New Feneon Blog: "Faits dit vers" as "Faits Divers de la poesie Americain et Brittanique"

Inspired by the anonymous "Faits Divers" which for 6 months in 1906 appeared in the French daily Le Matin, a new anonymous collective has launched its own blog of creative "Faits Divers."

http://faitsdiversdelapoesie.blogspot.com

The collective's "Faits Divers" are epigrammatic and satiric "news briefs" of "real fictions" and "fictive realities" of events and persons in the Anglo-American-Canadian poetry worlds.

The satiric element is signaled in the mangled French words and spellings of the blog's name, as perhaps a deliberate--or not?--"allusionary mocking" of the conventional comic mispronunciations of "frawn-say" by Anglo-American-phone
Non-French speakers.


In the examples below of the collective's work, one may note a number of reiterated images, like figures seen in recurring dreams (or nightmares)
exemplifying
the explicatory
of the predominance of the themes and imagery of fire and nakedness
which run through many of these entries like so many streakers heading for a fire sale--
there to re-clothe themselves in the Emperor's New Clothes of Significant Significations of
the commodity fetishism &
the vanity of poets arrested
for shoplifting the Name Recognition
of Recognized Name Brand Name Tags
and receiving the New Sentence
of Life
without Parole
in the Lacanian Mirror stages --
with an additional and concurrent term
of Sentencing to the Post New Sentence
d'une Langue sans la Langue
(a "Language/Tongue without a Language/Tongue")

Here then sampling of the "hi-jinx of the high-brows" of the “Faits Divers de la poesie---“

At 5 o’ clock in the evening, M. Bernstein and Mme Kim were eating croquets in a café in Clichy. The roof fell in and a stove blew up. They were singed and naked, but otherwise fine. The avant-garde goes on.

“Your Honor, a person who professes, gives readings, attends conferences, and hosts poetry parties must have a wardrobe!” shouted Mlle Reyes, defending her 4,000 pairs of shoes. Grimly, the jury looked on.

The bastard has stolen my shirt! screamed M. Kimball, staggering naked through the street. In his hand, held aloft like a flag, were his pantaloons. One month for public indecency.

Naropa has burned to the ground! But only after Mlle Waldman and fourteen followers fanatically held out, firing from the windows, to the ten thousand directions.

All our best salutations to this new blog and its anonymous Scribes, who do, indeed, use the blog template called Scribe.



Here then sampling of the "hi-jinx of the high-brows" of the “Faits Divers de la poesie---“

At 5 o’ clock in the evening, M. Bernstein and Mme Kim were eating croquets in a café in Clichy. The roof fell in and a stove blew up. They were singed and naked, but otherwise fine. The avant-garde goes on.

“Your Honor, a person who professes, gives readings, attends conferences, and hosts poetry parties must have a wardrobe!” shouted Mlle Reyes, defending her 4,000 pairs of shoes. Grimly, the jury looked on.

The bastard has stolen my shirt! screamed M. Kimball, staggering naked through the street. In his hand, held aloft like a flag, were his pantaloons. One month for public indecency.

Naropa has burned to the ground! But only after Mlle Waldman and fourteen followers fanatically held out, firing from the windows, to the ten thousand directions.



All our best salutations to this new blog and its anonymous Scribes, who do, indeed, use the blog template called Scribe.



Inspired by the anonymous "Faits Divers" which for 6 months in 1906 appeared in the French daily Le Matin, a new anonymous collective has launched its own blog of creative "Faits Divers."

http://faitsdiversdelapoesie.blogspot.com

The collective's "Faits Divers" are epigrammatic and satiric "news briefs" of "real fictions" and "fictive realities" of events and persons in the Anglo-American-Canadian poetry worlds.

The satiric element is signaled in the mangled French words and spellings of the blog's name, as perhaps a deliberate--or not?--"allusionary mocking" of the conventional comic mispronunciations of "frawn-say" by Anglo-American-phone
non-French speakers.


In the examples below of the collective's work, one may note a number of reiterated images, like figures seen in recurring dreams (or nightmares)
exemplifying
the explicatory
of the predominance of the themes and imagery of fire and nakedness
which run through many of these entries like so many streakers heading for a fire sale--
there to re-clothe themselves in the Emperor's New Clothes of Significant Significations of
the commodity fetishism &
the vanity of poets arrested
for shoplifting the Name Recognition
of Recognized Name Brand Name Tags
and receiving the New Sentence
of Life
without Parole
in the Lacanian Mirror stages --
with an additional and concurrent term
of Sentencing to the Post New Sentence
d'une Langue sans la Langue
(a "Language/Tongue without a Language/Tongue")

Paradoxically, the professed anonymity of the collective strikes one as the opposite of Feneon's in that it is "crying out" so to speak, or daring, to be recognized, by the milieu in and to which it is addressed.

