Commentary»Essays & Interviews

Original or reprinted scholarly writings on Agrippa. The Agrippa Files solicit submissions of additional scholarly works (full or excerpted). Original creative works that allude to, borrow from, respond to, or in some other way negotiate with Agrippa are also solicited. Contact the editors.

Hehmeyer, Paxton. “Interview with Kevin Begos, Jr.”

Transcribed and edited from a phone interview conducted December 17, 2005 by Pax Hehmeyer, a member of the team behind The Agrippa Files, this extensive interview offers information about Kevin Begos Jr.’s background and views on book publishing, artists’s books, and the creation of Agrippa (a book of the dead).

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., with Doug Reside and Alan Liu. “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Hacking ‘Agrippa’: The Source of the Online Text,” excerpted and adapted from a chapter-length discussion of Agrippa in Kirschenbaum’s book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). Kirschenbaum notes: “Mechanisms addresses itself to the textual and technical primitives of electronic writing, with special attention to the qualities of erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability for electronic objects.” (This advance excerpt was posted on The Agrippa Files with Kirschenbaum’s permission in 2005.)

See also Kirschenbaum’s earlier discussion, “Hacking ‘Agrippa’: The Source of the Online Text.”

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G. “Hacking ‘Agrippa’: The Source of the Online Text”

Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “Hacking ‘Agrippa’: The Source of the Online Text,” excerpted and adapted from a chapter-length discussion of Agrippa in Kirschenbaum’s book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (MIT Press, 2008). Kirschenbaum notes: “Mechanisms addresses itself to the textual and technical primitives of electronic writing, with special attention to the qualities of erasure, variability, repeatability, and survivability for electronic objects.” (This advance excerpt was posted on The Agrippa Files with Kirschenbaum’s permission in 2005.)

See also Kirschenbaum’s later discussion, “No Round Trip: Two New Primary Sources for Agrippa.”

Hodge, James J. “Bibliographic Description of Agrippa” (Commissioned for The Agrippa Files).

This detailed bibliographical description of Agrippa was commissioned for The Agrippa Files, and is based on examination of the copy in the New York Public Library supplemented by examination of the privately-held “Archive-1” copy of the work (shown to the site editors by the publisher, Kevin Begos, Jr.) and the “promotional prospectus” in the Whitney Museum of American Art. Also consulted were descriptions of other known publicly-accessible copies in museums and libraries. Correspondence and an interview with the publisher supplied additional information.

Liu, Alan. Excerpt from The Laws of Cool

Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 339-48. This excerpt follows a discussion of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and is part of a chapter entitled “Destructive Creativity: The Arts in the Information Age.”

Laws of Cool