One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme William Benzon • 15 March 2010 One Candle, a Thousand Points of Light: The Xanadu Meme William L. Benzon 15 March 2010 Abstract: I treat a single word Xanadu, as a “meme” and follow it from a 17th century book, to a 19th century poem (Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"), into the 20th century where it was picked up by a classic movie ("Citizen Kane"), an ongoing software development project (Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu), and another movie and hit song, Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu. The aggregate result is that when you google the word, you get 6 million hits. What is interesting about those hits is that, while some of them are directly related to Coleridge's poem, more seem to be related to Nelson's software project, Olivia Newton-John’s film and song, and (indirectly) to Welles’s movie. Thus one cluster of Xanadu sites is high tech while another is about luxury and excess (and then there's the Manchester Swingers Club Xanadu). Contents Introduction: “Xanadu” .................................................................................................. 2 Googling for Memes ........................................................................................................ 3 A Thousand Points of Light, a Metaphor ..................................................................... 4 Xanadu: A View from the Wikipedia ............................................................................ 5 Xanadu: A Google View.................................................................................................. 7 Examining the Xanadu System .................................................................................... 12 Beyond the Meme .......................................................................................................... 18 Beyond Interpretation ................................................................................................... 18 Appendix 1: Googling Oedipus ................................................................................... 19 Appendix 2: Xanadu in Google Books ........................................................................ 21 References ....................................................................................................................... 22 1301 Washington St. No. 311 Hoboken, New Jersey, 07030 bbenzon@mindspring.com This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. 1 Introduction: “Xanadu” Sometime early in January of 2005 I did a Google search on the term “xanadu.” I had no 1 particular expectations about what would turn up, but I was nonetheless surprised that I got roughly 2,000,000 “hits.” How did this one word from an early 19th century English poem, albeit a relatively well-known one, end up on approximately 2,000,000 pages of the World Wide Web in the early 21st century? In asking that question I am not looking for a detailed answer. Such an answer would be a very long list of events in which some person reads the poem, reads about the poem, or reads or sees or hears some other text that uses “xanadu.” It is not clear to me just what it is that I am looking for beyond some sense of the relationship between culture in the large and culture in the small. By culture in the small I mean specifically the word “xanadu,” which I will call a meme, after Richard Dawkins’s coinage in The Selfish Gene (1989). Dawkins coined the term to mean, roughly, a genetic element in culture and that is how I use it. But I do not want to push the genetic analogy very far in this essay, though I have done so elsewhere (Benzon 1996). My use here is informal. In particular my usage does not in any way depend on the notion that “memes” are purposive agents, an assumption made by many popular discussions of memes. The only agents in my discussion are the human beings who choose to use “Xanadu” for their purposes, whatever they may be. As for culture in the large, I take that to be the beliefs, attitudes, ideas, and practices of large populations over relatively long periods of time. In this investigation I am using the World Wide Web as a source of indicators of culture in the large. Obviously the contents of the web are a very biased sample of world-wide-cultural activity, favoring the recent, the industrial and post-industrial, the nations of the western and northern hemispheres, and the English language. Thus my results cannot be considered definitive. By the same token, the web is now extensive enough that these results are worth our attention. Prior to the emergence of the web such an investigation would have been all but impossible. We are now in a position to know something we could not have known before. Just what that is, that is not clear. To be blunt, I am playing around, but in a new sandbox. If we think of this investigation as an exercise in the construction of sand castles on a new beach, then we have a reasonable attitude. Constructing sand castles does, after all, require some skill and technique. And the castles can be judged according one’s ludic preferences. If the exercise proves interesting, then we can undertake the creation of methods that are not so vulnerable to the ebb and flow of the tides. 1 In January 2006 I was invited to participate in an online discussion of Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (2005). This discussion was sponsored by a group blog devoted to literature, The Valve, which is sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. This chapter is a revised version of that essay. I have decided, however, to retain the results of the original Google searches in this revised version, indicating the date that I ran those searches. Since the web is constantly changing, you will get different results from those that I obtained if you run those same searches. Since the original essay was written for the web it has hyperlinks, which do not function in hardcopy. You can access the original (somewhat degraded) document here: http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/one_candle_a_thousand_points_of_light_moretti_and_the_individual_text/ 2 Googling for Memes Anyone who has spent much time using Google knows that a given web page can appear more than once in the return list. Thus those 2,000,000 hits do not necessarily represent 2,000,000 different web pages, much less 2,000,000 different web sites, each with multiple pages. Just how many different pages or sites are represented is not important in this informal exploration. There is the further problem that, if you do a search several different times, you will get different results. In the case of the “xanadu” searches I conducted in January 2005, the number of hits was very unstable, varying between 1,600,000 and roughly 7,000,000. I have no idea what accounts for that upper 2 figure. Most often, however, the number of hits was roughly 2,000,000, and that is the number I will use in the rest of this essay. Given that the web is constantly in flux, I have given the dates for all of the web searches. If you were to perform the same searches at the time you are reading this, you would get different results. It is not at all obvious to me, however, that the general results would be broadly different from the ones I report here. Certain patterns do emerge from these data, and I suspect that those patterns are fairly robust. That said, let us get on with it and examine those patterns. First we need to get a better sense of just what those numbers mean: 1,600,000, 2,000,000, and 7,000,000. By themselves they have little significance. For one thing, they are not very large in relation to the overall size of the web. Though it is not easy to determine how many pages there are in the web, the number was upward of 4 billion at the time I did this work. Two million hits is five ten thousandths of that. But, what percentage of the web would you expect any one query item to retrieve? To get a better feel for these numbers I googled a number of items on Sunday 21 January 2005: 2 This instability seems to have been subsequently been worked out of the system. Since I was not, however, attempting to drawn quantitative conclusions, I chose to stick with the numbers I obtained in my original queries. Obviously, even if I had redone the numbers, the new numbers would have become obsolete by such time as this essay is published, and, beyond that, by the time of any particular reading. And then there is the fact that the results of a Google query may depend somewhat on the Google-history of the person who makes the query. Thus if you and I make the same query at the same time, we may get different results because the Google search engine knows your history and mine, infers that our various interests, and produces results on the basis of that inference. 