Let Us Now Praise Outdated Technologies

I grieve every day over the passing of Molly Ivins, the smart, funny, sharp tongued, big-hearted political commentator. She did not suffer fools, but she sure did enjoy exposing them. I miss her clear voice in these murky political times. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1999, and was in and out of treatment until her death in January of 2007. But she didn’t let her illness silence her. She was outspoken to the end. Here’s what she had to say in her last column: "We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war...We need people in the streets, banging pots and pans and demanding, 'Stop it, now!'" But not all her pieces were political. Some of her best writing, like some of the best writing of another political writer – the great George Orwell, was about everyday curiosities and everyday pleasures.

One of my favorites of her columns is “Coppeeee!”, in which she mourns the disappearance of the “copy boy” (young men, and eventually young women, who carried carbon copies of journalists’ columns, fresh from their typewriters, to their editors’ desks). This droll, nostalgic piece appears in the wonderful collection “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?”, and remembers with fondness this casualty of the ascendancy of the computer. We can be big fans of new technology and still honor the corpses strewn in its wake. Another literary phenomenon mowed down by the information technology juggernaut is the card catalogue. Replaced by the computerized Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC), most libraries have eliminated the cabinets of long wooden drawers filled with rows of cards cataloguing the library’s collection, each card pierced by a long metal rod running down the middle of each drawer. I wonder if paper manufacturers still produce cardstock with a hole in the middle near the bottom of each cardboard rectangle. Some libraries have retained their card catalogues for atmospheric purposes, posting a sign announcing the last year the catalogue was updated. I remember the card catalogue in my childhood library in the suburban village of Skokie. Some of the cards where typed, others were hand written.

All were dog-eared from use. I liked flipping through the cards, reading the cross references, and holding them between a thumb and forefinger, imagining a sympathetic connection to all the other readers that had held them this way before me on their various quests for literary satisfaction. One of the artists that works with the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education, Robert Poesshl, created a Requiem for the Card Catalogue as an installation in a library that was eliminating its outdated technologies. Robert made elaborate arabesques, arcing across the public space, out of the discarded cards. Information technology may have killed off copy boys and card catalogues, but I.T. is a ravenous creature that also eats it’s own children. Who remembers the early dot matrix printers that pecked out text on unfolding sheets of paper with perforated borders dotted by rows of punched holes? Gone. We mourn losing the grace notes of each passing technology, and the revolving door revolves a lot faster these days (short play vinyl record albums to long play vinyl record albums to cassette tapes to CDs to mp3s in a few short years), but it is our USES of technologies, and not the technologies themselves, that matter. We are the deciders.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) www.capeweb.org