Win McCormackRecensioni
Autore di Tin House 33 (Fall 2007): Fantastic Women
Recensioni
Tin House Volume 8 - Number 4 - Summer 2007 di Win [editor in chief] McCormack
I have a feeling that if the Antelope, Oregon residents hadn't been such rednecks, and conservative, and uptight, and also if Sheela hadn't been so hostile and bitchy and antagonistic, things wouldn't have gone so bad.
I tend to be sympathetic towards their ways of using the "human potential movement," except for their violent group exercises and the insistence letting men use women's bodies whether they wanted it or not.
This country, because it was founded on puritanism, is so freaking uptight, that anybody trying to tone that attitude down, and use meditation, is going to get my sympathy.
And we have this: " media representatives - like much of the Oregon intellectual community in general - were in many cases actually sympathetic towards the Rajneesh enterprise, viewing it as both an exercise of the First Amendment right of free exercise of religion and as a noble attempt to fulfill certain mutually shared ideals of community from the 1960s. In December 1982, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service denied Rajneesh the status of religious teacher (later revised) leading former Oregonian columnist Floyd McKay, in a commentary that began 'Merry Christmas to the Bhagwan - sorry but there's no room at the Inn,' called the ruling 'a charade' that 'supports the idea that there are few things more ridiculous than bureaucrats deciding spiritual questions.' he also complained that 'there is no place in America for the acknowledged spiritual leader of a quarter million peaceful people' (although Rajneesh claimed a worldwide following of 250,000 to 300,000, the actual number of committed disciples was 10,000) and declared that 'beyond the heavy-handed treatment of the people of antelope ... The Bhagwan and his followers have done no harm to this region.' ..."
Here's an excerpt taken from claims of a Rajneesh defector, named Eckhart Floether. He had been at the ashram in Pune India, before the Bhagwan flew to the United States:
".. first, Floether says, during a Rajneesh encounter group called Samarpan ('surrender') he saw the group leader, Swami Anand Rajen have sexual intercourse with a woman who was in the midst of an emotional catharsis over the recent deaths of her parents. Then, he says, the next day, in the same group, he saw two men have sexual intercourse with another woman; as he put it in his pamphlet: 'she did not, in my opinion, participate voluntarily.' Next, he says, a woman friend of his at the ashram who was pregnant informed him that, at the Bhagwan's suggestion, she was going to have an abortion performed by a sanyassin doctor. Finally, according to his account, another woman friend of his at the ashram, 28 years old at the time, told him that -- again at the Bhagwan's suggestion -- she was going to have herself sterilized."
In many ways, the Rajneesh movement, and the Bhagwan, were Machistas. As in many organizations, the men dictate to the women to do all the work while they sit back and enjoy the benefits of that work. Moreover, they think women are objects to be used however men see fit. An ex disciple named Roselyn Smith has much to say about this theme:
" 'the women were harangued into thinking that they were really uptight and negative if they didn't want to be sexually free. The women who didn't take part in it were made to feel very guilty and selfish and self-centered and uptight, frigid and rigid and rejecting of men. As I get further away from it I realize more and more... I used to think Bhagwan was a feminist. When I was in Pune, I used to want to write a book extracting his views on women. I thought that he supported a woman's right to an abortion, that he supported a woman's right to be a leader. Women ran the whole ashram there, and I was so impressed by that. But as I get further away, I realized that he's got the macho-male trip down flat; the way he got women to be sexual servants for men is every man's fantasy.' "
The people that worked closest to the Bhagwan were mostly from Rich conservative White backgrounds. To me, that doesn't really mesh with ideas like meditating for your inner peace, and tapping the human potential movement. Moreover, I looked up the Bhagwan's Rajneesh ashram that is still running to this day in India, and native Indians remark over and over in their reviews that they are turned away from the entrance, that only white people, Europeans, are admitted.
Ma Prem ARup, AKA Maria Gemma Kortenhorst, was a Dutch woman responsible for the administration of the therapy and meditation programs in Pune, India, and at the ranch in Oregon. She was from a traditional Dutch Catholic family, her father was a successful international banker and her grandfather was many years president of the lower House of the Dutch Parliament. She introduced the human potential therapies into Holland in the early 1970s after spending a year in residence at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur California. Someone like that, I mean you have to have tons of money to be able to not be working for a whole year and pay for their fees at that Esalen Institute. This is just laughable to me. What a bunch of b*******. In other words the Rajneesh movement was not really about human potential and meditating to tap your inner peace, it was about being in the in crowd, and buying your way into popularity.