3  Gargantua 569,000 Lysistrata 649,000 Gawain 934,000 Oedipus 1,960,000 Xanadu 2,050,000 Astro Boy 2,350,000 Agamemnon 2,920,000 Othello 3,410,000 Osiris 3,650,000 Bambi 4,260,000 Sailor Moon 6,180,000 Buddha 15,000,000 Atlantis 16,100,000 Avalon 19,000,000 Olympus 25,300,000 Eden 31,100,000 Paradise 61,300,000 At 569,000 “Gargantua” generated the fewest hits, while “Paradise” generated the most, 61,300,000. It is interesting, and not terribly surprising, that “Xanadu” is out-scored by “Bambi” and “Sailor Moon” (a very popular series of manga and anime from Japan). Though “Xanadu” outscored “Oedipus,” I rather doubt that the difference is large enough to matter. More significantly, as I will argue later on, “Xanadu” seems to draw forth a greater variety of hits than does “Oedipus.” What is particularly interesting about “Xanadu” is that, as we will see, among the variety of sites in its return list, two clusters seem particularly prominent. One of them is related to pleasure, luxury, and excess while the other is related to hypertext, media, and technology. I think of the first cluster as being related to the bodily, the sybaritic, side of human nature while the second is related to the mind and the intellectual, the cybernetic side. Think of these different types of sites as “environments” in which the Xanadu meme has taken up “residence.” The question before us is: Why does the projection of this word from a 200-year old poem onto the contemporary web have these two aspects? Let us call this projection the Xanadu cultural system. In coining that phrase I do not have anything particularly rigorous in mind. I certainly do not imagine some tightly structured organization dedicated to propagating the term. “Xanadu cultural system” is merely a convenient way of referring to whatever it is that is responsible all those Google hits. But whatever that is, it is real, and most peculiar. A Thousand Points of Light, a Metaphor How did “Xanadu” get from Coleridge’s poem to the web? How did it reach however many people it took to put the term on 2,000,000 or more websites? Obviously, through some form of communication. We might, for example, use a relay race as a metaphor for this process. In a relay 4 race a baton is passed from one runner to the next. This metaphor is a reasonable way to think about passing property from one generation to another through inheritance. But it is not a good metaphor for communication. When a baton is passed, it moves from one person to another. The passer no longer has the baton, for batons can only be in once place at a time. Messages, ideas, are not like that. The person who passes the message still has the message once she has conveyed it to another. Instead of a baton, let us think of passing a candle flame from one person to another. Not the candle, just the flame. Each person has their own candle. One advantage of flame-passing as a metaphor for cultural transmission – for that is what we are talking about – is that it allows for a rough and ready distinction between the biological and cultural facets in our nature. The conditions that must be met for a candle to work properly correspond to our biological nature, which is more or less, but not exactly, the same from one population to another. But there are aspects of candle composition that can vary, and these affect such things as the color and intensity of the flame, the odor given off, and how rapidly the wax is consumed. These factors correspond to our cultural nature, and can vary considerably from one population to another. Thus a small odorless yellow flame can easily ignite a large scented orange flame. The quality of the new flame is different from that of the flame that supplied the ignition energy. Let us call this modification. Now let's push the metaphor a bit. Imagine we have, say, a dozen people closely gathered in a group and holding their unlit candles so the wicks are touching. A person with a lighted candle approaches the group, touches the flame to the massed wicks and voilà!, twelve new points of light. A single flame has multiplied into 13 in one step. Let us call this amplification. Qualitative modification and amplification, these are the concepts we need to understand the Xanadu cultural system. The system has a pre-history, if you will, in 13th century Mongolia, where Kubla Khan founded the city of Shang-du. That becomes Xamdu in Purchas his Pilgrimage, which was published in the early 17th century. The system proper starts when Coleridge reads that book late in the 18th century and places Kubla Khan, Xanadu, and his palace and gardens into his poem. That is where our story really begins. What we are looking for are the amplifiers and modifiers that, in concert, have resulted in Xanadu appearing in 2,000,000 places on the web, with prominent clusters of sybaritic and cybernetic environments among them. Xanadu: A View from the Wikipedia Let us start with the Wikipedia. As you know, the Wikipedia is an online reference work created through the efforts of hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the world. Though, like any reference work, it is nominally positioned outside the world it documents, it is also, and at one and the same time, both physically and logically a part of that world. This recursive duality is particularly important in our consideration of the Xanadu system, for that system exists in a meshwork of relationships among people extended over geographical space and historical time. The Wikipedia entries for Xanadu thus constitute a dense nexus in that overall extended network. A small number of people have written and edited those entries, and they have, in turn, explicitly referenced a relatively small number of websites about “Xanadu.” The Wikipedia contains articles on several Xanadu tokens (accessed the weekend of 21 January 2005). (“Token” is a term of art in cognitive science meaning individual 5 instance of some symbol or string of symbols.) It lists them all on a so-called disambiguation page where it tells us that “the name Xanadu is widespread and used for many subjects. Most uses of the word trace its origins to Xanadu, the summer capital of Kublai Khan's empire.” The underlined word in that sentence is a hyperlink 3 connected to the Wikipedia entry for the geographic feature, Xanadu. The Wikipedia lists these other uses for the word, many of which are discussed elsewhere in the Wikipedia: Xanadu (song), a song recorded by the Canadian progressive rock trio Rush for their album A Farewell to Kings Xanadu (Citizen Kane), the fictional mansion built by Charles Foster Kane in the film Citizen Kane Watching Xanadu, a single recorded by Mull Historical Society Xanadu (Titan), an enigmatic bright feature on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan In Garage Kids, a prequel to French animated series Code: LYOKO, Xanadu is an ancestor to virtual world Lyoko Project Xanadu, an early hypertext markup project Xanadu House , a series of experimental homes, built to showcase computers and automation in the home Xanadu (film), a film starring, and with a soundtrack by, Olivia Newton-John Xanadu (comic), a comic book series by Vicki Wyman Xanadu 2.0, the nickname of Bill Gates' futuristic private estate Xanadu (video game), a video game by Falcom Xanadu (anime), from the anime series Lain Xanadu (snowpark), the biggest indoor snowpark in Europe, located at Arroyomolinos, near Madrid Xanadu, the name of Mandrake's estate in the old comic Mandrake the Magician In Xanadu, a book written by William Dalrymple Xanadu is the name of a proposed entertainment and sports complex in New Jersey. 