- Last night I watched Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two with my four year old daughter and 7 year old son. The kids taught me the points in the movie I was supposed to laugh. If you have never seen this movie, the dogs talk and there is a voice over for each dog, and as the human voice talks, the dog’s mouth opens and closes, so as to mimic a human while talking. In the middle of the movie, right when the Chihuahuas are plotting to save their owner’s parents’ house from bank repossession, I fell asleep.
- As long as I have been old enough to understand what the middle class is, it has been described as “shrinking.”
- I imagine it is much easier to fall out of the middle class as opposed to rising from the middle class to the upper class. The middle class family in Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two is in a free fall out of the middle class and they are trying to save themselves. In one scene, they visit the bank which threatens to repossess the house. The banker says to the middle class family that unless the family gives the bank $40,000 within three weeks, the family will need to leave their property. To make the bank look extra cruel, the banker offers the family a free pen on their way out—I believe with a happy face erasure on the top.
- When a text starts in the middle, we call it “in medias res”; when I think of the word “middle,” for some reason, it makes me think of the word “mediation.”
- When two parties get divorced, they often end up “in mediation,” and if things go well in the negotiations, they receive a “mediated settlement agreement.”
- When I wake up, Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two is still on, each kid at my side on the sofa, and I realize it’s in fact the very rich character, “Aunt Viv” (no relation to the middle class family) who saves the middle class family from ruin, not the well-intentioned “human dogs” who think that entering and winning the $50,000 grand prize at the Beverley Hills Dog Show might save the family. They don’t win because they are not pure bred Chihuahuas, something they could have known before they entered. Because the aristocracy intervenes in the drama, the only thing that the dogs can do is praise the goodness of the rich “Aunt Viv,” ie there is no sense that it’s the aristocracy that got the family there in the first place and the movie ends with a marriage between the middle class son and Aunt Viv’s aristocratic niece. It’s a comedy, after all.
- Yesterday, I received a box of books from my future publisher, Wave Books. One of the books is a collection of interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter called “What is Poetry? Just Kidding, I know You Know). I was really excited to read this book, so I began to read through some of the interviews. In an interview with Eileen Myles by Greg Fuchs Greg Fuchs asks Eileen, “Do you think regular people can get ahead in life without being jerks?”
- The lais of the Middle Ages are 2-D romantic narratives often depicting marvelous adventures of knights on great journeys. The earliest female poet of France, Marie de France (1155-1215), wrote a lais called “Bisclavret (The Werewolf).” But “wrote” isn’t exactly the correct word—she translated the story from the greater body of Arthurian legend; one thing transforms into another, one text bleeds into the next depending on time and culture. In the story of Bisclavret, a husband goes off to the forest three days a week and transforms into a werewolf; his wife doesn’t know what he does in the woods but his absence makes her anxious. Typically, on the third night in the forest, he goes to a chapel, puts on human clothes and returns home to his wife in human form.
- We all know that the Middle Ages are a time of the in between—a time when the world was no longer ancient, but not yet enlightened. The medieval mind as depicted in these romances, isn’t a mind of variables or on/ off transactions. One thing happens and then another thing happens, but things definitely don’t happen all at once. There is no information to manage because there is no information as we understand it today.
- We live in a time where every aspect of life is managed and controlled through technology, surveillance and policing. Wilderness areas must be managed so that capitalism can flow properly. Emotions must be managed, so that capital can flow properly. All human impulse, desire, psychology, will, terror must be broken down into patterns of yes and no so that capitalism can flow properly.
- Middle school originally referred to a school for middle class children and only very recently in history has referred to the years in school between elementary and high school.
- People often look back at middle school as some of the most awkward years of their life. If you don’t fit in, if you are not a conformist, in Middle school, a kid might call you “a freak.” Middle school is the first time that I heard this word. “Freak,” a kid yelled at someone else. Freaks have no monopoly on goodness or badness. Sometimes so-called freaks end up shooting up schools; sometimes, they become great artists. One can never quite tell with these things, but a “freak” is someone who is separated from the community by something—either a quality or perceived “deformity”—that makes them different and a threat to a group.