I barely made my way through this book. I watched the Netflix special about rajneesh puram, called "Wild Wild Country, and so I looked up a book about it, wanting to know if a book would fill in extra details.
This author used the same couple of people over and over to give quotes about how they would help people get decompressed from living at the ashram in Oregon and Puna india. I felt it was rather lame. What I did get out of it, i excerpted.
But the time ain’t tall
Yet on time you depend and no word
is possessed
By no special friend
A though the line is cut
It ain’t quite the end
I’ll just bid farewell till we meet again.
I ordered this back issue online (even got a T-shirt) and once I started flipping through the table of contents, it was truly impressive. Favorite writers of all stripes were everywhere. My favorite poet, James Tate—a current fixation of mine—was even well represented. Just some of the more than sixty writers that shined between these covers were: Karen Russell, Elizabeth McKenzie, Aimee Bender, Anthony Doerr, Sharon Olds, Nick Flynn, Colin Whitehead, Brenda Hillman, and Fran Tirado. However, if you happen to find a copy of this issue, please ignore my list, and take every writer for a spin, as it was nearly impossible to be disappointed in this collection.
I never read every issue of the magazine, but I was always glad when I did pick one up. Literary magazines are great places to find new favorite writers, as well as to visit an old friend. Certainly, there are many other fine literary magazines left, but there is now a large hole in the world of magazines. The name Tin House continues on as a publisher of some fine books, but you will no longer be able to first read a writer’s work in the magazine or on their website.
This is a great collection to keep on a shelf, to always have ready to be taken down at any moment, flipped through, and to impress you.
Een naam onthoud ik meer dan anderen: Caoilinn Hughes.
This is a collection of stories and essays, but no distinction is made for which is which. I suppose it doesn't matter much--good writing is good writing--but fiction and essay are evaluated differently in my mind; distance between reader and author is blurred. The anthology is arranged alphabetically by author, which makes some transitions a little rough but is a pretty standard method of organization, even if it's not my preference. As with any collection, quality varies from author to author; there are some stand-out pieces and some forgettable ones, and plenty that fall somewhere in between. (The essay on the furrie convention was particularly interesting, even if the author did have a definite "aren't these people kind of weird?" vibe coming through her writing.)
I'm waffling between keeping this four stars and acknowledging that it's probably more like 3.5, so I'll call it three-and-three-quarters and be done with it.
One last point: as far as I can tell, Steve Almond is nowhere in this collection, but he's tied to it on Amazon and therefore here on GoodReads.
I however did not care for the group of articles published after the implosion of the Rajneesh cult. As I suffered through those articles all I could think of "this book has a afterword?!?" I read the afterword so fast I barley remember it. Needless to say it didn't blow me away in fact if you want my copy all you need to do is ask...seriously
Alyson Sinclair's "The Invention of the South" and "I Dreamed The Clouds Went By The Moon Like Dead Fish" were memorable poems in this issue.
The interview with Israeli author Etgar Keret is perplexing. He refers to U.S. Republicans as rednecks and "crazy radical Christians," but states that Israel is "very liberal and very fascist at the same time." Perhaps I'm reading into it, but it seemed that he thought that was a good thing. He thinks Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize has racists undertones. He also stated that his writing was like a "biblical holiness" to him. Crazy radical Christians?
Reality Hunger author David Shields is also interviewed. An excerpt from Per Petterson's I Curse The River of Time is featured, but I didn't read it because the book is sitting on my shelf. I didn't want to ruin the experience of the novel as a whole.
The issue kicks off with “iff,” a short story by Antonya Nelson. She is considered a “master” of the form, but I’m not seeing it in this example. I found the narrator extremely annoying, and by the end of the story I thought, “No wonder your husband left you, your kid’s whipped by his girlfriend, and your mother-in-law is suicidal.” Moving on.
Michael Dickman’s poem “False Start” is one of my favorite pieces in this issue. Each of the five segments begin with the line, “At the end of one of the billion light years of loneliness…” With an opening line like that, the poem has to be great. The speaker addresses his mother, father, and brother. It begins with his mother in the kitchen feeding flies from her fingertips, but the imagery shifts to the ocean and restoration. I’m not sure what it all means, but I like it.
Karen Shepard’s “There Be Monsters” is a subtle dismantling of an wife and mother. She begins by telling us that when Natalie and her husband were dating, they joked about “deal breakers” in a marriage.