3 Underlining indicates and a word or phrase is a hyperlink. Hyperlinks do not function in hardcopy; in the original web page, of course, hyperlinks connect with other web pages. 6 Note that Coleridge's poem is not mentioned in this list. Nor is it mentioned in many of the Wikipedia articles about these various Xanadus. But those articles linked to the underlined Xanadu tokens all mention the poem (I checked them). The Wikipedia entry for the poem contains links to at least some – perhaps all, I've not checked – of the articles linked in the above list. It contains other links as well. Like the world it documents, the Wikipedia is not a tidy little closed system. Xanadu: A Google View Now let us go to Google. Google indexes the web. When you direct it to search for occurrences of “Xanadu” it returns a long list of items that you can then examine one after the other. That list is quite different in character from the one you find in the Wikipedia disambiguation entry that we examined above. For one thing, the Wikipedia entry only has 10s of items while the Google list has on the order of two million. Dramatic though that difference it, that difference is superficial. The deep difference is that the Wikipedia list is explicit within the Wikipedia while the Google list is only implicit within the Google system. The Wikipedia list was created by the volunteers who work on the Wikipedia. That list exists within the Wikipedia whether or not anyone is actually reading it at any given moment. The Google list exists only when someone calls it into being by searching on the term “Xanadu.” Otherwise it has no existence as a “compact” and more or less self-sufficient object. The Wikipedia listing shows us the Xanadu system as it has been filtered through and shaped by the minds of a small group of people. The Google listing still reflects human intentions, but much more diffusely. With that in mind, let's google “Xanadu.” In doing so, keep in mind that Google orders items in the return list according to their connectivity in the web. The basic idea is that the more incoming links a page has, that is, the more pages that reference it, the higher it is in the listing. Thus in examining items at the top of the ranking we are, in theory, looking at items that are “centrally” located in the Xanadu system. Unfortunately, Google’s formula for weighing the importance of web pages is secret, making it impossible fully to understand the significance of ordering in the return list for a query. In any event, the items listed when we google “Xanadu” certainly are not random. For what it is worth, a few of the items at the top of the Google list also appear in the Wikipedia list. When I googled “Xanadu” in January of 2005 I determined that a good many of the items that appeared at the top of the list fell into one of two categories that I have called the cybernetic and the sybaritic. Here are the first ten entries in the return list from 1.21.2005 (Note: I have added numbers to facilitate discussion): 1. Xanadu (1980): Xanadu - Cast, Crew, Reviews, Plot Summary, Comments, Discussion, Taglines, Trailers, Posters, Photos, Showtimes, Link to Official Site, Fan Sites. 2. Kubla Khan: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man: Down to a sunless sea. ... 7  3. Xanadu Australia: The name "Xanadu" and the Flaming-X symbol are software an eid service trademarks of Project Xanadu, registered in certain countries and claimed elsewhere. ... 4. XANADU Software Home Page: In XANADU did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree... ---. The XANADU software package comprises high- level, multi-mission tasks for X-ray astronomical ... 5. Welcome to Udanax.com: Xanadu Secrets Become Udanax Open-Source. The long history of the Xanadu® vision of hypertext has inspired many individual 6. The Mills - Madrid Xanadu: Madrid Xanadu · Register for X Alerts. Lo último en Madrid Xanadú. No hay ningún evento previsto actualmente. 7. Index: .:Test Page - www2:. www.xanaduwines.com.au/ - 1k - Cached - Similar pages 8. Xanadu: The language and translation wizard Xanadu: The language and translation wizard. Translate words and terms. Find professional translators. Read language related news. 9. Amazon.com: Xanadu (1980): DVD: Xanadu, Olivia Newton-John, Gene Kelly, Michael Beck, James Sloyan, Dimitra Arliss, Katie Hanley, Fred McCarren, Ren Woods, Sandahl Bergman, Lynn Latham, ... 10. Ted Nelson and Xanadu: The Electronic Labyrinth is a study of the implications of hypertext for creative writers looking to move beyond traditional notions of linearity. The first and ninth items are for a 1980 movie staring Olivia Newton-John and are obviously associated with her hit song of the same name; this is included in the Wikipedia list. The second item is a text of the poem itself in an online text repository at the University of Virginia – not in the Wikipedia list, but “close by.” This is one of many copies of the text online; I have made no attempt to count them, but that should be doable with the appropriate resources. Entries three, four, five, eight, and ten are all related to Ted Nelson's Xanadu project (included in the Wikipedia list), which I will discuss in a moment. There is nothing at item seven, nor do I have any idea why it is so highly ranked. Item eight is a retail and entertainment complex in Madrid (also in the Wikipedia list) that features an indoor ski-slope – caves of ice? Entries 3, 4, 5, 8, and 10 place Xanadu in a cybernetic environment of high technology, while entries 1, 9, and 8 place it in a sybaritic environment of pleasure, luxury, and excess. That accounts for eight of the top ten. The poem itself is the second item; I don't see that it makes any sense to score it as belonging in either a cybernetic or sybaritic environment. I don't know what to make of item 7 since there is nothing there. But if we examine the domain name, we see that it is for "xanaduwines" and that surely belongs in the sybaritic group. 