some thots on oneida

• the bookstore had several books that were out of print, and cheap.
  
• one of them was special love/special sex a diary of one of the members
  
• there were 45k visitors to neida b./w 1862 and 1867, this was only mentioned in passing by the tour but thids must have been a huge source of money (cf similar numbers of visitors to the shaker community near by
• the culture of mutual criticism c/w est, etc in the 70s
• Victor Neyes, the son of the founder, was thought to have gone insane due to a combo of masturbation and certain texts, including goethe, he ended in a philly asylum
  
• prophibtion against masturbation as an example of selfish pleasure, and against the unitarian "biblical communinsm", but also the 19th century idea that it saps strength
• little or no information in the material about the interventions b/w homosocial and homosexual, neweth diaries mention male friendship, and switching rooms, and the like, plus the idea that everyone is married, and the liminal space of same gendered friendship sin the 19th century new england (cf d michael quinn and the lds; boston marriages) but little or no work has been done about this in the oneida
  
• all of the apartments focus on a central parlour, which functions as an example of the architechture of control, but a difuse, community one, sort of a paropticon set on its side. the parlour was supposed to control gossip, backbiting, and the like, but often failed--in fact the discourses of communalism that were encouraged and the discourses of communalism that were discouraged were often flowing from the same sources (cf eliza snow's diaries of plural marriage in utah, and how to lighten the community of sister wives)
• the refusal or inability to mainstream the practive was not that big a deal--the usual reasons for disalootiuon, hunger, backbiting, etc was less opernational then the natural dissoloution that marks the life span of these spaces
  
• the weirdest thing about the discourses of this space--is what caused its eventual downfall was the desire for single families and heterosexual pair bonding; the queerest thing about this place could be a "special" friendship (c/c the use of words like unusual or special friendship in satholci seiminaries to note male sms)
• much of the biblical discourse of the onedia centres on eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven as a singifer of sexual radicialism
• i still wonder what happened after the disovling--to the adults and children who had to leave this utopia, what does expuslsion mean in this context
• much of the deciding who would do which work was decided by an almost random combition of skill, mutal benifance, luck, and hard work
  
• in the library voulmes of the dial, on meserism, spiurtralism, fashonaible texts on the avant garde spiritual practices of the day; they visited and traded pracitical information with the shakers; and the mansion was based at least partially on deisgns by robert own, communalism was not only wiht in their own spaces but w/i an emerging community of these new spaces
  
• more research needed on the onedia's use of st paul
• there practice of spiritual eugenics versus personal or ethnic eugenics, as an excuse to have children
  
• prefectionism as a unique american way of sorting out the tension b/w work and grace, and is v calvinist.