “Rumpus Room,” a new kitchenette and bar is there to entertain guests.
Photos by John Shum.
As many of my readers will know, I am continually fiddling around with my online presence, to such a degree that I try my own patience. The one element that’s fixed is my newsletter, which (IMHO) has a clear identity and purpose. I always know when something I’ve come across will be a fit for the newsletter.
Deciding how to use my micro.blog page has been a bit more of a challenge, but in recent months I have settled on what strikes me as a good approach: It’s a kind of journal, with photos and links to what I’m reading and listening to. And that’s all.
Everything else goes here — but what should that “everything else” be? As I’ve been mulling this over, I’ve come to two conclusions:
Let’s see how well I keep my resolutions!
UPDATE: A reader has rightly questioned my comment about “nasty stuff.” Not the best phrase for what I mean, which is “current events that call for critique or denunciation.” So many people are already in the critique-and-denunciation game, I don’t need to add to their number. (That said, my next major post will be, um, a critique and denunciation. Oh well.)
Food inflation in the UK has been on a steady rise, and the situation is only getting worse. According to the Office for National Statistics, food inflation reached a staggering 18.2% in February. This dramatic increase is primarily attributed to poor crops resulting from bad weather in southern Europe and Africa, leading to the rationing of fruits and vegetables in UK supermarkets. — Read the rest
The bill passed by House Republicans has no chance in the Democratic-controlled Senate but appeals to many of the party’s most conservative voters.
Photograph by Gary Bridgman. courtesy of wikimedia commons, licensed under CCO 2.5.
“That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long,” William Faulkner wrote of his native Mississippi in his novel As I Lay Dying. “Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.” There came a day when, as a reader of Faulkner, I wanted to see what he was talking about. If the tendency of things in Mississippi was to hang on too long, as Faulkner claimed, maybe the populace and the landscape would be more or less the same as they’d been when he wrote those lines in 1930. The drive from Brooklyn to his house, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, was seventeen hours.
Five hours in, I made a pit stop at an abolitionist holy site: the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. John Brown’s raid on the armory, in October 1859, was one of the proximate causes of the Civil War. It enraged a plantation-owning class already frightened of northern agitators. “I want to free all the negroes in this state,” he said, referring to Virginia, where half a million people were enslaved. His plan was to seize guns and hand them out to men in the nearby fields, fomenting rebellion. With twenty-one followers, he stormed the armory and held parts of it for two days before U.S. marines flushed him out. All that’s left of the armory, mostly destroyed in the subsequent war, is the fire-engine house, which happened to be Brown’s final redoubt. He was captured there, and then taken to prison, tried, and hanged. I stood in the house; it’s the size of a two-car garage, dwarfed by the green, misty mountains that surround it. It drove home how tiny Brown’s force was, for it to have been able to fit inside such a small place—how inadequate to his stated task.
In Faulkner’s novella “The Bear,” John Brown appears without warning, in the middle of a stream of consciousness, and has a dialogue with God. He explains to Him that he, Brown, is unusual among men only in that he sees slavery for what it is, a “nightmare.” God asks, “Where are your Minutes, your Motions, your Parliamentary Procedures?” Brown responds, “I ain’t against them. They are all right I reckon for them that have the time.” Note that Faulkner makes God sound lame and officious, and gives Brown, an Ohioan, the locutions of a backwoods Mississippian. As a man of action, and as a person who acknowledges the true nature of things, Brown is a kind of honorary Southerner.
Faulkner called Lafayette County, his home, “the final blue and dying echo of the Appalachian mountains.” This is true. I followed the spine of the alpine chain southwest from the peaks of Harpers Ferry, where the weather was cool and pleasant, down through Tennessee, until the mountains dribbled away in the heat of northern Mississippi. Lafayette County was the last place where the hills were substantial. I drove an additional hour west to see the Delta, which was flat, consistent with its reputation. Then I turned around and drove to Oxford.