In Feneon's anonymous daily pieces in a large circulation--and conservative--paper, the anonymity is not unlike that of the clandestine activities and writings of Feneon before he had been "unmasked in public" when on trial as one of the "Trial of Thirty," which received spectacular news coverage and forced the Bartleby-like aspirations of the Anarchist writer and critic into the media and public spotlight, the last place he would have liked to be, yet had knowingly run the risk of by his own actions in their melding of the "Propaganda of the Deed" with the "Propaganda of the Word."

In the "Faits Divers," the anonymous writer is able to carry on, "Hidden in Plain Sight," like Poe's Purloined Letter, his subversive critiques of the constructions and institutions of "Daily Life," an Anarchist critique from behind the scenes--or "mis-en-scene"-- of "Everyday existence" in a Great and Modern Civilization as Anarchical in itself, as demonstrated by the seemingly endless crime spree its citizens are embarked on.

One may read the "Faits Divers" as a Map and mapping of French daily life, a "social geography" of daily spaces as a "Critique of Everyday Life" initiated by the great Anarchist geographer Elisee Reclus, whose work anticipates that of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and the Situationists. Reclus, a Communard forced into exile in Switzerland, his fame as a geographer the only thing keeping him from being shipped to a prison colony, was fundamentally concerned with the power relations between the state and the individual which are expressed in everyday actions which take place in a "geography [which] is nothing but history in space."

Reclus' work was under a continual state of siege, repressed and suppressed in the that he was attacking the main stream conventionalized "geography of landscape"
institutionalized by the academic lions of the day such as Vidal de la Blache.

"Geography of the landscape" considers itself to be "the science of places and not people." It's attractiveness to the Institutional Mainstream's demand for Order is in its non-social immutability of a spatial stasis outside of the messing up and continual shifting of spaces created by the presences and daily lives of persons. Reclus counters this with his analyses, in which "Geography is not an immutable thing, It is made, it is remade every day; at each instant, it is modified by men's actions."

Reclus' analyses furnished the first studies in what is now known as "unequal development" within and of societies constructed by the violences of invasion, occupation and colonization. This analysis, when brought to bear on the inner struggles over social spaces within a "modern, civilized" society in the West such as France, can be seen in terms of Reclus' experiences lived during the period 1870-71 in Paris, during which, following the humiliating Prussian defeat of the Empire and the brutal, long siege of Paris, the Commune erupted and rapidly began creating a complete reorganizing of every space of daily life The two months of the initiation of a new form of society on the face of the earth was far to great a challenged not only to the French State, but for all the Western bourgeois States, who loudly cheered the extermination of Bloody Week, in which 20-25,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in the streets, and thousands more imprisoned and exiled.

Following this State Terror brought down without quarter on the "petroleuses" and and "rabble " of the Commune, there followed the complete make over of huge areas of Paris, a transformation which included the massive destruction of the working class neighborhoods as well as their small businesses and artisan shops, as a method of literally erasing from historical memory this revolt against the "unequal development" of classes under the stifling construction of a new bourgeois social order and culture which refused to consider the Communards as even human beings.
These events alone give a violent and vivid demonstration of Reclus' social geography at work, in which the struggle is precisely in terms of the mutability of Reclus' work and its refutation of the static, unchanging Institutional Landscape of the Solid State of Entropy known as the attainment for all time of that Triumph, the "pinnacle of Civilization."

The International bourgeois and State media of the times, as Karl Marx analyses in his study of the Commune, created a horrifying image of blood thirsty, fanatical and ignorant Communards bent on burning down all that Civilization and its various Gods held dear, much like today's media saturated images of "terrorists" and "rebels" and "insurgents" reduce persons to beings "outside the pale of civilization and morality" in order to ignore all International Laws of Human Rights and bomb, burn, starve and torture the non-beings until they give up all their land and natural resources.

Read in terms of Reclus' social geography, Feneon's Anonymous Anarchist "Faits Divers" present, sardonically and laconically camouflaged as the entertaining divertisments of "diverse facts/events," a social geography of the power struggles of "every day people" within the bourgeois State' Institutions of families, the Church, the professions, the rural/urban shiftings of populations,and with the State, the non plus ultra of repression, bolstered and buttressed by all the other Institutions.

