Let Me In. Dir. Matt Reeves. English, 2010. Horror film.
Another vampire movie? The knee-jerk reflex is of course to ask, why? Yet this film breaks, for me, new ground as the main character is a compelling, deftly controlling "twelve-year-old" little girl. Eternally living and yet on the brink of death if she is starved of human blood, she uses a nasty strain of co-dependence and grabs a boy every fifty years or so to do the killing for her. Why exactly they convince themselves to do this, I'm not sure, except for the fact that the girl is endearing (though, refreshingly not over-sexualized), seems more vulnerable than she is, and the boys she selects are lonely, weird, and need somebody whom they can help. So they grow up, taking care of this parasite by doing the dirty illegal work of murder and harvesting, while the girl who was their first love stays innocent in a string of apartments and drinks to her satisfaction. To be fair, the boy whom this film focuses on did get some help from her, both psychological and physical, in dealing with his bullies. Those jerks will never grace the halls of any school again. This movie features a strong, natural, and powerful, young female and makes the point that girls can hold a film together without exposing their cleavage.--olw (Written by Ola Liota Weinbaum)
For more information on this film, click on the film's title above.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Friday, November 5, 2010
A Midsummer Night's Press Announces a Call for Submissions
http://amidsummernightspress.typepad.com/amsnp/2010/09/cfs-for-2-anthologies-of-jewish-gay-and-lesbian-poetry.html
A Midsummer Night's Press announces a call for submissions for two anthologies celebrating queer Jewish poetry:
Flamboyant: A Celebration of Jewish Gay Poetry
edited by Lawrence Schimel
and
Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry
edited by Julie R. Enszer
to be published in Spring 2011.
"We are looking for poems that celebrate and question, meditate and intimate, argue and reconcile contemporary queer Jewish identity. What is queer Jewish experience in the twenty-first century? What poetry expresses queer Jewishness today?
Whether you write about interfaith queer parenting, cruising in shul, how it feels to sign a ketubah in a country that won't recognize our same-sex marriages, fetishing a sheggitz or being fetishized, we want to read about it and share it with others who want to read it as well.
What are our sacred texts for today? If they don't yet exist, write them. What are our queer Jewish blessings, curses and prayers?
While there is a rich tradition of queer Jewish writers who have made an indelible mark on our literature over the years, from Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich, to Allen Ginsberg and Edward Field, we are looking for work that reflects queer Jewish identity in the new (secular) millennium. As such, we are open to either unpublished work, or work that was published since 2000 (this would include work originally published in a magazine or anthology before 2000, which was later collected in a book published after 2000).
We welcome voices from across the spectrum of Jewish identity, from observant to merely cultural, and their intersections with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities and experiences. We are open to all styles of poetry, from formal to free verse. We welcome queer Jewish voices from outside the U.S., and are willing to consider translations into English (It is the translator's responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem in English).
Both anthologies are open to previously published work, but it is the poet's responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem.
We welcome work from Jewish trans poets, as long as the content of the work is revelant to either gay or lesbian experience.
There is no limit to the number of poems which may be submitted, as long as the Jewish and queer content are both relevant."
Submission instructions:
Payment will be three copies of the anthology per contributor.
About the editors:
Lawrence Schimel is the author or anthologist of over 100 books, including Found Tribe: Jewish Coming Out Stories; Kosher Meat; Best Gay Poetry 2008; First Person Queer; PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality; Two Boys in Love; The Future is Queer; etc. He has won the Lambda Literary Award (twice), an Independent Publisher Book Award, the Spectrum Award, and other honors. He writes in both English and Spanish, and his work has been translated into 27 languages.
Julie R. Enszer is the author of the poetry collection Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2010) and the chapbook Sisterhood (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in numerous Jewish, feminist and queer publications, including Bridges; Jewish Women's Literary Annual; Sinister Wisdom; Calyx; Women's Review of Books; Feminist Studies; Washington Blade; Lambda Book Report; etc. She is also the founder of the Lesbian Poetry Archive.
About the publisher:
A Midsummer Night's Press is an independent poetry publisher, publishing primarily in two imprints:
A Midsummer Night's Press announces a call for submissions for two anthologies celebrating queer Jewish poetry:
Flamboyant: A Celebration of Jewish Gay Poetry
edited by Lawrence Schimel
and
Milk and Honey: A Celebration of Jewish Lesbian Poetry
edited by Julie R. Enszer
to be published in Spring 2011.
"We are looking for poems that celebrate and question, meditate and intimate, argue and reconcile contemporary queer Jewish identity. What is queer Jewish experience in the twenty-first century? What poetry expresses queer Jewishness today?
Whether you write about interfaith queer parenting, cruising in shul, how it feels to sign a ketubah in a country that won't recognize our same-sex marriages, fetishing a sheggitz or being fetishized, we want to read about it and share it with others who want to read it as well.
What are our sacred texts for today? If they don't yet exist, write them. What are our queer Jewish blessings, curses and prayers?