Rowan Oak, where Faulkner lived from the age of thirty-two until his death at sixty-five, stands just outside of downtown Oxford, but it’s surrounded by woods, invisible from the road. From the dirt parking lot, you walk through a hardwood forest of virgin timber until a clearing opens before you and you are in a secluded “postage stamp” world, to use Faulkner’s term, several acres of grass and gardens walled in on all sides by dense foliage. There is a long, broad footpath lined with fragrant red cedars, planted in the 1870s because they were thought to combat yellow fever. The footpath leads to a big white house. Most of Oxford looks like any American college town, block after block of modest Colonials on their little green lots. But at Rowan Oak, the manorial landscape perseveres.
The two-story clapboard house was built in 1844 by William Turner, the same Oxonian who built the nearby mansion that inspired “the Compson place,” the setting of The Sound and the Fury. Rowan Oak is not as grand as the Compson place, let alone the cotton-kingdom palaces in the environs of Natchez and Charleston. It looks like a crude drawing of a Greek Revival house; four Doric columns support an unadorned pediment. It’s plainer than Emily Dickinson’s house in Amherst, and about the same size. But Dickinson’s house faces the street and is visible to its neighbors, despite the poet’s famous reclusiveness. Rowan Oak, by contrast, is hidden from the surrounding village, set apart; it takes a bit of effort to get to or away from it. You’d think that Faulkner, famous for writing interlocking stories about a community where everybody was in everybody’s business (his invented Yoknapatawpha County) would have lived in a house situated as Dickinson’s was, on a thoroughfare, in the thick of things, and that Dickinson would have lived in a place like Rowan Oak. Circling the house counter-clockwise, I saw the wooden smokehouse Faulkner erected on the ruins of the quarters for enslaved people, the post oak barn he built for his cow, and the stable he built for his horses. He loved riding; he joined two foxhunting clubs while Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, and a fall from horseback at Rowan Oak was a factor in his early death, because the pain from the injury made it harder for him to stay sober. On the right side of the house, there was the portico, where, standing in the shade one evening, Faulkner’s wife, Estelle, gave him the title for one of his novels, remarking that there was something unusual about the quality of light in August. She later threw the one extant manuscript of Light in August out the window of a moving car, forcing her adulterous, dipsomaniacal husband to pull over and gather the pages.
It was August when I was there, and I thought I saw what Estelle meant: the humidity was so intense that the sunbeams looked sticky, honeyed. But it was cool and dim in the foyer, where a graduate student stationed in an armchair collected my seven-dollar fee. There was nobody else around, so he showed me the library in the front of the house, where Faulkner had written Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! There were handsome bookshelves Faulkner had built himself, with special compartments for his shotgun shells. Naive art hung framed on the walls. This was the work of Faulkner’s mother, Maud. There was one portrait of Faulkner, and one of Maud’s grandfather in his Confederate uniform, both men wearing the same sad, gentle expression. I walked down the hall to the back study, where Faulkner wrote his late novels. The plot for A Fable was outlined in pencil and ink across two of the walls. There was something deeply Faulknerian about this: a screenwriter’s preoccupation with plot coupled with a modernist’s urge to transgress. Write a detailed outline, sure, but on the wall, like a convict scrawling on the wall of his cell.
I couldn’t proceed upstairs, to the Faulkners’ separate bedrooms, without hearing my professor, the great Southern writer Allan Gurganus, one of very few novelists who might with justice be named Faulkner’s successor, describe those bedrooms in his mellow drawl to a rapt classroom. “It was a house divided between two drinkers who despised each other. He drank whiskey, she drank wine. And let me tell you, boys and girls …” Here, Allan leaned forward and paused to look each one of us in the eye. “You can still taste the poison in the air.”
