Notes
by Tina Darragh

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This project report is a self_swerving production.

(self_swerving@comcast.net)

for “Rule of Dumbs”

The first section of “rule of dumbs” was published as Belladonna pamphlet #30 (New York: Belladonna Books, Spring 2002) with thanks to editor Rachel Levitsky.

Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (New York: New York Review, 1975).

Henry Spira on Peter Singer’s Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998).

misnomer “Father of Animal Rights” for Peter Singer: for example, “Father of Animal Rights Among TIME’s Most Influential People”, The Island Vegetarian: Vegetarian Society of Hawaii Quarterly Newsletter, July-September 2005 (http://www.veghawaii.com/newsletter-2005-09.pdf)

Solon’s law forbidding public lamentation: Richard A. Hughes’s Lament, Death, and Destiny . p.17-18. (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2004).

May Day beaker-speaks: Sherry Turkle’s Psychoanalytic Politics: Freud’s French Revolution. p. 85 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1978).

Marx’s human/animal dualism: “Marx on Humans and Animals” in Ted Benton’s Natural Relations: Ecology, Animal Rights & Social Justice (London/New York: Verso, 1993).

evolution is not a straight line: “Now this may be a bit disconcerting to some people. Sentient beings, sapient human beings, have always thought that there was something inevitable about them. Even devout Darwinian evolutionists tend to put our own immodest species at the top branch of the evolutionary tree, as if we were somewhat better and more evolved than other living species. But…chance has played a role in putting every living thing at the top of the present evolutionary tree.” p. 4 in Jeffrey K. McKee’s The Riddled Chain: Chance, Coincidence, and Chaos in Human Evolution (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000).

“Hanging”: Zenitha Prince’s “PETA generates outrage Equating Blacks with mistreated animals”, Afro American, September 2, 2005, A1, A6.

(dis-pose) ABLE creatures: the tile pays homage to Kevin Bales’
Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999, and was published in War and Peace #2 (San Francisco: O Books, 2005) with thanks to the editors Leslie Scalapino and Judith Goldman.

use of trademarks as verbs: pp. 219 – 223 in Herbert Charles Morton’s The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Concentration camp/slaughterhouse comparison controversy: pp.
49-50 in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1999).

For a discussion of the interrelationships among the mass murders of Jews, Gypsies, and the disabled during National Socialism: Henry Friedlander’s The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)

for Lost Limbo

A history of Limbo: George J. Dyer, S.T.D., Limbo: Unsettled Question (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964)

the quiet removal of Limbo from the catechism: “Dumping Limbo” in Free Inquiry 18(1): 45-46, Winter 1997/1998. The article is attributed to “Voltaire”.

beginning of life at conception as a novelty in Roman Catholic moral tradition: G.R. Dunstan, “The Moral Status of the Human Embryo: A Tradition Recalled”, Journal of Medical Ethics 10(1): 38-44, March 1984.

A description of the variety of Jewish opinions on abortion can be found in Laurie Zoloth’s “Each One an Entire World” in Sacred Rights: The Case for Contraception and Abortion in World Religions, Daniel C. Maguire, editor, pp. 21-53, Oxford University Press 2003. Maimonides’ teachings are discussed on p. 38.

Qur’an and ensoulment: pp. 40-41 in Encyclopedia of Bioethics, 3rd edition (McMillian 2004). Anabaptist opposition to the state regulating religious beliefs can be found on p. 36 in the same volume.

for an overview of the legal arguments for abortion rights as freedom of religion: Peter S. Wenz’s Abortion Rights as Religious Freedom (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992)

Patriot Act protest: the following polemic was read in conjunction with “Lost Limbo” at Bridge Street with P. Inman, and at the i.e. reading series in Baltimore with C.A. Conrad and Frank Sherlock, December 2005:

Disarm the Patriot Act by Arguing for Abortion Rights as Religious Freedom Rather Than as the Right to Privacy of Roe v. Wade

There is no such thing as privacy under the US Patriot Act. We live in a police state sustained by single-issue, right-to-life politics coated in faux religiosity. Constitutionally, privacy is not one of our named rights. Freedom of religion is, and definitions of when life begins and when abortion is immoral differ among and within established religions. Some legal scholars have argued that, constitutionally, the right to have an abortion is covered by the First Amendment because beliefs about the moral significance of non-viable fetuses are religious beliefs. Roe v. Wade should be abandoned as both constitutionally unsound and politically dangerous as it perpetuates the myth of privacy in the United States. The next anti-abortion court ruling should be challenged on the basis of religious freedom.