" Now Natalie thinks of the things that deserved to be deal breakers but that you let slip while you waited for further evidence, extenuating circumstances, explanations worthy of forgiveness. Things that now, twenty years down the road, are off-limits, unfair game. You took them off the table yourself. They sequestered themselves in their own little room, emerging for purposes of mockery and torment."
Natalie wishes her husband would do something unforgivable, something to let her out of her marriage. I felt for her at first, but as the story progresses, Shepard reveals that Natalie is not as together as she imagines. Towards the end, I didn’t like Natalie very much, but I got the feeling Natalie didn’t like Natalie very much. There is a moment of light at the end, but it’s hard to say if it is enough for the family.
Ben Marcus’ “The Moors” is the centerpiece of this issue. Editor Rob Spillman describes it this way”
Ben Marcus, who, in true literary-convention-spanking style presents us with “The Moors,” in which he blatantly ignores Fiction Rule Number 12: It is impossible to write a thirty-seven page story about a hapless man tied in knots over what to say to a colleague as they arrive at the coffee station at the same time.
That doesn’t quite do this story justice. It will make you laugh. It will make you want to beat the ever-living snot out of the narrator. It will make you question your own sanity by the time you finish it. The Moors is the break room in the labs where the narrator, Thomas, works. He describes it this way:
" The Moors may just as well have had a genital-removal station you visited on your way out, water-fountain height, retractable into the wall. Tilt in your hips and come back clean. And the egghead architects laughing and pointing, maybe even rubbing themselves into states of ecstasy… It was a pornographic pleasure, no doubt, to watch people killed in buildings, killed slowly, brought just near death and held in suspension simply by precalculated dimensions, by room design."
You see, in real time the events of the story would probably take five minutes at the most, but Thomas goes on for thirty-seven pages thinking of these things in his head, while the attractive co-worker in front of him pours her coffee. To give you a clue as to Thomas’ mental state, he describes his co-worker breathing as “A soft wall wall swollen with something almost unbearably luscious underneath. Was that an okay thought to have? Hello soft wall, he wanted to say. I love you.”
There is much more sweet goodness in this issue, but I feel I have already overstayed my welcome. I will leave you with Ana Menendez’s excellent essay about traveling through Afghanistan in the late 1990s- “From Kandahar to Herat.” Menendez witnesses boy soldiers patrolling the streets with whips and a Friday execution. Her epiphany comes when she is traveling through Dasht- e- Margow, “The Desert of Death.” They are caught on the road after dark because of car trouble. Bandits are a serious fear. She writes, “As the sun began to set and the desert went on and on, panic started to set in. What if the drivers were in league with the bandits? How would we respond to a roadblock? To a rape?”
And then, of course, they encounter a roadblock. As they approach, their fear turns to joy. “The translator cheered: ‘It’s Taliban!’” They CHEERED because it was Taliban. They were safe. Menendex concludes,
" …The image lingers more than a decade later. “Taliban!” With what joy we said it. And with that flood of relief, I remember, also came a terrible wisdom. In the years since, I’ve learned not to rush to understanding. That life’s brutality can be unfathomable. And that freedom is a pleasing abstraction until some horror finds you vulnerable and alone. Then, you gladly trade your visions of hell for a truck full of boy soldiers who once filled you only with a pure and uncomplicated fear."
Yep. I’m glad I re-subscribed.
José Saramago AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL Death With Interruptions
The child's mother was sobbing and repeating over and over, My son, my father, and her sister came and embraced her, weeping and saying, It's better like this, it's better like this, the life these poor unfortunates were living was no life at all.
J. C. Hallman ETHAN: A LOVE STORY
Sky Meadow was protected at its base by a gatehouse and a team of geriatric guards in gray uniforms who controlled the white tube arm that blocked passage into the community.
Christopher R. Howard INTELLIGENT PEOPLE SPEAKING REASONABLY
A web of china white from each of the three bullet holes had spread across the windshield in front of the driver's chest. The subsequent burst took the driver's head.
Adam Braver THE CASKET, A COMPLETE EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL NOVEMBER 22, 1963
People ran chaotically. Newspapermen scurried for telephones. Elected officials milled. Congressmen. Senators. A general stood with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist, as though he might blow the place to smithereens.
NEW VOICE FICTION
Natalie Bakopoulos FRESCO, BYZANTINE
They had come of age in such places, those island prisons—during the Nazi occupations, during the civil war, throughout the fifties, and now—and now some were growing old there.