The only evidence of discord in the Faulkners’ bedrooms was the window AC unit in Estelle’s, installed the day after William’s funeral, because he hated air-conditioning so much he wouldn’t let her install it while he was alive. I didn’t know to what degree my feeling of immersion in an unwholesome miasma was Allan’s influence, and to what degree it was the persistence of marital toxins in the atmosphere, but I wanted to get outdoors. I walked down the hall onto the balcony, and it started to rain, first a patter, then a downpour. It released the smell of the curative cedars. I went downstairs and out into the rain, and when the rain stopped, steam rose from the grass and the circular garden, from the scuppernong arbor and the knot of wisteria.
This was a beautiful place. But when Faulkner and his family moved in, it was rustic in the extreme. The house was lit by oil lamps and heated by a cast-iron stove in the kitchen. His stepdaughter, Cho-Cho, recalled that it was “tumbled down, surrounded by brush, outdoor privy, snakes, no electricity, plumbing.” But Faulkner was an avid do-it-yourselfer (see Geoff Dyer’s study of D. H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, for more on modernist writers and the home improvement impulse). He added amenities throughout the thirties and forties, funding his projects with his work on Hollywood screenplays, like The Big Sleep and To Have and Have Not.
During Faulkner’s lifetime, nobody knew whether Rowan Oak was a place where people had been enslaved. It was well-documented that Robert Sheegog, the house’s original owner, had enslaved many people, but Sheegog owned multiple properties, and this one was not a labor camp out in the country but a home built for leisure, close to town. The past at Rowan Oak was both present and befogged in Faulkner’s day, a subject of speculation, like Joe Christmas’s parentage in Light in August or Charles Bon’s in Absalom, Absalom!
After I’d wandered the grounds, I spent the weekend in Oxford, a heady experience for a Northern fetishist of things Southern. I ate catfish and grits, drank whiskey in a bar on the outskirts of town where old men in hats played guitars. I visited Faulkner’s grave and his birthplace, drove around the Mississippi hill country, and ate okra with congenial strangers. I tried to understand why I felt drawn to this part of the world. To that end, I drank whiskey in a second bar, this one downtown, overlooking the statue of the Confederate soldier who gazed “with empty eyes,” in Faulkner’s phrase, at the square. I decided the reason was this. I grew up in Amherst, a mile down the road from Dickinson’s house, and Massachusetts is the Mississippi of the North, Mississippi the Massachusetts of the South. They’re on opposite sides of the American political spectrum, but they’re both places where the present is dwarfed and chastened by the past. In Massachusetts, a given location is known as the spot where the minutemen faced the redcoats on the green, or where Jonathan Edwards delivered his sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” or where the Mayflower landed, or where the whalers set sail, or where the tea was dumped in the harbor. In Mississippi, it’s the same: here’s where Grant’s army bivouacked; here’s where the formerly enslaved Union soldiers drove the Texans from the field; here’s where Elvis grew up; here’s where Emmett Till was murdered; here’s where the earliest blues music was performed. I’ve heard both Massachusetts and Mississippi maligned as boring, and I’ve tried to explain to the maligners: You need to stop living so much in the present.
Faulkner is, of course, the guy who said, “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.” Rowan Oak preserves the physical evidence of his compulsion to live in a house that summoned bygone times, a need shared by the Compsons in The Sound and the Fury, Joanna Burden in Light in August, and Henry Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! You can see the agrarian outbuildings he rebuilt, the air conditioner he forbade (truly astounding), his riding boots, and the encircling woods that make the hum of traffic disappear.
Benjamin Nugent is the author of Fraternity: Stories, and the recipient of The Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize.
INNESS is a boutique country refuge located in Accord, New York, designed by Post Company in partnership with restaurateur and trained architect Taavo Somer, development team Michael Barry, CBSK Ironstate, and Lee Pollock. Named after renowned American landscape painter George Inness, the retreat was brought to life by the aforementioned group of designers and developers.
The 225-acre property features 40 hotel rooms distributed between a 12-room farmhouse and 28 cabins. Amenities include a restaurant and lounge, a 9-hole golf course by King Collins, a sports outfitter, swimming pools, tennis courts, hiking trails, an events barn, a farm shop, and a 3-acre organic farm designed by landscape architect Miranda Brooks. Slated for 2023, the wellness building will offer a spa, gym, and spaces for movement classes and yoga.