8  If we continue scrolling through the list we'll find more software links, but we'll also come to an entry for The Mills - Meadowlands Xanadu, which is a retail and entertainment being developed in the New Jersey just West of New York City – though the development has run into financial difficulties. This project is a corporate sibling of Madrid Xanadu. A bit further on we come to the Manchester Swingers Club Xanadu in Britain, “for North West swinging couples.” Also in Britain we find, “Xanadu Interiors: Interior Design, Interior Designers, London.” And so it goes for page after page. I have not made any attempt to sample this list in any exhaustive way. All I want to do is motivate my assertion that, at first glance, the sybaritic and cybernetic groups seem real. As I noted in the introduction, Oedipus gets roughly the same number of hits as Xanadu does. I chose Oedipus as a term for comparison as it too is closely associated with a specific literary text, though a considerably older one. Beyond that, it is also associated with psychoanalysis, a conceptual system that is roughly a hundred years old and still current, if somewhat beleaguered. Let us take a look at the return list for Oedipus and compare it to that for Xanadu. I've listed the top ten returns in Appendix 1. All of them are to sites referencing the story of Oedipus. Eight of them reference Sophocles’ play. One of them references a game based on the play, while another references an animated parody of the story. Moving beyond the top ten we find more Sophocles references, but we also have sites for: 1) Oedipus, a band out of Los Angeles, 2) a Motorcycle Club in Southern California, 3) a site which is described as “a SourceForge project that I've recycled to provide a CVS server and bug tracker for various projects of mine”, and 4) a site devoted to resources for the blind. The web environments for Oedipus thus seem to be mostly about the ancient Greek play with a mixture of other stuff. Curiously, there weren't any references to Freud or to psychoanalysis at the top of the returns lists. In an effort to see if “Freud” would turn up in some of the same websites as “Oedipus” I entered “Freud” and “Oedipus” into the search window (as two separate items, not as a single phrase) and got 340,000 hits. I've listed the top 10 in Appendix 1 as well. Presumably those are a subset of the return list for “Oedipus” alone. I have no idea how far one has to go into the “Oedipus”-only list to starting running into those items. At this point we have evidence for two things: 1) That the cybernetic and sybaritic clusters are present in the return list for “Xanadu,” and 2) that the return list from “Oedipus” is quite different in character, with many items associated directly with the originating literary text. Given the sketchy nature of these analytic forays, however, it would be unwise to draw any hard and fast conclusions. Instead, let us play around a bit more. Google has a variety of search engines available; let us try another one. Let us take a look in Google Books, which searches the full text of books that publishers have allowed Google to include in the service, which is but a fraction of all the books in print or in libraries. I've listed first ten entries in Appendix 2. I won't comment on these beyond noting that the first two entries are about a book entitled Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond (sybaritic) while the last four are all related to media and the internet (cybernetic). When we try Google Images we see lots of images from the movie, Xanadu. We also get an image of the indoor ski-slope from Madrid Xanadu, which is not terribly surprising. Now consider this image: 9 NASA created that image. It was taken on 10.24.2004 and shows one of Saturn’s moons, Titan. The bright area on the center right has been named “Xanadu.” Thus, like the Xanadu of Coleridge’s poem, this Xanadu is a geographic feature, though one considerably more exotic than the ancient capital of Mongolia. Another image that shows up is a design study for a Xanadu hotel by a Las Vegas hotel architect, the late Martin Stern, Jr. The study was commissioned by Donald Trump in the 1970s. Trump’s financing fell through and the hotel was never built. It was to have been located on the site where the Excalibur is currently located. Further searching reveals another interesting link between Donald Trump and “Xanadu.” On August 18, 1997 Trump Taj Mahal Associates filed a legal action against Chatam International Incorporated. Chatam had filed to use “Xanadu” as a trademark for “wines and distilled spirits” (Holtzman 2000). Trump Taj Mahal opposed the 10 application because they had been using the name for a nightclub and restaurant in a hotel-casino in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The action was decided against Trump in a decision filed on October 30, 2000 (Holtzman 2000). There was no question that Trump had used “Xanadu” for business purposes before Chatam sought to do so. What was at issue is whether or not Chatam’s use would have resulted in confusion in the marketplace, thus harming Trump’s brand identity. Thus we must ask whether or not Trump and Chatam are competitors in the same market and thus likely to be confused with one another if Chatam is allowed to market a Xanadu brand. The court decided against Trump on this point, thus allowing Chatam to use the name. I won’t attempt to summarize the full reasoning, which is not complex, just tedious. But I will quote some key passages. First, let us consider the provenance of the name. In the decision we are told: To demonstrate the suggestive nature of the mark and the public’s familiarity with the term, applicant [Chatham] has made of record an encyclopedia reference describing “Xanadu” as a province or region in China “mentioned” in Samuel Coleridge’s poem, “Kubla Khan” as the site of Khan’s well-known pleasure garden. Then we are told that Chatham has produced a dictionary definition, defining Xanadu as “a place of great beauty, luxury, and contentment.” Then we have “three publications in the nature of movie and video review guides” that reference the 1980 film. The court concludes: It can be seen from this evidence that XANADU is not an arbitrary or fanciful mark in the context of opposer’s [Trump] services. The evidence shows that when XANADU is used in connection with a nightclub and restaurant the term is in fact suggestive of the environment or ambiance for those services. That is, the term (“Xanadu”) seems to have inherent meaning “suggestive” of the business of Trump’s venue, a nightclub, and so its trademark value is not entirely due to Trump’s activities. Trump is not responsible for the value that the term has in that context. Toward the end of the document, the court observes: In view of the foregoing and the suggestive quality of the mark in connection with opposer’s nightclub and restaurant, we find the mark is, at best, only moderately strong as used in connection with those services and, as such, entitled to a more limited scope of protection than an arbitrary or fanciful mark. What is interesting about this is that the case depends in part on the prevalence and “inherent” meaning and connotations of “Xanadu.” If the court had decided that the word lacked inherent resonance with Trump’s venue, it would have given him more consideration because any resonance it now had would have been created by Trump. The prevalence and meaning of the word worked against Trump. I leave you with this interesting footnote from the decision (no. 11, p. 13), which bears on the issue of how the word gets around from person to person: As a final note, opposer’s suggestion that applicant [Chatam International] intentionally adopted its XANADU mark to trade directly on the goodwill of opposer is unsupported. It is true that the person responsible for selecting the word XANADU as applicant’s mark, Mr. Kevin O’Brien, stated, in response to a request for admission, that he had “[stayed] overnight” at the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort “prior to August 8, 1997” that is, at some time prior to the filing of the involved application. However, there was no request for Mr. O’Brien to admit that he was aware of the XANADU nightclub during that visit and 11  moreover, there is no particular time frame for that visit; it could have occurred prior to the time the nightclub was in existence. That is to say, while there is evidence that the applicant had stayed at the Tramp Taj Mahal, there is no evidence that that stay was causal in choosing “Xanadu” as a brand name. Thus the court has taken the Xanadu cultural system (as I have informally defined it) into account in its reasoning in this case. It is because such a cultural system exists that the Trump organization cannot claim ownership of the name for business purposes. The Trump organization played almost no role in creating the resonance that inheres to “Xanadu,” but in claiming ownership of the term it