While there is a rich tradition of queer Jewish writers who have made an indelible mark on our literature over the years, from Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich, to Allen Ginsberg and Edward Field, we are looking for work that reflects queer Jewish identity in the new (secular) millennium. As such, we are open to either unpublished work, or work that was published since 2000 (this would include work originally published in a magazine or anthology before 2000, which was later collected in a book published after 2000).
We welcome voices from across the spectrum of Jewish identity, from observant to merely cultural, and their intersections with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities and experiences. We are open to all styles of poetry, from formal to free verse. We welcome queer Jewish voices from outside the U.S., and are willing to consider translations into English (It is the translator's responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem in English).
Both anthologies are open to previously published work, but it is the poet's responsibility to secure permission to reprint the poem.
We welcome work from Jewish trans poets, as long as the content of the work is revelant to either gay or lesbian experience.
There is no limit to the number of poems which may be submitted, as long as the Jewish and queer content are both relevant."
Submission instructions:
- Title file with the initials of the anthology and author's last name: F-Surname.doc or MH-Surname.doc
- Include your name, your mailing address, your email address, and a bio WITHIN the .doc file with your essay, as submissions will be separated from emails to be read.
- Submit your work by email as an attachment in .doc or .rtf format to: queerjewishpoetry@gmail.com
Payment will be three copies of the anthology per contributor.
About the editors:
Lawrence Schimel is the author or anthologist of over 100 books, including Found Tribe: Jewish Coming Out Stories; Kosher Meat; Best Gay Poetry 2008; First Person Queer; PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality; Two Boys in Love; The Future is Queer; etc. He has won the Lambda Literary Award (twice), an Independent Publisher Book Award, the Spectrum Award, and other honors. He writes in both English and Spanish, and his work has been translated into 27 languages.
Julie R. Enszer is the author of the poetry collection Handmade Love (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2010) and the chapbook Sisterhood (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in numerous Jewish, feminist and queer publications, including Bridges; Jewish Women's Literary Annual; Sinister Wisdom; Calyx; Women's Review of Books; Feminist Studies; Washington Blade; Lambda Book Report; etc. She is also the founder of the Lesbian Poetry Archive.
About the publisher:
A Midsummer Night's Press is an independent poetry publisher, publishing primarily in two imprints:
- Fabula Rasa, dedicated to work inspired by myth and fairy tale, which has published Fortune's Lover: A Book of Tarot Poems by Rachel Pollack, and Fairy Tales for Writers by Lawrence Schimel
- Body Language, devoted to queer poetry, which has published "This is What Happened in Our Other Life" by Achy Obejas; "Banalities" by Brane Mozetic, translated by Elizabeti Zargi; "Handmade Love" by Julie R. Enszer; and "Mute" by Raymond Luczak.
Saturday, October 9, 2010
The 10.2 Cover Art: Challenging Gender in a Sexist Society
Artists generally seek to engage, inspire, and challenge others with their art or creative work. Others may simply create something just to express outwardly what is deep inside themselves, a part that is invisible to the outer world but known only by them. The artists whose work has been selected for Femspec in particular tend to voice their beliefs or thoughts of feminism, gender, and sexuality with the hope or expectation that we will be enlightened, or at the very least, entertained by their art. Whatever their reasons are, it's safe to say that artists do their part in providing the world with a numerous range of unique perspectives, all of which to consider while we expand on our own consciousness or awareness.
Kartika Affandi Koberl is an artist who certainly expresses a unique perspective, especially as she challenges ideas of gender through her artwork. An interesting sculpture of hers boldly adorns the cover of 10.2, our most recent issue.
As you can see from the photo, it is a fiberglass sculpture of colorful and odd-looking phalluses, all of which have different heads or faces. My first reaction to this display was to laugh. The artwork is a bit humorous in its boldness. I thought to myself, what exactly is this artist trying to convey about the male gender? I thought one possible theory was that the phalluses, particularly the commanding one in the middle, represented the male ego in society and the man's fight to maintain his leading role in a changing world where women are rising both professionally and perhaps socially. I also thought the art was a representation of male egos or personalities and how they each operate in a male-dominated society. Then when I studied the art more carefully, I noticed some things about the faces that would suggest a possible play on words. For instance, the middle phallus's head appears to have a glove on it (it is a shape of a fist but looks like a gloved fist), so I immediately thought of the term "glove," another word for "condom." The orange phallus has the head of a rooster or chicken, so the term "cock" entered my mind, which is another term for a penis. I also thought it could represent an arrogant or "cocky" man. The pink one is a fish, which made me think of a blowfish... which of course caused me to think of the act of fellatio. I wasn't sure if these connections were just coincidental or if the artist did in fact have these terms in mind (consciously or subconsciously) when creating this thought-provoking sculpture. I wasn't very sure what the sleeping phalluses meant, and couldn't quite make out their "faces," but thought possibly they represented impotence or the impotent male. If so, I pondered, were they symbols of men in society who have no influence or power in the world, or do they simply represent men whose egos do not stand at attention like the others do? As you can see, art like this can spur many different interpretations.
