“Wet petals? Black Bough? Sounds like a socialist agenda to me.”

Unemployment. Nuclear-capable Iran. Whether God insists that you carry the offspring of your rapist to term. Now, courtesy of Oklahoma Republican senator Tom Coburn, the hot new political topic of the season: Edith Sitwell and Mina Loy.

Senator Coburn recently released his latest report meant to call out more egregious and ridiculous examples of government bloat, what he calls his Wastebook. The Wastebook specializes in exaggeration, misleading numbers, and just the sort of painfully bad photoshoppery that only the most hurried senate intern or indie publishing house blogger (Hi Mom!) would release to the world. The Wastebook can be funny as well, for all that its entire existence arises from misguided and dangerous partisan priorities.

Item seventy-nine this year, nestled between a grant to a potato chip company and government-funded research into rubber-alternative tires, is “Duplicate Magazine Preservation.”

In 2012, the Modernist Journals Project, a joint venture administered by Brown University and the University of Tulsa, was awarded $270,000 in federal funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The award was for the creation of “a digital archive of a group of important early 20th-century American periodicals.”

The once-popular McClure’s magazine will be among the magazines digitized, though much of it is already available for free online at Google Books. Researchers will also archive The Masses, The Smart Set, Camera Work, and The Seven Arts. Need for federal funds to undertake the work is questionable, however. Thanks to the work of libraries and hobbyists, the magazines are also available on the Internet at repositories such as Archive.org, Google Books, and Project Gutenberg.

Did you catch that? The government shouldn’t pay to digitize these magazines because hobbyists and Google are already doing it. Putting aside the fact that Coburn is talking about an NEH grant — hugely competitive, judged by a panel of experts — this is not just an argument against one project, but against the entire idea of a publicly funded library system.

The Modernist Journals Project — the recipient of the grant — is, according to their own site (a great resource I strongly urge you to visit) a “project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern.” Yes, they scan magazines that are in the public domain. Yes, some of what they scan is available on Hathi, for instance.

I wrote last week about the resolution of the Authors Guild suit against the Hathi Trust, mentioning that some of my reservations about the venture arise from the fact that Google, a for-profit company, is undertaking the scans. It seems advisable for any work, but particularly for these very important and easily damaged works of early Modernism, that multiple scans should exist, hosted by multiple ventures, and that one be explicitly outside the realm of capitalist ventures. A better argument for the importance of the MJP’s work comes from its director Robert Scholes in his response to Coburn, published on the blog Magazine Modernisms.

Senator Coburn claims that certain works like the once-popular McClure’s magazine will be among the magazines digitized, though much of it is already available for free online at Google Books. This is simply not true.  Google has digitized some material, but it is taken mainly from printed compilations of these magazines which, in fact, do not have most of the advertising pages, making them less useful for scholarly research. These full magazines with all their pages are extremely difficult to find, and the Google versions lack 50% of the contents. Many of the magazines. digitized by the MJP over the four grants given by the NEH, are in fact very rare, and the few more popular magazines included in the MJP are also hard to find, because the libraries who bound them omitted the advertising.

He also points out that Coburn’s math is off, with over half of the funding for the grants coming directly from the University of Tulsa and Brown, where much of the digitization has taken place.

Among the treasures already scanned by the MJP are works by Joyce, and Loy, alongside ads for Fluffs-Moquet (“the perfect wash for the hair”). I obviously find this to be worthwhile work, and Coburn’s crusade misguided both in general and specific. But if it leads to senators quoting Jules Laforgue on the chamber floor, perhaps it will have been worth it.