was attempting to gain ownership of that resonance. It would be easy to continue listing items and commenting on them; each item has its own story, some more complicated than others. That is how history is, detail upon detail upon detail upon detail. At this point, however, I think it would be more fruitful to step back from these specific examples and think about the Xanadu system in a more global way. Examining the Xanadu System For the purposes of discussion let us continue on the assumption that the Xanadu system exhibits two clusters of meaning: 1) sybaritic excess: entertainment, exotica, and opulence and 2) cybernetic connectivity: hypertext, media, the internet. In continuing with this assumption I am not implying that all of the web sites associated with “Xanadu” can be placed in one of those two categories. I mean nothing more than that many web sites can be placed in one or another of those categories, and that those two categories are the largest groups in the return list. I don't have any sense of how many websites are associated with the poem itself. Thus I don't know whether that class is comparable in size to the sybarites or the cybernauts. Given that these two groups are real, how did they come about? Let us start with the cybernetics group, which seems unrelated to Coleridge's poem. That is to say, the resonance of the Xanadu meme has become quite modified in this context. There is no particular mystery about why this group is so large. Back in the 1960s one Ted Nelson started exploring the notion of hypertext and decided to use Xanadu as the name of his project; Coleridge's poem is known to have been his source (Nelson 1987). While conducting my initial research on the Xanadu system I posted a notice to a memetics list. One Keith Henson responded that he had worked on the Xanadu code and that he had a current email address for Ted Nelson. Keith offered to email Nelson and ask him just why he chose to call his project Xanadu. This is Nelson’s response: I chose “Xanadu” because 1. “Kubla Khan” is the most romantic poem in English and I loved it; 2. The backstory-- that he was interrupted in his reverie by the dreaded Person from Porlock and lost much of the poem-- represents the hazards of the creative process. 12  Which I hoped to eliminate. Thus I always thought of the system as “The magic place of literary memory, where nothing is lost.” I have always resented people who speak of it as “technology.” 
The technology follows the idea and not vice versa: it is an idea for which a variety of mechanisms have been found. Or, as Hume said, “ The Reason is, and by rights ought to be, slave to the emotions.” Nelson’s project became legendary among computer and digital media people. That history would seem to be behind all the technology and media oriented sites in the Xanadu system. With respect to the large historical forces behind this technology, Nelson's decision to name his project “Xanadu” would seem to be arbitrary. I rather suspect most of the interest in Nelson's project has been related to the technological content of the project itself. Whatever reasonable name Nelson had chosen would have been carried along with that interest. But he choose to call it “Xanadu” and so the term has become indissolubly linked to high tech independently of any meaning the term has within Coleridge’s poem. Nelson adopted the “Xanadu” name in 1967. He first published his ideas in a 1974 book entitled Computer Lib/Dream Machines and then later in his 1981 Literary Machines. I became aware of the first book sometime in the late 1970s, when I was in graduate school. I was introduced to it by my friend, Richard Fritzson, who was deeply immersed in the world of computers. I became aware of the 1981 book when someone showed me a copy while I was working on a NASA project that summer. The project involved computing and so I was surrounded by computer folks from all over the country. I do not have any sense of how widely Nelson's ideas were known during this period, but they certainly circulated in university-related computer circles. By this time the personal computer revolution was moving into high gear and that certainly gave an impetus to Nelson's ideas. The sybaritic cluster of meanings seems more rooted in the poem itself, which talks of a pleasure dome, of a woman wailing for her demon lover, and which has that ejaculatory fountain. That is not all that is in the poem, of course. We also have the damsel with a dulcimer and the fear and ritual magic at the end of the poem. That does not quite fit in with the sybaritic theme. Reuven Tsur (1987, 2006) has argued that the poem is a mystical one and I certainly agree. Mysticism and sybaritic excess are not exactly opposed, but they are not deeply consonant either. The relationship between them is complex and gnarled. Rather than attempting to argue from the poem to the sybaritic let me offer a specific proposal about the key event in the founding of that cluster of meanings: the premier and exhibition of Orson Welles's 1941 Citizen Kane. Though it won the Best Screenplay Oscar, the film's early history was checkered. It was released in Europe in 1946, to much acclaim, and revived in the United States in the 1950s, when it became widely acknowledged as “the greatest film ever made.” Critics, can, however, make such a declaration without many people having seen the film. Just what put the film before lots of eyes, and when, is not quite clear to me. I first saw it in a college film series in the late 1960s, and suspect that by that time it had 13 been a staple on the college circuit for some time. That would put the film in front of lots of people, but gradually over a relatively long period of time. Sometime during this period – the 60s – the name “Rosebud” showed up on a sled in the Charles Shultz comic strip Peanuts. That was, of course, a reference to the film and suggests a relatively wide awareness of the film by that time. More directly to our immediate purposes, Welles put the first five lines of the m ”Kubla Khan” were put up on the screen and had them read in the voice-over on the soundtrack. The film is about a tycoon in the newspaper business – based on William Randolph Hearst – and “Xanadu” was the name of his uncompleted Florida mansion – Hearst's mansion was named San Simeon and still exists in California. This interpretation gains some confirming evidence from the Oxford English Dictionary, which dates ”Xanadu” to Purchas, in 1625, then lists “Kubla Khan,” published in 1816, and finally has six entries between 1948 and 1977, all with architectural references having implications of luxury, that is, the sybaritic cluster. Here are the six most recent OED entries: 1948 ‘J. TEY’ Franchise Affair i. 7 To that douce country lawyer .. Scotland Yard was as exotic as Xanadu, Hollywood, or parachuting. 1958 M. KENNEDY Outlaws on Parnassus xi. 165 Desirable readers .. do not expect Xanadu to put them in mind of Yarmouth. 1962 Holiday Aug. 70/1 It was only about half an hour's drive to the Xanadu of le facteur Cheval. 1969 Guardian 12 Nov. 5/7 Bob's double-tiered hideaway .. overlooking the fairy-lit battlements of his Xanadu in Mayfair. 