So, what was the artist really thinking when she created this potentially controversial piece of art? During an interview with Femspec, Kartika explained that the inspiration for the art first came from a visit to a sex shop in Amsterdam, where she noticed condoms with different heads. A couple years later she made the sculpture, and from reading the interview in 10.2, each penis represents a type of man with the heads serving as symbols of their personalities, etc. The middle phallus represents an arrogant man; the one with a chicken's head represents a philanderer, or as Kartika put it, "a man who is already married but likes to be with other women" (for a chicken always wants more food); the one with a fish head represents a "slippery" man and one who "thinks like a woman;" and the two that are asleep represent men who have worked hard (Kartika in Femspec 10.2, 65-66).
One could say that perhaps the artist is objectifying men by using their sexual parts as representations of the men themselves, as if their phalluses define who they are. Yes, they are defined by their personalities, but why use phalluses to represent men? The truth of the matter is, what other way could she have shown us that the sculpture is about the male gender? We've all been taught that the first way to differentiate between genders is to identify the sexual parts of the person. Women have often been objectified in the same way by the media, society, and men. Do you think the artist was turning the tables and reversing sexism? Or was she mocking the male gender to make up for the objectification and disrespect some men have shown towards women? During the interview, the artist claimed regarding the sculpture: "I'm not trying to shame men. I'm not against men. I'm just having a lot of fun" (Kartika in Femspec 10.2, 66). Some could argue that the fun is at the expense of the male gender. Normally, I would say that if women should not be objectified, then men should not be as well. To rally against the mocking and objectification of women but accept the same treatment of men would make us hypocrites, and would pose a double-standard way of thinking. However, this is ART. Art doesn't have to play by the rules. Perhaps though, when reflecting on Kartika's art we should be a bit more open-minded when witnessing art created by male artists that portrays the female gender in the same light, lest we be caught in the double-standard.
Here are some comments from the artist herself regarding the art: "One says, standing in the middle with the metallic color, 'I am rich, good looking, and many girls are around me.' And the other one with the cock-head says 'I am a simple man but it is easy to find someone beside my wife (chicken are used to being in the garbage).' The other fish head is very slippery, so do we as wives have difficulty understanding what our husbands want? The smaller size, pale blue, says 'Will you please all shut up! I have done my job.' It's all about men's behavior."~Kartika
No matter how one interprets this art or feels about it, it is safe to say that many would agree that this artist is gutsy to create a sculpture such as this, especially since she did so in Indonesia, a country that is largely populated by Muslims. The Muslim culture is known to be strict about many things, some of those things being gender, sexuality, and expression. However, as Kartika mentions in 10.2, areas like Indonesia are not quite as limited now as they were twenty years ago due to globalization. Nevertheless, it is a culture that is still mainly male-dominated, still holds sexist ideas, and still tries to silence or oppress its women. Thankfully, the artist discussed here was neither silenced, nor afraid to express herself as she saw fit.
Now it is your turn to speak up. What are your impressions or interpretations of the art on the cover of 10.2? Did it shock you? Make your comments in the comment area and/or participate in the polls at the bottom of the home page. Thank you for your time and participation!
~Kelly VanBuren
Kartika Affandi Koberl is an artist who certainly expresses a unique perspective, especially as she challenges ideas of gender through her artwork. An interesting sculpture of hers boldly adorns the cover of 10.2, our most recent issue.
So, what was the artist really thinking when she created this potentially controversial piece of art? During an interview with Femspec, Kartika explained that the inspiration for the art first came from a visit to a sex shop in Amsterdam, where she noticed condoms with different heads. A couple years later she made the sculpture, and from reading the interview in 10.2, each penis represents a type of man with the heads serving as symbols of their personalities, etc. The middle phallus represents an arrogant man; the one with a chicken's head represents a philanderer, or as Kartika put it, "a man who is already married but likes to be with other women" (for a chicken always wants more food); the one with a fish head represents a "slippery" man and one who "thinks like a woman;" and the two that are asleep represent men who have worked hard (Kartika in Femspec 10.2, 65-66).
One could say that perhaps the artist is objectifying men by using their sexual parts as representations of the men themselves, as if their phalluses define who they are. Yes, they are defined by their personalities, but why use phalluses to represent men? The truth of the matter is, what other way could she have shown us that the sculpture is about the male gender? We've all been taught that the first way to differentiate between genders is to identify the sexual parts of the person. Women have often been objectified in the same way by the media, society, and men. Do you think the artist was turning the tables and reversing sexism? Or was she mocking the male gender to make up for the objectification and disrespect some men have shown towards women? During the interview, the artist claimed regarding the sculpture: "I'm not trying to shame men. I'm not against men. I'm just having a lot of fun" (Kartika in Femspec 10.2, 66). Some could argue that the fun is at the expense of the male gender. Normally, I would say that if women should not be objectified, then men should not be as well. To rally against the mocking and objectification of women but accept the same treatment of men would make us hypocrites, and would pose a double-standard way of thinking. However, this is ART. Art doesn't have to play by the rules. Perhaps though, when reflecting on Kartika's art we should be a bit more open-minded when witnessing art created by male artists that portrays the female gender in the same light, lest we be caught in the double-standard.