The property’s central theme revolves around the contrast between the cultivated and the wild. The grounds are anchored by social hubs designed for both aesthetic appeal and communal function, while also offering ample space for exploration and discovery. Inspired by the region’s Colonial Dutch architecture, the buildings showcase a minimalist design that highlights the picturesque landscape. Rustic details and an emphasis on local materials unify the structures, which are further enhanced by Miranda Brooks’ carefully balanced landscaping that seamlessly blends wild growth with manicured elegance.
The farmhouse serves as a central hub, featuring a communal lobby bar, guest kitchen by Plain English, library room, and game room. A coffee service and continental breakfast are available for guests and members throughout the week. The farmhouse rooms offer mountain views, modern amenities, and are furnished with a mix of vintage and custom furniture – including pieces by Sixpenny – artwork, and wares to create a cozy, lived-in atmosphere.
Photos by Adrian Gaut.
I’m back! — well, partially. Posting will be light for a while. But I certainly learned that for me micro.blog works best as a place to post images and sounds (and to make note of books I’m reading).
Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program.
Erica Berry is a writer and teacher based in her hometown of Portland, Oregon. Her nonfiction debut, Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear, was published by Flatiron and Canongate in early 2023. Other essays appear in Outside, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, The New York Times Magazine, Gulf Coast, and Guernica, among others. Winner of the Steinberg Essay Prize, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Tin House.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Erica Berry: I recently read Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, which was just longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and which I bought while teaching in the U.K. last summer, in part because I am just always drawn to what is hiding behind the stark white and blue of Fitzcarraldo Editions covers. I found it a totally propulsive novel, lyrically exploring the contradictions and societal pressures of motherhood, womanhood, etc. I was also stunned by The Story of a Brief Marriage, by Anuk Arudpragasam, which unfolds over just a few days in a Sri Lankan refugee camp amidst the civil war, with a granularity that was so gorgeously, delicately rendered in a very short book, while also raising larger questions of how we love amidst crisis. What does it mean, really, to tie ourselves to another body? I’d also be remiss not to mention a few wonderful nonfiction books: I was awed by the intellectual inquiry in Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, and am currently loving Doreen Cunningham’s researched memoir Soundings, about whales and migrations and family more broadly.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Berry: I think of one day in middle school, when I was dreading a camping trip required for my whole class from school, and my father—he was in the driver’s seat—told me that it would be okay if it wasn’t all fun. In those moments, he said, I could think of myself like an anthropologist or a journalist, and thereby create a little distance from living the drama, I could be observing it instead. He told me he was looking forward for me coming back to tell him the stories I had learned. I already knew writing as a form of self-expression, but until then I had not understood that storytelling was also a way of making the world more bearable. Even things that were challenging to bear IRL could be made palatable—or at least a bit more legible—by wrestling them into story. I suppose I grew up feeling like I was always a bit too curious and too sensitive, and writing let me see both those things as assets. I was hooked.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Berry: My best friend from college and I have a very close, joke-y relationship, but our senior year, she slipped a note under my door explaining that the way I’d told a story about her at dinner had rubbed the wrong way, and she felt a bit hurt. I felt horrible, truly like the worst person, but, at the same time, overcome with gratitude—she knew our relationship could bear the honesty. I struggle with confrontation, and I was awestruck by how gracefully she’d pulled it off. For years I saved her note. It was a reminder of who I wanted to be as a friend—the sort of person who expected more from the people around me, and was always working to strengthen those ties.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Berry: Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear is a weave of memoir, history, science, psychology, folklore and cultural criticism, telling three central stories: my own coming-of-age encounters with fear, the story of real wolves coming back into Oregon, and the legacy of ’symbolic wolves’ across time and space. When I started the book, I didn’t even consider myself an ‘animal person,’ and a part of me wanted to try and write a wolf book that made space for readers who might not think they would have any reason to read one. Whatever a reader’s preexisting relationship with wolves, I hope the larger life questions resonate: How do we evaluate our fears, and at what cost both to ourselves and to the world? How can we best share the world with one another, human and animal?