- I have a weakness in my heart for “freaks.”
- There is no concept of “risk management” or “emotional management” in Bisclavret because the thread of the story is pulled by language thoughts in a linear way. If something happens, it happens.
- Words that comes up over and over in the texts of this genre are “marvelous” and “strange” and “adventure.” One may not see a lover for three days, three weeks, three years. Time elapses, but not in the same way as we understand it. One could walk into the wilderness, never to return.
- The wilderness of the Middle Ages not something to be managed, but a vast space of criminality, romance, adventure and possibility. In the Middle Ages, bad things happen in the wilderness—rape, robbery, just as bad things happen in our late-capitalist highly managed wilderness areas.
- One might run into a werewolf. Likewise, one might be captured by fairies—one never knows exactly what will happen. When the character of the king in Bisclavret discovers the werewolf in the forest, the king stops his men from killing him and takes him into the castle, certain that the werewolf is good: “Look at this wonder/ how this beast humbles itself!/ It has human understanding, it begs mercy. Get all these dogs away from me/ make sure that no one strikes it! This beast has intelligence and understanding.”
- The dogs of Beverly Hills Chihuahua Two also have “intelligence and understanding.”
- To the king, Bisclavret’s uniqueness or should we say freakishness, is not something to be destroyed, but rather saved. Bisclavret becomes a source of truth because he shows no aggression towards his newfound aristocratic family. And when Bisclavret is reunited with his former wife, it is towards her that he shows aggression. It’s important to note that Bisclavret’s wife leaves him for another knight once she finds out that Bisclavret is leaving her each week to transform into a werewolf. Towards the end of the text, he rips off her nose and Marie de France tells us all her children were born without noses and lived “noseless.”
- The nose is in the middle of the face.
- Bisclavret is both a freak and a tool of the aristocracy.
- Bisclavret is both a knight and an animal.
- The Chihuahua are both humans and dogs.
- The punishment for Bisclavret’s former wife’s disloyalty to him (besides the fact that her nose is ripped off), is exile. In a strange reversal, Bisclavret’s former wife and children become the “freak,” on the margins of society.
- The final lines of Marie De France’s poem are “The adventure you have heard/ was true, have no doubt. The lai of Bisclavret was made /to be remembered forevermore.”
- I sent a group text message to an anonymous writing collective that I was in that I could no longer take part because I couldn’t devote the time I needed to devote to it. My friend wrote back that the point of the collective was to “fit it into my schedule when there is time” except that there was no time, always having the feeling that I was in the middle of something.
- I have heard that it’s awful to be the middle child.
- In the Middle Ages, there was no middle class as we understand it today. Nor was there a managerial class.
- I’m pretty sure that Frederick Jameson writes about the lack of the outside of capital.
- A poet is often entirely in the middle of culture and entirely freakish (on the margins).
- At a housewarming party I went to last week, where I was the only poet, when people asked what I did and I said “I’m a poet,” they seemed fascinated but in that way that I remember from middle school when someone called someone else a “freak.”
- A minor poet is often more freakish than a major one.
- What I like about the story of Bisclavret is the clarity of the casual violence and clarity of sympathy. The actions are unmediated by Marie De France in the sense. There is no psychologizing of these characters, what they do, how they feel. There is no longwinded explanation of why they do what they do because human psychology is not managed in the same way that it is today. Yet when Bisclavret attacks his former wife, he makes clear that he is in fact only “human” towards the aristocracy, or rather, in the king’s perception of him.
- I am deeply suspicious of the field of psychology.
- In an interview with Eileen Myles by Greg Fuchs in the Poetry Project Newsletters Eileen replies, “No” to Greg’s question and then goes on, “In the 70s it was possible to break out beyond the poetry community, and I mean that in a good way….I mean even get rewarded for being weird.”
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