Win McCormack

If women are called Ma Anand Sheela, for example, why aren't men called Pa Anand Sheela, like Ma and Pa Kettle?

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.… (altro)

I confess I did not read through this entire volume. I will echo what many others have offered: the selection here is very inconsistent. I somewhat enjoyed to loved: Jane Avrich, Aimee Bender (always), Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Mary Caponegro, Julia Elliott, Samantha Hunt, Miranda July, Kelly Link, Lydia Millet, Alissa Nutting, Paisley Rekdal, Stacey Richter, Gina Zucker, and the Rick Moody essay on Angela Carter. The rest I found kinda boring or too muddled and glossed over. Still, this was a good read for being holed up with shin splints, and I've got a few more authors to add to the future readings list.… (altro)

Yeah, yeah, I know, this is a quarterly literary magazine, but as this is the last issue—after twenty years of featuring some of the finest examples of the written word—I feel that it deserves a look and a review. Issue volume 20, number 4, spans over 400 pages and includes an impressive array of fiction, essay, other nonfiction, and some grand poetry. There are goodbyes from both the editor in chief/publisher, Win McCormack, and the editor Rob Spillman, that set the stage for a magazine that I just can’t believe is gone from the literary landscape. There is even an apt quote from Bob Dylan.

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.… (altro)