Appreciate this helpful and detailed review by @devinfitz.bsky.social

This is like if 2/3 of the people in Wyoming fled the state.

I can't imagine the horror of waking up every day as Pete Hegseth.

Everytime I read Yusek Komunyakaa, my admiration grows. But I also think of his child being murdered, and I simply cannot imagine ever putting myself together again.

Paul Giamatti is just amazing

Finally finished writing my book review for The Dynamic Spread of Buddhist Print Culture, by Susan Huang. At over 1000K pages, the book is a total trove of information and erudition. I'll post the link when it end up on H-Net.

Just saw a tiny home ad. It's a trailer! I loved when my dad lived in a trailer park. It was the only time he was free. I will fuck with a trailer park any day. Sure, some smelled weird, but it was also Just a neighborhood. Just working class people. It was great.

I am forced to miss the RSA due to illness. Track record for this conference is wild. I have gone 5 times (counting this one, since I paid), and been sick 3, including the great Dublin covid disaster, which must have been the greatest conference pandemic ever.

All hail this undergrad who is just here to look at cunieform tablets despite being unable to read them.

Oh shit, someone wants me to do a Shakespeare book history/bibliography session. I've spent my entire career trying to prevent this. Their touch affrights me as a serpent's sting

A visiting scholar found quite the provenance hiding in a heavily annotated book. Signature had been washed, but it's definitely en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatus_...

My favorite part of the American left is how it attacks itself. My wonderful radical queers, pls, do not feel free to attack ppl for only now tuning in to American fascism as the ignored Gaza/X/BLM. A conversion is a conversion. You think evangelicals are getting on ppl for finding Christ late?

The pandemic world is: everyone is always sick. It seems like every 3 months something rips through special collections. It's absolutely maddening

Just so everyone knows, @periodeye.bsky.social is a goddamn queen.

Live footage of Hannah Arendt's dichotomy between violence and power.

We are dealing with a Western Christian supremacist movement willing to see millions die in the name of racial purity. This is William Wolfe. A year ago he was invited with fourteen other faith leaders to the WH. Today he is praising ICE for killing peaceful observers. This is Christian fascism.

Love notes like this left in books by earlier librarians. This profession runs on the hope of ever having time to love things as they deserve, and our archives are full of the epitaphs of good intentions.

Moving after divorce is gradually stepping up from disposable crap furniture that is plywood composed of broken hearts into mid century modern.

ICE raids are not the first time this was made explicit. I think people downplay how much Jim Crow was not just about controlling Black people but it was also about controlling white people. If you thought racism was dumb and acted that way you could end up with a bomb in your home

This is more nuanced than things on the ground: essential research services (libraries, staff support) have been gutted at an alarming rate, and there is little discussion of rebuilding former capacities. Even as the US is at its wealthiest, we are robbing the future www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/u...

Totally nutty: A rubbing of the calligraphy of Yan Zhenqing (d. 785), cut and pasted into a Ming 1600s directorate of education Song history.

Fed chair being the beacon of morality and spine was not on my bingo card. Homie serving Atticus Finch moral clarity. Felt like his statement should have been filmed in black and white.

I can't describe how bad Minneapolis feels right now. My neighbors are pulling kids out of school. The public schools are offering remote learning until 2/12. We are having conversations in our alleys about how to protect ourselves. It feels like a military occupation with a blockade.

Had a check in with my friend/tutor in Isfahan scheduled, likely the internet is down with all the protests. Love 2026. No notes.

Yale Law School never beating the “they don’t teach law at Yale” allegations

Metal AF, from 1751 'Vida, maritirio, y beatificación del invicto proto-martir del Japón San Felipe de Jesus, patrón de México su patria, imperial corte de Nueva España en el Nuevo Mundo' printed in Mexico city. A biography of the San Felipe de Jesus, the first Mexican saint, martyred in Japan.