POETRY
Mary Szybist
ANNUNCIATION IN Byrd and Bush
ANNUNCIATION IN Nabokov and Starr (complete poem)
Marvin Bell
COMBAT PHOTOGRAPHY
Kevin Young
MAY DAY BLUES
RING OF FIRE
LIME LIGHT BLUES
Ethan J. Hon
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
INTERVIEW
A CONVERSATION WITH THOMAS FRANK
Win McCormack talks with Thomas Frank about his new book, The Wrecking Crew, which surveys the devastating impact of conservative governance on America.
ESSAYS & FEATURES
Barry Sanders AMERICA: A VERY BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
You know there's something happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? It's high time to find out.
Nick Flynn PROTEUS (TORTURE AND BEWILDERMENT)
Here I am, my fingers tight around Proteus's neck, asking that same question, over and over, as if the answer exists, inside the maniac, inside the prisoner, inside the beloved, inside my mother, inside my father, inside me, as if the answer is there and just needs to be released.
Christopher R. Beha THE STUDY OF PERFECTION
William F. Buckley and T.S. Eliot aside, you're free to be a conservative in literature and a liberal in politics.
Francine Prose OUT FROM UNDER THE CLOUD OF UNKNOWING
The author wrestles with the slippery question: What makes a work of art political?
Wallace Shawn THE UNOBTRUSIVES
With the country riven by class divisions and drunk on imperial hubris, the writer and actor can't help but wonder what role the inhabitants of the Mansion of Arts and Letters have to play in our political destiny.
Bruce Handy, Tim Bower INTERNMENT, A GRAPHIC ESSAY
From the Japanese internment camps of World War II to Guantanamo, a graphic query into what was and is being done in our names.
Win McCormack THE END OF DEMOCRACY?
With the United States losing influence in the world and the rise of authoritarian capitalism in China and Russia, the future of democracy looks tenuous. But can either system survive?
Cynthia Ozick, Dorothy Allison, Charles Baxter, John Barth, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Lydia Davis, Lydia Millet, and more THREE QUESTIONS
A truly Olympic dream team of writers answers the following questions: What do you fear most about the future? What gives you hope for the future? And, is there a book—fiction or non—that captures your political sensibility?
Slavoj Zizek SEXUALITY IN THE ATONAL WORLD
Masturbation may be the ideal sexuality for the internet age. The Slovenian cultural critic explains the failure of love in contemporary Western society, summoning French novelist Michel Houellebecq to help.
D.W. Gibson ENGAGE CHRISTIAN MOUNZEO
What good is truth if it goes unsaid? Citizens of the Republic of the Congo know all too well the evils of censorship, as they struggle with their country's oil industry and its rampant damage to the environment.
Brian Evenson THE REFINER'S FIRE
Joseph Smith still reigns as the best fiction writer Mormonism has produced. The author prophesizes that he won't be dethroned anytime soon.
Curtis White TAKE BACK YOUR EMPTINESS
Let's get real and acknowledge all the lies we've been told so many times and so effectively that we've internalized them.
Mazen Kerbaj NEW WAR
These pen-and-ink drawings, dispatched from Lebanon, struggle with how to represent the conflict there and, more broadly, life under siege.
David Rees GET YOUR WAR ON
As a cult phenomenon, this cartoon series has provided an apt and hilarious outlet that sheds light on the ills of the Bush Administration.
Markos Moulitsas Zúniga ADAPT AND INNOVATE
The Daily Kos creator shows how Ukraine's Orange Revolution succeeded, not by being the first effort to oust the tyrannical regime of Leonid Kuchma, but by mobilizing the masses through the Internet.
LOST & FOUND
Michael Kobre
ON THE FILM Black Hawk Down
Kim Adrian
ON VALENTIN PAPADIN'S Teach Yourself to be a Madman
Tom Grimes
ON NORMAN MAILER'S Miami and the Siege of Chicago
Judith Paterson
ON LILLIAN SMITH'S Strange Fruit and Killers of the Dream
Mark Statman
ON JOSÉ MARÍA HINOJOSA (complete writing)
Edward J. Hill
ON ELDRIDGE CLEAVER'S Soul on Ice
Win McCormack
ON URSULA LE GUIN'S The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
WORD GAME
Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon
A CAUSTIC ACROSTIC
LAST WORD
Eduardo Galeano OBJETOS PERDIDOS
The twentieth century, which was born proclaiming peace and justice, died bathed in blood.
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