Henriette Lazaridis’ novel Terra Nova (Pegasus Books, 2022) was called “ingenious” and “provocative” by the New York Times. Her debut novel The Clover House was a Boston Globe bestseller and a Target Emerging Authors pick. Her short work has appeared in publications including Elle, Forge, Narrative Magazine, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, and more, and has earned her a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. Henriette earned degrees in English literature from Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston and runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel, at henriettelazaridis.substack.
The Rumpus: What book(s) made you a reader? Do you have any recent favorites you’d like to share?
Henriette Lazaridis: I still have my copy of James Ramsay Ullman’s Banner in the Sky, and you can tell from how beat up it is that I read it and over and over. I loved that book. I imagined myself as Rudi, the main character who climbs a mountain that’s a lot like the Matterhorn to succeed on the climb that killed his father. I loved to hike, and this mountain climbing adventure captured my imagination and got me into reading all sorts of other adventure books, like Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
Among the many recent wonderful books I’ve read, I keep going back to Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson. It’s not my favorite of hers, but it’s her latest, and it filled my need to be in the presence of her narrator once again–a narrator who does things I don’t think I’ve seen any other narrator quite do. Reading Atkinson is almost painful, she’s so good. It’s like speaking a language you know you can communicate in but whose real meaning keeps eluding you.
Rumpus: How did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Lazaridis: I talked the talk starting in middle school, and wrote for the school magazines and all that. I left my career in academia after fifteen years to return to fiction writing. But I didn’t really understand that that was what I wanted to do until I’d gotten yet one more letter in a stream of rejections and decided to burn all my manuscripts (Really. I looked up the regulations for a bonfire in your backyard and I was good to go.). I got some excellent advice from those who best knew me, and I didn’t light that bonfire. I realized I had to go all in, no hedging bets, no self-sabotage, no easy way out, if I wanted to really call myself a writer.
Rumpus: What’s a piece of good advice or insight you received in a letter or note?
Lazaridis: I can quote it by heart. It was one of the pieces of excellent advice I got, from my then husband, when I was trying to figure out if I should just quit this whole writing thing. “You can’t burn to reach a dream while seeking to protect yourself in case of failure.” Dammit, he was right.
Rumpus: Tell us about your most recent book? How do you hope it resonates with readers?
Lazaridis: Terra Nova is about two Antarctic explorers in 1910 and the woman back in London who loves them both. While the men are racing to be first to the South Pole, Viola aims at new achievements of her own, as a photographer and artist involved in the suffrage movement. The book explores questions of ambition and rivalry and kinds of love. I would hope readers would come away from the novel asking themselves how far would they go to achieve their own ambitions? How much would they be willing to sacrifice–and to ask others to sacrifice–in order to reach their goals?
Rumpus: What is your best/worst/most interesting story that involves the mail/post office/mailbox?
Lazaridis: During my childhood summers visiting my family in Greece, I’d go to the local kiosk and buy that week’s edition of the Mickey Mouse comic, in Greek. My grandmother and I would read it together, with the images helping me figure out the words. When I went back to the States for the school year, my grandmother would send me those comics from Athens every week, to help me keep up with my reading. (Greek was my first spoken language but the second one I learned to read.) Those comics came like clockwork, delivered in brown wrapping paper to my mailbox in New England, decorated with an array of Greek stamps, week after week. I loved the stamps, I loved the comics, but most of all, I loved having mail addressed to me–just me–every single week.
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Open-all-night diner chain Waffle House becomes the stage for a moving and dramatic goodbye scene in this SNL skit. Marcello Hernandez and guest host Jenna Ortega deliver a heartfelt performance as high school sweethearts saying their farewells before heading off to different colleges. — Read the rest
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