Here are some comments from the artist herself regarding the art: "One says, standing in the middle with the metallic color, 'I am rich, good looking, and many girls are around me.' And the other one with the cock-head says 'I am a simple man but it is easy to find someone beside my wife (chicken are used to being in the garbage).' The other fish head is very slippery, so do we as wives have difficulty understanding what our husbands want? The smaller size, pale blue, says 'Will you please all shut up! I have done my job.' It's all about men's behavior."~Kartika
No matter how one interprets this art or feels about it, it is safe to say that many would agree that this artist is gutsy to create a sculpture such as this, especially since she did so in Indonesia, a country that is largely populated by Muslims. The Muslim culture is known to be strict about many things, some of those things being gender, sexuality, and expression. However, as Kartika mentions in 10.2, areas like Indonesia are not quite as limited now as they were twenty years ago due to globalization. Nevertheless, it is a culture that is still mainly male-dominated, still holds sexist ideas, and still tries to silence or oppress its women. Thankfully, the artist discussed here was neither silenced, nor afraid to express herself as she saw fit.
Now it is your turn to speak up. What are your impressions or interpretations of the art on the cover of 10.2? Did it shock you? Make your comments in the comment area and/or participate in the polls at the bottom of the home page. Thank you for your time and participation!
~Kelly VanBuren
Monday, September 20, 2010
Call for Abstracts: Popular Culture and Political Theory
Homer Simpson and the Promise of Politics: Popular Culture as Political Theory
Edited by Joseph J. Foy and Timothy M. Dale
"Abstracts are sought for an edited volume exploring political theory/political philosophy as presented through popular culture. This volume is to be published through the University Press of Kentucky as part of their politics and popular culture series, which includes Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture and Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent through American Popular Culture. For additional information, please see the attached 'Project Overview.'
The chapters of this book will consider the political theory represented by major works of popular culture, written to examine these ideas in the context of great political thinkers and influential political ideas. The typical chapter will select a film, television series or musical artist, or a genre of examples from any of these categories, and examine the popular culture artifact in the context of a collection that covers a wide range of popular culture texts organized to provide a relatively comprehensive look at the political theory canon through a popular culture lens. The book is intended for readers being introduced to political theory (first and second year college students), or readers generally interested in the intersection between cultural and political studies.
Contributor Guidelines:
Although abstracts are currently being sought, authors who have unpublished essays relevant to this collection are encouraged to submit."
Please forward to all potentially interested contributors
Timothy Dale
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Department of Social Change and Development
Mary Ann Cofrin Hall, B310
University of Wisconsin, Green Bay
2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311-7001
Phone: 920-465-2061 Fax: 920-465-2791
Edited by Joseph J. Foy and Timothy M. Dale
"Abstracts are sought for an edited volume exploring political theory/political philosophy as presented through popular culture. This volume is to be published through the University Press of Kentucky as part of their politics and popular culture series, which includes Homer Simpson Goes to Washington: American Politics through Popular Culture and Homer Simpson Marches on Washington: Dissent through American Popular Culture. For additional information, please see the attached 'Project Overview.'
The chapters of this book will consider the political theory represented by major works of popular culture, written to examine these ideas in the context of great political thinkers and influential political ideas. The typical chapter will select a film, television series or musical artist, or a genre of examples from any of these categories, and examine the popular culture artifact in the context of a collection that covers a wide range of popular culture texts organized to provide a relatively comprehensive look at the political theory canon through a popular culture lens. The book is intended for readers being introduced to political theory (first and second year college students), or readers generally interested in the intersection between cultural and political studies.
Contributor Guidelines:
- Brief abstract (100-500) words describing the popular culture artifact employed and the political theory/political philosophy examined
- Resume/CV for each contributing author
Although abstracts are currently being sought, authors who have unpublished essays relevant to this collection are encouraged to submit."
Please forward to all potentially interested contributors
Timothy Dale
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Department of Social Change and Development
Mary Ann Cofrin Hall, B310
University of Wisconsin, Green Bay
2420 Nicolet Drive, Green Bay, WI 54311-7001
Phone: 920-465-2061 Fax: 920-465-2791
Sunday, September 19, 2010
An Interview with Piper Martin at Twin Oaks
This is a continuation of interviews with members of Twin Oaks. The theme is the possibility of using the imagination to collectively challenge gender with various intentional organizations of child care responsibilities. The opinions and recollections expressed are those of the individuals interviewed, and are not necessarily reflective of the community or of the people about whom they speak.