I have officially started a routine of sleeping for 20 minutes every lunch. And you know, it's magical. I think I may actually be on to something.

The woman killed by ICE today was a poet. She won the 2020 Academy of American Poets, University & College Poetry Prize at Old Dominion University. (And this is Renee from confirmed socials- a photo of a different woman with red lipstick is going around, but that was a classmate.) /

Fuck this fascist administration and everyone who helped put them in power.

Back at work this week and I wanted to share something that's actually a cool history post and not just, like, anti-imperialist rage. This is a Buddhist 'dharani' amulet found in a tomb at Chang'an (modern Xi'an) in northern China. It was *printed* (probably by monks) circa 650-670 CE.

Does anyone have a reference to a single peer-reviewed scientific article demonstrating the danger of gel nail polish (or nail polish) to rare books and manuscripts in their handling? There are many anecdotes, which I expect are misogynist and classist dog whistles.

Do you have an archive, collection, recent acquisition, or project on Japan worth showcasing in a short article? 🗾 NCC collaborates with institutions and scholars on “Japanese Studies Spotlight” features to introduce these important resources to the field!

On the first day back following the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro & first lady Cilia Flores, 6 Senate Democrats vote yea to confirm Keith Bass as an Assistant Secretary of Defense by a vote of 50-35.

Classes already back. The quarter system is brutal. Happy first day of winter quarter UC goons.

Now that my Hunagarian is getting into A2 (we are in month 2), I would say the most interesting thing is watching a brain without scaffolding. No cognates, just gut busting memorization. My brain keeps making false friends. Also started Hindi this week, for something a bit lighter.

Here I was thinking we'd make through the first week of the year before starting a war. Silly.

Congratulations LA.! We did full Old Testament this year. We got raining fire, Pharoah's troops (ICE), and world submerging floods.

Looks like I am finally moving from the Westside to mid city. Will be nice to be near people with interests aside from surfing.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

Can I get three chapters in a readable form by Jan 5? No! Will I be disappointed that I failed? Yes! Happy holidays from the beginning of my final failures of 2025. May you and yours also find impossible self imposed expectations and epigenetic Protestant shame!

This book is interesting. While it no doubt furthers the case that print had a major impact during the Song dynasty(960 to 1279), when it was adopted by the state and state actors, a couple of areas were completely unexplored. For ex, not a single surviving material text is discussed.

Every time someone talks about movable type as more advanced, I want to blast my face off. It was just one of many reprographic modes, all of which were used according to the needs of users. If by more advanced, you mean invented later, fine... But we have half of the world of print who rejected it.

Someone donate a blockbook or blockbook fragment to UCLA. They are expensive and I promise I would use it all the time. You will be very happy, just like these little devils:

Our next exhibition, Beginnings, features the work of contemporary painter Harmonia Rosales in conversation with works from the manuscripts collection, considering the legacy of Creation stories—opens January 27th at the Getty Center @gettymuseum.bsky.social ! www.getty.edu/news/getty-p...

This is pretty wild ngl!

I won a lottery — 2nd best job in my field that year — in a very bad year in a lifetime of bad & worsening years. Back then 30ish jobs I could contort myself into being eligible for, because of generalist jobs. It being 08-09 meant most didn’t hire ANYONE that year. It’s only gotten more brutal.

I got sick in November and had to stay home for a few days. I amused myself by starting Hungarian. Today I had a 30 minute conversation in Hungarian. I am socially very weird and have a hard time dating in LA. I am old enough to understand that correlation is sometimes causation.

As part of a field where we still regularly work with scrolls, let me dispell your technological relativism and assure you: they are an utter pain in the ass. Text only scrolls such. Handscrolls with images are tons of fun, but still a pain in the ass.

One thing about doing Chinese bibliography. I can say something about an edition and try to amend cataloging etc., but it doesn't count unless I find a bibliographer in China to repeat exactly what I said. 'Foreigner' is an ontological handicap that prevents participation in some fields.