In terms of being an anonymous toiler in the bowels of the media machinery, Feneon is tossing greasy monkey wrenches into the gears, which appear ink smeared in print form "right before the reader's very eyes," as the mocking messenger of a widespread social geography of revolt against the media's Power. This mockery is found in Feneon's obsession with incidents of telephone and telegraph wire cuttings, destruct ions, interruptions in service. This seemingly nation wide spree of guerrilla warfare against the State, Mainstream and Institutional media remarked on in these anonymous notes is not unlike those "manuals for bomb making" that were churned out as anonymous little low-tech, low-fi pamphlets by clandestine presses and authors, producing via anonymous translations an International and highly mutable, volatile library of clandestine best sellers, the anonymous words and instructional diagrams bringing together, as do Feneon's "Faits Divers," the "Propaganda of the Word" and the "Propaganda of the Deed."

Read in this sense, as the production of notices of methods to attack and destroy the media hidden within that very media as "anonymous" "news items" which offer a camouflaged insight into these methods to incite the "cutting of" of the media's "power" cables and wire "connections," and "services" in the name of State control of social geographies, Fenoen's "Faits Divers" still carry those "explosive charges" which he was put on trial for, "charged" with the possesion of detonators found in the closet of his room, which he had claimed were "found on the street" by his father, during an innocent stroll around Anarchist haunted Paris.

In a sense, the "Faits Divers," or "Faits dit Vers" or even "Faits d'hiver" of the Feneon Collective offer an example of one of then rapidly rising aspects of bourgeois society Reclus' analyses were dissecting. This is the increasing "specialization" of Western bourgeois Colonialist and Imperialist society and culture, in which the atomization and seperation not only of "alienated labor," but also of the alienation of one discipline from another, allows for the Invisiblity" as it were of the functioning of the whole to those involved in its construction and maintenance.

That is, a critique within one sphere imagines its critique is extensive to all others while at the same time remaining elite, seperate, invioble. and supposing its own "higher" existence is not itself enmesheed in the very machinations it purports to critique.

In this way are made possible the claims of any one sphere to an "innocence" despite existing within a brutal State society which tortures, supports Apartheid, uses its morality and ethics to render others "evil." and endlessly celebrates its own self importance and self-obsessed culture.

From the "point of view" of Reclus and Feneon's work, the Feneon Collective's specialization announced in its rubric as "American and English Poetry" creates what may be thought of as the social geography of a space in which the function of the observer is to be also one or more of the observed, who is to remain "invisible" within this presentation of a world obsessed with it own appearances in terms of a continual self reflection it seeks to project on to the gaze of others, who will then be reflecting on one's own self importance also.

In a bizarre fashion, this is a world which is producing as it were a hydra-headed Big Brother, in which all eyes are looking at all others as being in themselves both Big Brother and one of those who love Big Brother.

The anonymous collective being a part of this self obsessed social geography of self obsessed selves uses its own anonymity as a kind of hinge, meaning that it is like a door that can swing both ways--that is--be both on the inside and the outside of that which it is presenting.

In terms of a social geography, the radical difference between the Collective and the poetry worlds it observes and Feneon is that in the former the specialization of the analysis remains within the sphere of its specialty. In a sense, the analysis remains "stuck" within the self reflecting activity of the sphere it is reflecting upon, so that the analysis becomes a form of "drawing attention to oneself," in the manner of the others whom it reflects and reflects upon.

It is this "Hall of Mirrors" which Reclus and Feneon refuse and resist in the extensions of social geography outwards from the self centeredness of citizens of self centred societies who see themsleves as the Central Power in the World, which today, Americans loudly proclaim they indeed are, as "the world's one remaining Super Power."

The specialization of social geographies allows for the spheres within a society to observes themselves self centeredly, so that they are blind to their own connections with the extensions of self-centredness in the Centralization of Institutionbal and State Power,which, being the One Super Power is the cnrtralization of the worlds gaze on oneslef, the cnter of the world.

Here then a small sampling of the "hi-jinx of the high-brows"--

At 5 o’ clock in the evening, M. Bernstein and Mme Kim were eating croquets in a café in Clichy. The roof fell in and a stove blew up. They were singed and naked, but otherwise fine. The avant-garde goes on.

“Your Honor, a person who professes, gives readings, attends conferences, and hosts poetry parties must have a wardrobe!” shouted Mlle Reyes, defending her 4,000 pairs of shoes. Grimly, the jury looked on.

The bastard has stolen my shirt! screamed M. Kimball, staggering naked through the street. In his hand, held aloft like a flag, were his pantaloons. One month for public indecency.

Naropa has burned to the ground! But only after Mlle Waldman and fourteen followers fanatically held out, firing from the windows, to the ten thousand directions.

All our best salutations to this new blog and its anonymous Scribes, who do, indeed, use the blog template called Scribe.