Category: Libraries Museusm and Archives

“Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?”

Or: “No . . . it was Beauty killed the Beast.”

Hadn’t planned to be blogging this but once again, I’m battling with the ongoing META embargo of news stories from posters residing in Canada and posting without using a VPN. Thinking that I may need to start using one on another computer to post things directly to “that other platform.”

Anyway.

Came across a piece by Thomas Pynchon, published in the New York Times back in 1984 (perfect for the timing!) about the Luddites and the history of the movement.

So here’s a link to the piece (archived, so you should be able to see it past their firewall)

Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?

Personally, I’m now inclined to answer that with a resounding “Yes.”

“These are not misprints”

Or: “Mistakes were made…”

As a long-lapsed rare books conservator, the lede caught my roving eye — “not misprints but beauties of my style hitherto undreamt of” — and I had to dig deeper. Of course I had to follow that link, and down the rabbit hole we went!

The first link in the MetaFilter story went to artnet.com and provides the source — from the Yale University Library — of the images below. The “Ulysses” image is especially nostalgic: the multiple copies of “Ulysses” held at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center (I think there are twenty-two? I’ve forgotten the exact number) were the subject of some of the last treatments I performed when I worked there. I was responsible for cleaning the books and consolidating the paper dust jackets.

If you ever want to experience the very worst of the physical side of commercial paper-making, the 19th and 20 Centuries provide excellent examples. Given that the book was printed in between the two word wars, premium materials were not all that available and the paper dust jackets, seen here in the illustration, were made with some real crap. Yeah, a “technical” term to describe the highly brittle paper that was used. Fun times, indeed,

But the contents were also irresistible. The mother-in-law at the time and I discussed some of the eccentricities of Joyce’s linguistic games —“Agenbite of Inwit” has stayed with me the past forty years (Barb, you are missed by all).

So diving into these two articles was absolutely necessary!

The artnet story:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/yale-errata-exhibition-2751007

The exhibition announcement:
https://events.yale.edu/event/beauties-of-my-style-errata-and-the-printed-mistake

Enjoy —




And what is the Internet for?

Or: “Prøn. Cats and prøn!”

Years ago — back in grad school, I think or shortly thereafter — there was some discussion about what were the “drivers” of the adoption of new technologies and people brought up the battles that video tape faced. Some went even further back and brought up book publishing/moveable type. It was a discussion I followed closely, in part due to my own interests in the history of bookbinding, as well as my interest in digital publishing.

A running joke at the time, yet still applicable today, was that “the Internet is for prøn, prøn and cats”, the deliberate use of the “ø” and misspelling to avoid immediate censorship by the more easily-offended. There is an amusing truth to the joke: adult entertainment drove the development of micro-payments that led to the monetization of anything put online. And erotica1 was among the earliest of Western European book publication. Quite simple, really, entertainment sells and adult entertainment sells very well.

And so, here we are:

We’ve already seen the AI cats, the nudification of celebrities and spiteful ex-partners, the slop that is spreading in all forms of digital entertainment.

  1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/18459/18459-h/18459-h.htm
    This links to the Project Gutenberg digital version of the classic. More explanation and background on this text, in the following link,
    as the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is the a example of these early “entertainments”. ↩︎

Permanent Resource List

I’ve added a page for alternative resources. This includes ICE-monitoring sites in Europe and elsewhere, alternatives to US-based digital products, and whatever else is need to bring about an end to the oligarchy…

Ice, ICE, baby… I’m melting

Bookmark or whatever you need to do to find it again.

AI Trolls and Ghouls are at it

Wasting little time, the AI ghouls and troll have immediately started in on creating a false narrative round the murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis.

A brief look, from NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/08/nx-s1-5671740/ice-minneapolis-grok-ai-renee-nicole-good


Watch for ICE on the road, Traveler

Winter is barreling down upon us and the long, slow slide into the oligarchy that we are witnessing in the US right now is filled with so many new ways to watch and, in some cases, warn. One of the worries is that there is no clear record of the actions that ICE has been taking. We cannot allow this to happen. Taking control of the narrative is paramount when dealing with an all-out war of misinformation, disinformation, and outright lie.s

Currently, there is an initiative underway, coming out of Europe and outside the potential for prohibitions by US regulators, to document events and individuals involved in ICE activity and to allow private citizens to report it.

Here’s a link to a news story about it —

https://migrantinsider.com/p/news-ice-list-launches-wiki-to-expose

And another discussion about the project —

https://www.crustnews.com/p/were-building-the-wikipedia-of-ice

Screenshot of an ICE Wiki entry:

Screenshot of an ICE armed agent in the South Park area of San Diego, 2025-04-11.

And here’s the Wiki, so put it to good use and feel free to share these links as widely as possible—

Link to ICE Wiki

[The graphic above links directly to the Wiki as does this,
https://icelist.is/]

WHAT NIJ RESEARCH TELLS US ABOUT DOMESTIC TERRORISM: The Report

So the DOJ removed this report that that concluded that far-right extremists had killed more Americans than left-wing or radical islamist extremists. Well, what’s a lapsed archivist/librarian to do when someone is trying to deliberately (and with malice, I might add) alter the historical facts?

Well, share it of course! So here’s a link to it:

https://a.nwps.fi/306123.pdf

… should that link disappear, I’ll make sure the report is still available.

#Resist #Persist #NoMartyrsForMAGA

Google and The Right to Be Forgotten

In a case in Canada, Google is refusing to comply with a court decision involving “the right to be forgotten.” As an archivist, I have mixed feeling about this, but I think Google is in the wrong here…

Google refusing to comply with privacy commissioner’s ‘right to be forgotten’ decision