As you can tell, if you have been reading the previous entries, most Twin Oaks members are very busy. They have to keep up with a quota of 42 hours of assigned labor a week, although older members get a pension of one hour off per year per week starting at the age of 50. That is, at the age of 50, you only have to work 41 hours; at 51, 40, and so on down the line.
Nonetheless, no matter what the age, it becomes a challenge to corner a member and schedule a block of time--45 minutes, an hour--which he or she can pencil on on a labor sheet to sit down and reminisce in front of a computer about any topic under consideration.
As a guest, I too have a labor sheet, and am required to make quota, so my time is also under high demand. This Sunday morning, Piper and I have about 45 minutes before I go to water the orchard behind Morningstar, a job Elsa gave me, and Piper goes to wash and cut apples.
I gave Piper an article I had written from oral history I had done with women in Palestine/Israel while I set up the session, and then organized to begin my questions.
Piper, at the age of 86 and three quarters, having lived on Twin Oaks around 30-35 years, moved here first in March of 1971 but then left a few times and returned. She remembers the time when children lived away from their parents in Degania, a building named after a kibbutz in Israel. I asked what she could tell me about the Degania system.
Piper: First of all, I think you have to put it in the context of how different Twin Oaks was then from now. We had a much higher quota and less resources. Quota was 49-51 hours a week.
Q: What do you mean by quota?
P: Quota is part of our elaborate system of equalizing the community's work load among all members. Once a year, we vote in the Trade-Off game for our best guess of how many hours of work we want to do to earn our income and to do our daily living chores like cooking, total that up and divide by the number of members, and get the number that is called "quota." In reality, this requires many compromises in the things that we would like to be creditable as quota hours in order to keep the quota, or required number of hours, average, per week. It is perfectly OK for members to "bank" their extra hours and spend them later.
Whenever we were not getting enough work done, we raised quota to get closer to what we wanted. Most of the time just raising the quota left us not yet getting what we wanted. And allowance was very low. It could have been only a dollar a week. Or ten dollars a month. Something very minimal. Now it is minimal by other people's standards but it is 86 dollars a month now. When our allowance was so low, we were making do with a diet inferior to what most of us wanted. That included things like baloney sandwiches. When a cheese sandwich was served, if we wanted an extra slice of cheese, we had to pay a nickel out of that tiny allowance. This was before we were making our own cheese, before we even had any cows. So to work more hours meant we could improve our community diet. And there were other things like that. If people needed eye glasses, you pretty much did without them, unless you had parents who paid for your eye glasses. Turn-over was extremely high then. A lot of people came with these wonderful visions and found they couldn't stick it out. But also this many years later, it is funny to think how many people came expecting it to be an easy life with lots of sex and time to play music and life an easy life.
But we had this vision and the parents originally participated in this vision that the children would not be owned by their parents, that the children would be Twin Oaks children, that we would collectively enjoy them being Twin Oaks children and we would collectively take responsibility for them being our children.
Q: What happened with that vision?
P: Well I think one of the main things that happened was that the parents did not feel the community took as good care of their children as they could by themselves, even if they had to go back to the mainstream. Back in the mainstream, they could get grandparents to help them, often grandparents with money. There were only 30-40 members at the time, so lots of complications happened--jealousy, when we didn't believe in jealousy. We believed in equality. We wanted every body to have everything. And here we were. So when the parents left, they would leave with their children. If they left the community, they took their children with them, which was not the understanding we had started with in attempting communal parenting. The idea was that if the parents left, the kids would stay and other people here would parent them. So it was a very serious job to take on a primary for one of these babies. There were various levels, but the ones who were equivalents to the parents were essentially saying they were taking on the child for life just as the parents were. So Josie Kincaid and two other young women--one was named Freddie--and a hammocks manager for so long-- were intensely committed to this idea that their children were going to be community children, and their children were going to get super care.
For a couple of years we had had no children at Twin Oaks after blaming ourselves for the poor care of the children at Twin Oaks who had left with their parents. So this time we waited until we had completed Degania and had what we thought were super super conditions for children to grow up. Meaning that before these babies were born, we had handles to the doors down low where toddlers could reach them and electric outlets up high where toddlers could not reach them--all sorts of things to make life good for our children. And we even had a glorified crib. Do you know about the Skinner cribs? For example, a soft mesh mattress was used so that urine could go straight through and the infant did not have to wear diapers 24 hours a day. There were other things about the crib such as a fan attached to the outside so that the child would be cool. We were basing this all on the fictional book Walden Two by BF Skinner. When Skinner came to visit, we started proudly showing him the crib. We just had one of the special cribs and were wondering whether we could make another one ourselves. Skinner looked very flustered as he tried to explain to us that the crib was supposed to be right in front of a large window so that the child could see birds coming and going, the weather through the sunshine, clouds and rain, etc. And instead, we had placed the crib in a small special room up against blank walls with windows, high above the crib, that the child could not look out of. And then we tried to make up for it by putting commercial mobiles in the crib. I don't remember the year. Skinner only made that one visit. He wanted to come earlier, but we said, we don't feel ready yet. Would you first wait for us to invite you?