for “precautionary hysteria”

defining hysteria - the womb as an animal on the move: pp. 10-22 in Ilza Veith’s Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965)

the return of hysteria: Elaine Showalter’s Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1997; Gulf War Syndrome as a media event: pp. 133-143.

for a review of radiation injury studies from the 1940s – 1960s, including a discussion of the principle of the “latent period”- “..the time required for depletion of cells in affected tissues through interference with cell renewal” after radiation exposure: Arthur C. Upton’s Radiation Injury: Effects, Principles and Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)

for information on current studies of the effects of depleted uranium: the Uranium Medical Research Centre http://www.umrc.net/

on the use of “hysteria” to illuminate the history of environmental health issues: at a Bridge Street Books poetry reading on October 24, 1999, I protested a literary critic’s use of “hysteria” as an organically-determined condition rather than as a socially-constructed one. I apologize for not recognizing that the critic was trying to counter postmodernism’s ahistorical reputation by reminding readers of hysteria’s track record as an illness.

text of protest:

Open Letter of Protest to Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie:

When I read Leslie Scalapino’s Seamless Anti-Landscape, her response to your “The Language Poet as Autobiographer: Ron Silliman’s Under Albany”, I was surprised that you described Ron Silliman’s, Barry Watten’s, and Michael Palmer’s works as proceeding from their lives while Leslie’s proceeds from her body. I don’t agree with your description of Leslie’s work as “just barely controlled hysteria”, but your uncritical use of the term “hysteria” here undercuts your critique of Leslie’s work as not being “disjointed” enough since historians characterize hysteria as a discontinuous state, a collision of the conflicting social roles women play. Having now read your essay in full, I find that this depiction takes place as part of a general plea to academia to cease demonizing LANGUAGE poetry. It is abhorrent that, in the name of writing you champion because it “…undermines the ‘natural look’”, you have attempted to normalize the works of a group of male poets by contrasting them with that of a lone woman who’s “…mind’s not right.”

When, in speaking of Ron’s work, you say that “…indeterminacy of agent and referent does not preclude a razor-sharp realism of description”, I agree with you. It does not exclude history, either. If we LANGUAGE poets seemed to agree about anything early on, it was that we challenged notions of voice and the unified subject to highlight the historical conditions of our lives, not to obliterate them.

In a recent “Philly Talks” newsletter, Ron reiterates that his writing challenges people to resist being good soldiers who uncritically buy into the roles society creates for them. You completely undermine Ron’s critical theories when you attempt to give him a “natural look” by comparing his “jaunty utterances” to Leslie’s “hysteria” in the same sentence.

The title of Leslie’s piece in question is “hmmmm”. That is not the monotone hum of one suffering from mental illness, but the sharp reflex of one who is thinking about the ways language and images and memories intersect. Where you see Leslie assigning a distorted meaning to a scene, I see Leslie setting up a frame for questioning it. With a job description of critic, it does not surprise me that you would dismiss poetry that includes critique as part of its format. But no matter what bases you have for your individual likes and dislikes, your use of gender stereotypes puts you in the front line of the good women soldiers of internecine struggle who dismiss other women’s intellectual contributions by calling them crazy. Hysteria as a concept has been, and thanks in part to you continues to be, a means of authenticating the lives of men over the defectives bodies of women. It should give all of us pause that someone who describes herself as a reader of LANGUAGE poetry for over 20 years should continue to think in these terms. Perhaps we owe you a collective apology. But you definitely owe Leslie a big apology, both personally and professionally.

texts cited:

Perloff, Marjorie. The Language Poet as Autobiographer: Ron Silliman’s Under Albany. In: Ron Silliman and the Alphabet, Quarry West 34, Porter College, U.C. Santa Cruz, 1998, pp. 167-181. Perloff wrote about “hmmmm” in Leslie Scalapino’s Considering how exaggerated music is (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982). “hmmmm” is dedicated to Dog-Woman.

Rule of Dumbs

Illuminated Apology Laments

Author's Statement