Illustrated Three-Line Novels by the One-Man Twitter of 1906 France

What an early 20th-century Parisian dandy had to do with political theater and the rise of micro-nonfiction.

We’ve previously shown that the literati of yore had their own Facebook, and it turns out they had their Twitter, too. Artist, anarchist and literary entrepreneur Félix Fénéon was the one-man Twitter of early 20th-century France. Between May and November of 1906, he wrote 1,220 succinct and near-surrealist three-line reports in the Paris newspaper Le Matin, serving to inform of everything from notable deaths to petty theft to naval expedition disasters. In Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon, artist Joanna Neborsky captures the best of these enigmatic vignettes in stunning illustrations and collages, inspired by Luc Sante’s English translation of Fénéon’s gems for the New York Review of Books. Sometimes profound, often perplexing, and always prepossessing, these visual snapshots of historical micro-narratives offer a bizarre and beautiful glimpse of a long-gone French era and a man of rare creative genius.

Félix Fénéon was a dandy, a literary bricoleur, and a terrorist, maybe. Biographers dispute his guilt in the 1894 bombing of a restaurant in Paris. As the journalist himself might later have written, ‘A flowerpot left on a windowsill exploded in the Rue de Conde. In the Restaurant Foyot, appetites and the eye of Laurent Tailhad, 40, were lost.’ Fénéon, then a clerk in the government’s War Office, was arrested and tried int he sensational Trial of the Thirty, a piece of political theater aimed at exposing the anarchist underground. After he was acquitted (evidence was flimsy, the prosecution, inept), two policemen followed Fénéon for the next two decades. But how do you shadow a shadow? In life and work, the wraithlike Fénéon — his lean face darkened by a top hat and limned by a goatee that friends said gave him the look of Uncle Sam, or Mephistopheles — preferred to disappear. His love was art, and his subject, the genius of others.”

Illustrated Three-Line Novels: Félix Fénéon comes from indie powerhouse Mark Batty Publisher, who have previously delighted us with explorations of everything from how sounds became letters to why typography might be the key to cross-cultural understanding to what the ecology of Antarctica has to do with remix culture and many, many more treats.

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Tweets from Tahrir: Rare Record of a Revoltuion

What Gladwell’s fallacies have to do with changing media models and political paradigms.

In the past year, we’ve seen the fall of political regimes, the crumbling of media paradigms, and the parallel evolution of decomcary and social media. And while certain pundits continue to hold blatantly misguided opinions about the sociopolitical role of social media in activism, the real world is providing ample evidence for these new modalities of democracy and dissent. Tweets from Tahrir, an excellent new addition to alternative publishing powerhouse OR Books‘ stable of progressive social and political commentary, is a compelling time-capsule of the revolution unfolded before the world’s eyes as young people used social platforms to coordinate an historic uprising, documented it with their mobile phones, and spread it across the social web — a revolution not only of political dogma, but also of media dogma as citizen journalists in the streets replaced traditional newsrooms to deliver rich real-time insight into the heart of a historical milestone.

I think we’re agreed: Without the new media the Egyptian Revolution could not have happened in the way that it did. The causes were many, deep-rooted, and log0seated. The turning moment had come — but it was the instant and widespread nature of the new media that made it possible to recognize the moment and to push it into such an effective manifestation. What happened next has already become legend. Lines and images from the three weeks that followed January 25, 2011 , have imprinted themselves not just on the Egyptian psyche, but on the memory and imagination of the world.” ~ Ahdaf Soueif

Edited by young activists Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was in Tahrir Square when Mubarak fell, and with a foreword by Anglo-Egyptian novelist and political commentator Ahdaf Soueif, the book is everything the self-righteous, removed pontification of cultural theorists is not (sorry, Malcolm) — the lived reality of the revolutionaries, the raw core of a world history landmark the repercussions of which will shape textbook narratives for generations to come.

I have friends on antidepressants who, over the twenty days of the revolution, forgot to take their pills and hav enow thrown them away. Such is the effect of the Egyptian Revolution.” ~ Ahdaf Soueif

Fast-paced and relentlessly fascinating, Tweets from Tahrir is unlike any book ever written, much in the way that the Egyptian Revolution was unlike any uprising ever orchestrated. To miss it is to deny yourself unprecedented understanding of the sociocultural forces that shape our political and media reality.

Thanks, Kirstin

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See Something Cite Something: A Fair Use Flowchart

The social web era has introduced new challenges to attribution and citation. In an information system where content discovery is the currency of cool, not crediting your sources is a new form of piracy, plagiarism perpetrated against fellow publishers, driven perhaps by the misguided notion that there somehow isn’t “enough” — enough audience, enough interest, enough status — for everyone. The lack of attribution and source citation across the social web is not only one of our biggest pet peeves, but also one of the most serious issues that journalism has to sort out as it grapples with new publishing platforms. (In fact, we’re working on a forthcoming project in that very vein — stay tuned.)

So we were particularly thrilled to stumble upon this excellent See Something Cite Something flowchart guide to crediting your sources when you “see something cool on the Internet.”

Published just in time for yesterday’s World’s Fair Use Day, the flowchart is a tongue-in-cheek reminder to do the decent thing in what’s actually a very serious issue in publishing and content curation. Massive hat tip to co-creators Rosscott and H. Caldwell Tanner for doing what should’ve been done a long time ago.

via Coudal

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