Walden Two was about a thriving large community that already had lots of resources. And here we were a little struggling community with maybe 4 per cent of the number of members that the Skinner community had, trying to see what we could provide for our children. So some mild degree of disagreement between the parents and the non-parents started as soon as the first metas got labor credits for watching and recording the actions, and the number of hours the infants slept, and the number of times they peed, and all that, while the rest of us worked "much harder".
Q: What is a meta? And why did they have to keep records?
P: Metas are a name we picked up from Israel. The Israeli name is longer but it started with those letters, of the name of the person watching the children in the kibbutz. Record keeping was part of our idea of how to take super care of the children. People took childcare shifts and we wanted each shift to be well informed to do a superb job.
I never was a meta. I was part of the non-parent, non-meta group.
Q: How did you view the situation?
P: I was extremely disappointed when it failed. I actually had been seriously considering the possibility of adopting a child to raise under these experimental conditions, although I was over 50 by this time. It was supposed to be security for the children, the best possible life for the children. But the program wasn't enough to fulfill the metas, some of whom went on to have their own biological children to add to the roster of Twin Oaks children. Some metas tried especially hard. One I remember in particular was Eve. She wanted to be the kind of meta who would not have her own child but would spend her life as one of the mothers of these communal children. But, apparently after a lot of soul searching, she did leave the community. And left the children feeling as if a mother or father had left them. This was a warning to all the biological parents and to the community that we could not count on anybody to stay and feel as responsible as the real parents did. This is where the vision hit the reality. Eve made it known to the community that she was feeling unfulfilled. I think she tried to get pregnant and couldn't.
But by that time we also discovered that the biological parents wanted to have a bigger say in what the children ate or didn't eat, whether the children brushed their teeth or not, whether they dressed in gender-specific clothes. Some people thought we should train their kids from the beginning to wear girl clothes and boy clothes. For the boys to wear girls clothing---that was a big leap. Some of the community was in favor and some not.
Q: So it broke down over gender roles--the parents did not want their boys wearing skirts?
P: No, they did not want the community deciding whether their boys would wear skirts. It was also over whether their kids could eat sugar....was it important to have supervision over tooth brushing...little daily things. Too many by far to have community meetings over all these things. Remember there was no precedent anyplace. Walden Two did not talk about details like this. As far as we knew we were the first ones trying to benefit our children by behaviorist methods in a group setting. We didn't have any resources to go visit kibbutzim to learn how others had done things until after our whole effort was history.
Q: Had you already raised your own children before this?
P: : Oh yes. My youngest was in college at Antioch. After the first year, the students there were self-supporting. I had no financial obligation any more. My older daughter had graduated from college and had a job in NYC, and my son, who had stayed with his father after our divorce, was on his own at that time.
Q: Having raised your children in a nuclear family, what was the appeal?
P: It was a major appeal of the community in the first place that we were going to do a better job than on the outside raising children.
Batya: Thank you for being such a good resource.
As you can tell, if you have been reading the previous entries, most Twin Oaks members are very busy. They have to keep up with a quota of 42 hours of assigned labor a week, although older members get a pension of one hour off per year per week starting at the age of 50. That is, at the age of 50, you only have to work 41 hours; at 51, 40, and so on down the line.
Nonetheless, no matter what the age, it becomes a challenge to corner a member and schedule a block of time--45 minutes, an hour--which he or she can pencil on on a labor sheet to sit down and reminisce in front of a computer about any topic under consideration.
As a guest, I too have a labor sheet, and am required to make quota, so my time is also under high demand. This Sunday morning, Piper and I have about 45 minutes before I go to water the orchard behind Morningstar, a job Elsa gave me, and Piper goes to wash and cut apples.
I gave Piper an article I had written from oral history I had done with women in Palestine/Israel while I set up the session, and then organized to begin my questions.
Piper, at the age of 86 and three quarters, having lived on Twin Oaks around 30-35 years, moved here first in March of 1971 but then left a few times and returned. She remembers the time when children lived away from their parents in Degania, a building named after a kibbutz in Israel. I asked what she could tell me about the Degania system.
Piper: First of all, I think you have to put it in the context of how different Twin Oaks was then from now. We had a much higher quota and less resources. Quota was 49-51 hours a week.
Q: What do you mean by quota?
P: Quota is part of our elaborate system of equalizing the community's work load among all members. Once a year, we vote in the Trade-Off game for our best guess of how many hours of work we want to do to earn our income and to do our daily living chores like cooking, total that up and divide by the number of members, and get the number that is called "quota." In reality, this requires many compromises in the things that we would like to be creditable as quota hours in order to keep the quota, or required number of hours, average, per week. It is perfectly OK for members to "bank" their extra hours and spend them later.