1972 K. BONFIGLIOLI Don't point that Thing at Me viii. 76 The Ambassador was at some Xanadu-like golf-links far away. 1977 Time 25 July 2/1 We have lived in Southern California for twelve years and watched nearly everything encapsulate itself within a plastic bubble; not only giant ‘pop Xanadus’ like Sea World and Universal Studios, but also miniature golf courses, shopping centers and finally the American home. That these entries are subsequent to Citizen Kane is hardly proof of the Kane hypothesis, but I note that the OED has no entries between Coleridge's poem and that cluster. This suggests that the word entered the language as a term of excess sometime after Welles’s film. Prior to that it was simply the name of an exotic city that happened to be mentioned in one of the best-known poems in the English language. I have also searched the New York Times archives on “Xanadu” between 1851 and 1980. I got 443 hits; only 3 of them were in 1900 or earlier. I checked only the first one, an article on child labor from 1870 and was unable to find “xanadu” in the article itself and so have no idea why it turned up in the search. I checked a few later articles, including a review of Livingston Lowes’s The Road to Xanadu and one of a Coleridge biography. There were a number of articles about yachting and ocean racing in the 1930s and into the 1940s. I checked two of them. One mentions a yacht named “X Anadu” and another mentions one named “Xanadu.” While the first is probably a typo, I would not automatically assume so; yachts are often oddly named. The point is that entries are sparse between 1900 and the 1940s. The New York Times review for Citizen Kane, however, was 77th in the list of 443 hits over the period between 1851 and 1980. Thus over 80% of occurrences of “Xanadu” are dated after the premier of Citizen Kane. These two sources, the OED, and the New York Times, thus strongly suggest that it was Citizen Kane that brought “Xanadu” into wide popular circulation. That movie 14 acted as both modifier, focusing the meaning of “Xanadu” more specifically than it is in the poem, and amplifier, broadcasting that meaning to a relatively wide audience, many of whom may have had no particular knowledge of the poem itself. Events subsequent to Kane have helped amplify the sybaritic cluster. Olivia Newton-John's 1980 movie became a cult classic and she went on to a reasonable, if not particularly long-lived, career as a pop singer. That would have given “Xanadu” quite a bit of pop visibility in the near past. Note however, that the connotation of “Xanadu” in the movie is positive, while it seems to be at least slightly negative in Citizen Kane and in much of the sybaritic cluster – a matter we will return to shortly. Before Newton-John, in 1977 the Canadian rock group Rush recorded a “Xanadu” song that used many fragments from ”Kubla Khan” in the lyrics (a bit of googling will turn up those lyrics quickly enough). Here then, is my basic proposal about the Xanadu system. Given that the OED lists nothing between Purchas and “Kubla Khan” let us say that the system starts with Coleridge. We would like to know why he wrote “Kubla Khan” in the first place and why it talks of “Xanadu.” That sort of question – the poem's origins – has generated a large and inconclusive literature: we do not know. Whatever it is, for our purposes it is enough to assert that the poem exists through Coleridge's agency. The very real possibility that the poem somehow ”came to him” in an opium induced vision does not, as far as I am concerned, affect that assertion in any deep way. However he came to write it, he chose to put the poem before the world. That is agency. Coleridge published the poem in 1816. It was not particularly well received, but Coleridge was known to have given compelling readings of the poem (cf. Hogsette 1997). From that point up through and into the 20th century the poem's cultural presence was amplified by the methods of industrial era print culture, whatever they were. The poem was popular enough that Livingston Lowes devoted several chapters to it in his 1927 The Road to Xanadu, which was otherwise about “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel.” That book sold well enough that its copyright was renewed in 1955. That date is after Welles's film put the first lines of "Kubla Khan" across the screen though I do not know whether Citizen Kane stimulated any interest in Coleridge. Welles's film did two things: 1) it further amplified the cultural presence of the Xanadu meme, and 2) it modified its containing environment. Whatever it is that attracted Welles to the poem, his use of it put Xanadu before a large audience, and did so rather more rapidly than the print-culture of the 19th and 20th centuries could have done. But the chemical composition of the candle for this audience, to return to that metaphor, was rather different from that of Coleridge's candle, and those who caught the flame from him and from his expositor, Livingston Lowes. The Kane flame, and those in the audience who lit their candles by it, burned with a different color and a different odor. As far as I can tell, this is the beginning of the sybaritic branch of the Xanadu system. Starting in 1967 Ted Nelson initiated the cybernetic branch of the system. He introduced the Xanadu meme to a different social network with rather different attitudes and interests. These people where and are technophiles. I suspect that this branch of the system didn't really take off until the personal computer revolution of the late 1970s put computers in many different hands and led to the birth of a computer 15 subculture that had deep roots in the counter culture of the 1960s as well as the university and corporate worlds of high technology (Markoff 2005). Thus by the 1970s an element within “Kubla Khan,” a single word, had become detached from the poem and had begun circulating in two different branches of this cultural system. The word carries different connotations in these two branches, one sybaritic and the other cybernetic. These branches do not depend directly on the poem itself, but rather on the cultural products and processes which gave them life: movies, songs, computers, networks, software. At this point it would seem that the Xanadu cultural system has had three phases, each associated with a branch in the system: 1. Print media: 1816 into the first half of the 20th century. This is the root of the system, as it were. 2. Electronic and mass media: mid-20th century to present. 3. Digital media with world-wide provenance: starting in the mid 1970s. We can represent this diagrammatically with the following diagram, which is derived from the cladograms drawn by evolutionary biologists (cf. Collard, Shennan & Tehrani 2006): In 1980, as I have already mentioned, Olivia Newton-John had a hit song, Xanadu, and starred in a movie of the same name that became a cult classic. I propose that that event has given rise to yet another branch in the Xanadu cultural system, as follows: 16 To justify that diagram I need to argue two things: 1) that there is a direct link between the movie and the original branch in the system, the one for the poem itself, and 2) that the ambience of this milieu is different from that of the sybaritic and cybernetic branches. The first point is straightforward. The opening lines of “Kubla Khan” are quoted directly in the film in a bit of dialogue between Gene Kelly and Olivia Newton- John. Regardless of how the production team knew about the poem, the fact that they included it in the movie gives the movie itself a direct link to the main branch. Equally important, as this speaks to the second issue, the mood of the film is quite different from that of Citizen Kane and thus the valence of “Xanadu” is quite different in this context. In Citizen Kane, “Xanadu” is the name of an incomplete, but grandiose, estate. It functions as a symbol of Kane’s outsized ambition and, ultimately, his personal failure. In Olivia Newton-John’s film “Xanadu” is the name of a nightclub that is the fruition of the dreams of two men from two generations, Gene Kelly, and the other one, a young artist who falls in love with an honest-to-gosh goddess, the character played by Olivia Newton-John. It is thus a symbol of success and celebration. The final sequence of the movie takes place inside the Xanadu Club and involves dancing and singing and high spirits – and some bitter-sweetness as well. For these reasons – direct reference to Coleridge’s poem, connotative valence – I believe that Olivia