Introduction

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Notes

notes

1. The site of our own erudition, which we hesitate to call feigned, may be sourced as follows: <http://shakespeare.about.com/cs/sources/>.

2. See <http://www.etymonline.com/>, which unfortunately does not give the source of the 1788 usage.

3. Unsourced quotation attributed to Radiguet, but often misattributed to Cocteau: see <http://www.bartleby.com/66/94/45894.html>.

4. See Rose, who argues that a series of

cultural developments – the emergence of the mass market for books, the valorization of original genius, and the development of the Lockean discourse of possessive individualism – occurred in the same period as the long legal and commercial struggle over copyright. Indeed, it was in the course of that struggle under the particular pressures of the requirements of legal argumentation that the blending of the Lockean discourse and the aesthetic discourse of originality occurred and the modern representation of the author as proprietor was formed. Putting it baldly and exaggerating for the sake of clarity, it might be said that the London booksellers invented the modern proprietary author, constructing him as a weapon in their struggle with the booksellers of the provinces. (55)

5. For the dichtung-digital interview, see <http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/>. Amerika's PHON:E:ME project is located at <http://phoneme.walkerart.org/>.

6. “When applied to a post-material digital world of instantaneous composition and delivery via the Internet,” Amerika writes

this “surf–sample–manipulate” practice (ie. [sic], to surf the net, sample data and then alter that data to meet the specific needs of the environment being developed by the artist) works on two fronts: one, the so-called “creative content,” that is, the text, images, music, and graphics of many web-art sites are often sampled from other sources and, after some digital-manipulation, immediately integrated into the work so as to create an “original” construction and, two: the so-called “source code” itself, that is, the html and javascript language that informs the browser how to display the work, is many times appropriated from other designs floating around the Net and eventually filtered into the screen's behind-the-scenes compositional structure. The great thing about the Net is that if you see something you like, whether that be “content” or “source code,” many times you can just download the entire document and manipulate it according to your anti-aesthetic needs. (“Surf”)

7. Dylan's punishing touring schedule since the late 1980s is documented at the fan site, “Still on the Road”: <http://www.bjorner.com/still.htm>.

8. Always assuming, of course, that Dylan is telling the truth. While the truth status of Chronicles is questionable, its truth effect, by virtue of the genre of the memoir, is highly seductive. But whether or not Dylan's recollections are true is anyone's guess, possibly including even Dylan's. Then again, could anyone say for certain that there aren’t moments, if not whole episodes, in Chronicles where Dylan isn’t just having us on?

9. A song called “Something Stupid (feat. Nicole Kidman)” is listed under ROBBIE WILLIAMS LYRICS at <http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/robbiewilliams/somethingstupid.html>.

10. The song has been recorded many times since, in several languages and genres. To trace its history, see the “Somethin’ Stupid” entry at Wikipedia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethin'_Stupid>.

11. Someone ought to tell it to the fanlisting “then i go and spoil it all …,” set up in homage to the Williams and Kidman version: <http://fans.papervixen.net/stupid/about.php>.

12. Shouldn’t the Cohens be held accountable for fashioning their hitman out of the 1960s counter culture? Or is that too South Park a question for serious entertainment? Or, are the Cohens trying to tell us something (in a South Park kind of way): that the Regan/Bush era was made possible by the “drop out” political mentality of the hippie generation? Hence the comparatively liberal, but by no means uncompromised, Clinton administration (1993–2001) would be not so much an usher to the Nirvana generation as an allowable eccentricity from the point of view of US and global corporate power and wealth? See Derrida, Specters and Lucy and Mickler.

13. Mill and Taylor were friends and collaborators for many years before their marriage in 1851. Although On the Subjection of Women was published more than a decade after Harriet's death in 1858, the substance of Cavell's point is confirmed, somewhat ironically, in the following passage from the feminist website Sunshine for Women:

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Mill wrote copiously on a variety of political topics often in collaboration with Harriet Taylor. Although it is difficult to sort out who contributed what to each work, some historians speculate that Taylor contributed the artistic parts of their work, painting with “broad brush strokes,” creating the general outline, adding a woman's perspective to an idea, polishing Mill's writing as well as editing it for content, while Mill contributed the details and the logic[!] (http://www.pinn.net/~sunshine/whm2003/js_mill4.html)

14. “Baedekers,” as these guidebooks are often called, are still being produced. See the Wikipedia entry <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baedeker>.

15. The expression dates from 1900; see <http://www.etymonline.com/>.

16. The reference is to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's What is Property? Or, An Inquiry Into the Principle of Right and Government (1840). See the Wikipedia entry, “Property is theft!”: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_is_theft>.