Whenever we were not getting enough work done, we raised quota to get closer to what we wanted. Most of the time just raising the quota left us not yet getting what we wanted. And allowance was very low. It could have been only a dollar a week. Or ten dollars a month. Something very minimal. Now it is minimal by other people's standards but it is 86 dollars a month now. When our allowance was so low, we were making do with a diet inferior to what most of us wanted. That included things like baloney sandwiches. When a cheese sandwich was served, if we wanted an extra slice of cheese, we had to pay a nickel out of that tiny allowance. This was before we were making our own cheese, before we even had any cows. So to work more hours meant we could improve our community diet. And there were other things like that. If people needed eye glasses, you pretty much did without them, unless you had parents who paid for your eye glasses. Turn-over was extremely high then. A lot of people came with these wonderful visions and found they couldn't stick it out. But also this many years later, it is funny to think how many people came expecting it to be an easy life with lots of sex and time to play music and life an easy life.
But we had this vision and the parents originally participated in this vision that the children would not be owned by their parents, that the children would be Twin Oaks children, that we would collectively enjoy them being Twin Oaks children and we would collectively take responsibility for them being our children.
Q: What happened with that vision?
P: Well I think one of the main things that happened was that the parents did not feel the community took as good care of their children as they could by themselves, even if they had to go back to the mainstream. Back in the mainstream, they could get grandparents to help them, often grandparents with money. There were only 30-40 members at the time, so lots of complications happened--jealousy, when we didn't believe in jealousy. We believed in equality. We wanted every body to have everything. And here we were. So when the parents left, they would leave with their children. If they left the community, they took their children with them, which was not the understanding we had started with in attempting communal parenting. The idea was that if the parents left, the kids would stay and other people here would parent them. So it was a very serious job to take on a primary for one of these babies. There were various levels, but the ones who were equivalents to the parents were essentially saying they were taking on the child for life just as the parents were. So Josie Kincaid and two other young women--one was named Freddie--and a hammocks manager for so long-- were intensely committed to this idea that their children were going to be community children, and their children were going to get super care.
For a couple of years we had had no children at Twin Oaks after blaming ourselves for the poor care of the children at Twin Oaks who had left with their parents. So this time we waited until we had completed Degania and had what we thought were super super conditions for children to grow up. Meaning that before these babies were born, we had handles to the doors down low where toddlers could reach them and electric outlets up high where toddlers could not reach them--all sorts of things to make life good for our children. And we even had a glorified crib. Do you know about the Skinner cribs? For example, a soft mesh mattress was used so that urine could go straight through and the infant did not have to wear diapers 24 hours a day. There were other things about the crib such as a fan attached to the outside so that the child would be cool. We were basing this all on the fictional book Walden Two by BF Skinner. When Skinner came to visit, we started proudly showing him the crib. We just had one of the special cribs and were wondering whether we could make another one ourselves. Skinner looked very flustered as he tried to explain to us that the crib was supposed to be right in front of a large window so that the child could see birds coming and going, the weather through the sunshine, clouds and rain, etc. And instead, we had placed the crib in a small special room up against blank walls with windows, high above the crib, that the child could not look out of. And then we tried to make up for it by putting commercial mobiles in the crib. I don't remember the year. Skinner only made that one visit. He wanted to come earlier, but we said, we don't feel ready yet. Would you first wait for us to invite you?
Walden Two was about a thriving large community that already had lots of resources. And here we were a little struggling community with maybe 4 per cent of the number of members that the Skinner community had, trying to see what we could provide for our children. So some mild degree of disagreement between the parents and the non-parents started as soon as the first metas got labor credits for watching and recording the actions, and the number of hours the infants slept, and the number of times they peed, and all that, while the rest of us worked "much harder".
Q: What is a meta? And why did they have to keep records?
P: Metas are a name we picked up from Israel. The Israeli name is longer but it started with those letters, of the name of the person watching the children in the kibbutz. Record keeping was part of our idea of how to take super care of the children. People took childcare shifts and we wanted each shift to be well informed to do a superb job.
I never was a meta. I was part of the non-parent, non-meta group.
Q: How did you view the situation?
P: I was extremely disappointed when it failed. I actually had been seriously considering the possibility of adopting a child to raise under these experimental conditions, although I was over 50 by this time. It was supposed to be security for the children, the best possible life for the children. But the program wasn't enough to fulfill the metas, some of whom went on to have their own biological children to add to the roster of Twin Oaks children. Some metas tried especially hard. One I remember in particular was Eve. She wanted to be the kind of meta who would not have her own child but would spend her life as one of the mothers of these communal children. But, apparently after a lot of soul searching, she did leave the community. And left the children feeling as if a mother or father had left them. This was a warning to all the biological parents and to the community that we could not count on anybody to stay and feel as responsible as the real parents did. This is where the vision hit the reality. Eve made it known to the community that she was feeling unfulfilled. I think she tried to get pregnant and couldn't.