Newton- John‘s film and song have started a new lineage off the main one. Thus I must revise the idea that the Xanadu system has two main clusters, the sybaritic and the cybernetic, for the Olivia Newton-John cluster is not part of the sybaritic cluster – as I had treated it above. If it shares an architectural resonance with the sybaritic cluster, that is because that resonance derives from the poem itself, 17 through Kubla’s pleasure-dome. Thus we have not one, but two, sybaritic clusters with differing valence. Beyond the Meme I now want to step beyond the meme. For, as the term has come to be used in popular intellectual discourse, the meme has been endowed with agency (analogously to Dawkins’s selfish gene). Memes are thought of as moving about from mind to mind, either singly or in “meme-plexes” and such. In this discourse minds tend to become warehouses and hotels for memes. That is, agency is attributed to memes, but not to minds. I think this view is mistaken and that the burden of argument is with those “memeticists” who endow memes with agency (I have argued against one such thinker in Benzon 2002). As a way of indicating my position on this issue, let us take another look at Olivia Newton-John’s Xanadu. In the middle of the film there is an animated sequence done by Don Bluth, who had once worked at the Walt Disney animation studios. To my eye that sequence owes debts to the “Nutcracker Suite” segment of Fantasia (which, like Citizen Kane, was released in 1941). More specifically, the animated segment has portions that are like the underwater sequence and the ice-skating episodes from the “Nutcracker Suite.” That is to say, this animated sequence includes memes that are also in Fantasia. In more traditional terms, these two films share tropes and images, for example: both are under water, both have fish and aquatic plants, both show small-scale humanoid creatures in action (the fairies in Fantasia, the hero and heroine in Xanadu). There must be tens of thousands of such memes in the entire film, each having its own linage trailing into the past. Any full account of the cultural lineages intersecting through Olivia Newton- John’s film would thus include many lineages from various sources. The intersection of all those lineages happened in the minds of the creative team. They, collectively, were aware of “Kubla Khan,” Fantasia, and much else and they, collectively, included these elements in the film along with many others, e.g. “boy meets girl.” When audiences see the film, they see it whole. Whether or not they identify the poem fragment (first five lines) or the Fantasia references depends, in part, on whether or not they have prior acquaintance with those works. But the film works as it does even if the references are not recognized. Such things are true for Citizen Kane and for Project Xanadu as well. These are all complex cultural products. That each of them mentions Xanadu does not mean that each of them derives primarily from the Xanadu meme. Cultural heritage is a tricky matter. Any complex cultural product is likely to be heir to many lineages. Sorting all this out will be difficult in individual cases, as will formulating generalizations about the process. Nor, I might add, does it make any sense to talk about complex cultural products as some simple combination of the many lineages intersecting through each product. It is not as though these products somehow miraculously congeal into a finished work. That congealing requires the deliberate work of someone’s mind, or, in many cases, the minds of many people. Beyond Interpretation The discussions in the previous sections are full of interpretive statements. I see no way to eliminate them, nor do I have any desire to do so. They are essential to thought. 18  But what would it mean to explain the Xanadu system as I have outlined it? I have argued that Coleridge's poem is at the center of this system. Even if I am correct in that argument, we do not know just why that poem has been so popular. I have argued elsewhere that poem's form is critical (Benzon 2003). But I have by no means explained just why that should be so. That explanation will have to be couched in psychological – perhaps even neuroscientific – terms. That is one thing. That explanation would tell us why individual upon individual is attracted to the poem. But we also need to understand the workings of social networks and how ideas, attitudes, and feelings move through those networks. What structure do such networks have to have in order to amplify their cultural inputs? What about the time course of memes through the networks? Note, however, that there is considerable independence between these two problems. We can analyze the properties of socio-cultural networks without knowing just what it is about "Kubla Khan" that makes it compelling. Similarly, we can think about the poem itself, in all its particularity and formal sophistication, without worrying about how it has made its way in the world. Finally, I want to make some remarks about the biological metaphor, which has pervaded this exploration, and about history. New historicist criticism has been enormously productive and influential over the last few decades. Yet the terms of its success – scrupulous attention to historical context – have had a curious effect: history is atomized into a pile of moments that are next to one another, but have lost all causal connection from one decade to another, one generation to another (Perkins 1992, Said 2001). Here, I believe, is where it will prove fruitful, albeit difficult and tricky, to learn from evolutionary biology. Living things are quite specific. Populations are adapted to environments. When the environment changes, a population must adapt or perish. The relationship between a population and its environment is thus one of particularity. But, over the long term, environments do change. And populations adapt and change, some of them, at least. Others fail to change and so they perish. Literary history, and its parent, cultural history, exhibits the same phenomena. How can we adapt the logical form of evolutionary explanation to the rather different demands of our materials? I emphasize logical form, because that is what is important. Gene, phenotype, environment, reproduce, adapt – these conceptual objects and others from biology are all related to one another through a certain logical form. It is that form that we must strive to reconstruct in terms appropriate to our discipline. One aspect of this process is purely theoretical. But that must be closely related to concrete examples of description and analysis. That is what I have sketched out in this essay, a single example that involves literary and cultural materials deployed in a manner susceptible to analysis inspired by biology. Appendix 1: Googling Oedipus When I googled “Oedipus” on 22 January 2005, I got roughly 2,000,000 hits. Here are the first ten: The Classics Pages - Oedipus Tyrannos by Sophocles Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrrannus (Oedipus the King, Oedipus Rex). Discussion of the interpretation of the tragedy. 19  The Oedipus Game : Start Page [Takes you to the Oracle of Loxias, where your questions can be answered], You've read the play: now play the Game! You are sitting on the slope of the ... The Internet Classics Archive | Oedipus the King by Sophocles <!--quoteTitle> by Sophocles, part of the Internet Classics Archive. Oedipus Rex Synopsis of 'Oedipus Rex,' Sophocles' dramatic masterpiece. Oedipus Study Guide Oedipus rules over Thebes, a city whose mythological background is important to ... Oedipus even begins the play by calling its residents the "new blood of ... Enjoying "Oedipus the King" by Sophocles An overview of the legend, the play, and major themes of Oedipus Rex by Ed Friedlander. GradeSaver: ClassicNote: Oedipus Rex / Oedipus the King Full summary and analysis of Oedipus Rex / Oedipus the King by Sophocles written by Harvard students. Includes a biography, and background information on ... Oedipus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Finally, the seer Teiresias revealed to Oedipus that he himself was the ... Oedipus discovered he was really the son of Laius and Jocasta and that all of ... Oedipus The story of OEDIPUS, in 8 minutes, performed by vegetables, in the lavish tradition of BEN HUR and GLADIATOR. Directed by Jason Wishnow. Oedipus, Greek Mythology Link. The blind Oedipus goes into exile led by his daughter Antigone 2 ... Oedipus: I am the one who came into high songs of victory, because I guessed the ... I then submitted both “Freud” and “Oedipus” as a single query (as: +Freud +Oedipus) to Google and got 340,000 hits. Note that when I did this I did not group the two terms together into a phrase by surrounding them with quotation marks ("Freud Oedipus"). That would have forced Google to search for that phrase, which is much more restrictive; if you do that, you get roughly 800 hits. Rather, I formulated the query so that both “Freud “ and “Oedipus” had to be in each returned item, but that they could occur anywhere within the item. This is the first ten items returned by asking for pages with both “Freud” and “Oedipus” on them: D2: Freud, Jung, and Psychoanalysis — Oedipus Redivivus Freud, Jung and Psychoanalysis. Douglas A. Davis1 Haverford College ... Freud and Oedipus. New York: Columbia University Press. ... 20  Sigmund Freud Oedipus complex repression — Sigmund Freud's major works. The Interpretation of Dreams, The Oedipus complex, Freudian slips, free associaion. Freud and Oedipus — Teresa M. claims Freud's Oedipal Complex doesn't apply to Oedipus: I agree that he ... Sophocles, "Oedipus as Evidence: The Theatrical Background to Freud's ... Freud: On Narcissism — CriticaLink | Freud: On Narcissism | Terms. Oedipus complex. Drawing on the Greek myth of Oedipus as dramatized by Sophocles in the tragedy Oedipus the King ... Oedipus complex revisited; son of Freud rebuts father— Otto Rank inspires a revamped interpretation of Freud's Oedipus complex, making love the focus instead of fear, reducing intellect and historical truth to ... Antigone, the neglected daughter of Oedipus: Freud's gender ... — Antigone, the neglected daughter of Oedipus: Freud's gender concepts in theory. Shainess N. MeSH Terms Female Freudian Theory* Gender Identity* ... oedipus freud - Books, journals, articles @ The Questia Online Library — For instance, Freud's Oedipus has very little to do with... ... Peter Rudnytsky notes in Freud and Oedipus that Freud also stressed. ... Sigmund Freud's final outline of psychoanalysis — Oedipus Rex: The story of King Oedipus, from the Greek play, is retold by Freud in Interpretation of Dreams (1924). The way the Oedipus Complex breaks down ... Untitled Document — ... False Sense of Ego Oedipus, Freud’s Oedipus Complex, Oedipus Freud, Psychology Oedipus, Freud’s Favorite Band Oedipus, Freud’s favorite Music Oedipus, ... Oedipus complex: Definition and Much More From Answers.com. The Oedipus complex is a concept developed by Sigmund Freud, who inspired Carl Jung (he described the concept and coined the term "Complex"), to explain the ... Appendix 2: Xanadu in Google Books The first 10 items returned when submitting “Xanadu” to Google Books on 21 January 2005: Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond by David G Schwartz - Social Science - 2003 - 243 pages Suburban Xanadu: The Casino Resort on the Las Vegas Strip and Beyond by David Schwartz - Social Science - 2003 - 240 pages. * Page 15 - ... exile in the Nevada desert Attacks on gambling in general and legalized gambling in particular have recently been uttered by various public officials. ... 21  From Apec to Xanadu: Creating a Viable Community in the Post-Cold War Pacific edited by Donald C Hellmann, Kenneth B Pyle - Political Science - 1997 - 264 pages * Page v - ... Used Abbreviations xiii Contents 1. Introduction Donald C. Hellmann and Kenneth B. * Pyle 3 2. APEC in a New International Order Robert G. Gilpin 14 3. ... Necroscope: Invaders by Brian Lumley - Fiction - 2000 - 544 pages * Page 1 - Prologue IN XANADU, JETHRO MANCHESTER HAD BUiLT A pleasure dome, in fact the Pleasure Dome Casino. But that was some time ago, and since then Manchester's ... Saturn's Race by Larry Niven, Steven Barnes - Fiction - 2001 - 384 pages * Page 3 - 1 JUNE 2020 T he sun had fled the sky hours ago, and with it, Xanadu's winged children. Before it dipped beneath Bombay's horizon, a thousand kilometers to ... Short Stories for Rainy Days by M E Keimig - Fiction - 2004 - 164 pages * Page 2 - Why don't you drive in Xanadu with the other slow-pokes and stay off the highways.” Just then, Jack heard a loud noise. Thinking it was thunder, ... Networks of Innovation: Change and Meaning in the Age of the Internet by Ilkka Tuomi - Business & Economics - 2003 - 250 pages * Page 50 - Similarly, whereas much of the Xanadu architecture was based on solving the problem of fair reuse, the WWW didn't have any way to facilitate intellectual ... Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond by Jakob Nielsen - Computers - 1995 - 480 pages * Page 38 - Parts of Xanadu do work and have been a product from the Xanadu Operating ... The Xanadu vision has never been implemented, however, and probably never will ... The World As Information by Robert Abbott - Social Science - 1999 - 160 pages * Page 124 - If the Xanadu project fails then maybe the ideal of a World Brain will never be realised, and information disorder will spiral ever more out of control. ... Electronic Books and Epublishing by Harold Henke - Computers - 2001 - 241 pages * Page 145 - The Economist (2000) magazine provided a succinct description of Xanadu: “Xanadu ... The Xanadu system could contain only one copy of a particular novel. ... References Benzon, W. L. (1996). "Culture as an Evolutionary Arena." Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 19(4): 321-362. Benzon, W. L. (2002). "Colorless Green Homunculi." Human Nature Review 2: 454-462. 22 Benzon, W. L. (2003). “Kubla Khan” and the Embodied Mind. PSYART: A Hyperlink Journal for Psychological Study of the Arts. http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/2003/benzon02.htm Collard, M., Shennan, S. J. & Tehrani, J. J. (2006) Branching, blending, and the evolution of cultural similarities and differences among human populations. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27, pp. 169-184. Dawkins, R. (1989). The Selfish Gene, New Edition. Oxford, New York, Oxford University Press. Hogsette, D. S. (1997). “Eclipsed by the Pleasure Dome: Poetic Failure in Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’.” Romanticism On the Net 5. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~scat0385/eclipsed.html Holtzman, T. E. (2000) Trump Taj Mahal Associates v. Chatam International Incorporated. Opposition No. 111,896, Serial No. 75/342,541 filed August 18, 1997. United States Patent and Trademark Office, Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. URL: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/com/sol/foia/ttab/2dissues/2000/111896.pdf Markoff, John (2005) What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer. New York: Viking Adult. Nelson, Theodor H. (1987) Computer Lib/Dream Machines. Microsoft Press. Perkins, D. (1992) Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Said, E. W. (2001). "Globalizing Literary Study." PMLA 116(1): 64-68. Tsur, R. (1992). Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics. Amsterdam, North-Holland. Tsur, Reuven (2006) 'Kubla Khan' – Poetic Structure, Hypnotic Quality And Cognitive Style: A Study in Mental, Vocal And Critical Performance. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co. 23