But by that time we also discovered that the biological parents wanted to have a bigger say in what the children ate or didn't eat, whether the children brushed their teeth or not, whether they dressed in gender-specific clothes. Some people thought we should train their kids from the beginning to wear girl clothes and boy clothes. For the boys to wear girls clothing---that was a big leap. Some of the community was in favor and some not.
Q: So it broke down over gender roles--the parents did not want their boys wearing skirts?
P: No, they did not want the community deciding whether their boys would wear skirts. It was also over whether their kids could eat sugar....was it important to have supervision over tooth brushing...little daily things. Too many by far to have community meetings over all these things. Remember there was no precedent anyplace. Walden Two did not talk about details like this. As far as we knew we were the first ones trying to benefit our children by behaviorist methods in a group setting. We didn't have any resources to go visit kibbutzim to learn how others had done things until after our whole effort was history.
Q: Had you already raised your own children before this?
P: : Oh yes. My youngest was in college at Antioch. After the first year, the students there were self-supporting. I had no financial obligation any more. My older daughter had graduated from college and had a job in NYC, and my son, who had stayed with his father after our divorce, was on his own at that time.
Q: Having raised your children in a nuclear family, what was the appeal?
P: It was a major appeal of the community in the first place that we were going to do a better job than on the outside raising children.
Batya: Thank you for being such a good resource.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Barbara Ardinger's "Transmutation" Will Enchant You
Barbara Ardinger wrote an enchanting story about a beautiful woman who seemed to have everything, yet does not possess a soul, and in which an Alchemist must find her a soul, lest he be destroyed by the Lord Bishop's orders. Although the author has mentioned that the story is an "alchemical version of Beauty and the Beast," I can't help but also be reminded of The Wizard of Oz due to the girl in this story lacking something vital (in this case, a soul), something that would obviously be impossible to live without.
As the Alchemist was trying desperately to locate or create a soul for this woman, in the back of my mind I of course wondered whether she already possessed a soul, thus also carrying a similar moral to the story as the one in The Wizard of Oz ("you've always had it, my dear").
The story is beautifully written, and does seem to contain a moral within it. When the Alchemist's housekeeper tells the couple to go and be together in their home in the wilderness (a home the soulless woman dreamed of), she also stated that she would show the Lord Bishop how they have found their souls. It's possible the housekeeper, who appears to be a good witch, will either trick the Lord Bishop to save the couple, or actually performed a spell in which a soul would be provided to the woman, thus sparing their lives. But I actually feel the story implied something more meaningful, which is that the woman already had a soul within her all along... for one could not possibly love another without one.
To read this beautiful story, click here.
~Posted by Kelly VanBuren
As the Alchemist was trying desperately to locate or create a soul for this woman, in the back of my mind I of course wondered whether she already possessed a soul, thus also carrying a similar moral to the story as the one in The Wizard of Oz ("you've always had it, my dear").
The story is beautifully written, and does seem to contain a moral within it. When the Alchemist's housekeeper tells the couple to go and be together in their home in the wilderness (a home the soulless woman dreamed of), she also stated that she would show the Lord Bishop how they have found their souls. It's possible the housekeeper, who appears to be a good witch, will either trick the Lord Bishop to save the couple, or actually performed a spell in which a soul would be provided to the woman, thus sparing their lives. But I actually feel the story implied something more meaningful, which is that the woman already had a soul within her all along... for one could not possibly love another without one.
To read this beautiful story, click here.
~Posted by Kelly VanBuren
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Femspec announces Femspec Books
New start up of the publishing imprint Femspec Books.
So far this imprint has published a trial run of one full-length novel in the genre that Femspec usually publishes and a second book just off the press. Contact us for review copies.
The journal is starting this press because after ten years positioned in the publishing business, bringing out 500 plus artists, critics and authors, we have been approached numerous times with full-length manuscripts. Thus we feel uniquely situated to bring out authors who will already have an audience with us (our readers) and to whom critics and reviewers will already turn, on our recommendation.
Not only will we increase our profits, but we will enlarge our impact on the literary universe, which was our goal in the first place---to broaden the understanding of the speculative genre, to make it more inclusive, which most feel we have done.
We will offer the same sort of peer-review we do for the journal and will retain our integrity as a respected press.
Our first two trial run publications (to get out the quirks) are my own:
The Nightmares of Sasha Weitzwoman, a 583 .p novel about a woman who goes to Jerusalem to cover the first Intifada and gets caught in a haunted hotel in West Jerusalem, previously excerpted in the Jewish issue. Available for $26 plus shipping and handling, $35.
Opening Palms, a book I have been selling at festivals which is based on a column I wrote for the Santa Barbara Independent for a year and a half. $10. Plus shipping and handling, $15.
Contact us if you have manuscripts of fiction, nonfiction or poetry. Look soon also for Fermspec Productions, producing music cds and books on tape.
Batya Weinbaum
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