• The Harvard University Press is headquartered in Cambridge. The Cambridge University Press is headquartered in New York City. For the latter, I am quite surprised that it is not in London. Yes, I'm also aware that one Cambridge is in Massachusetts and the other is in Britain.

• I wish I had a bigger desk, as I am interweaving quotes from nine different books, and I don't have enough space to keep them all handy. Three are on my lap, four on my desk, and two have been relegated to the floor. Also, there are four different e-texts open in browser windows, making my reference list a lucky 13. Books spread all over the place: this is pretty much how historians work, judging by my professors' offices.

• I can't find a free online German version of the particular Nietzsche work I'm writing about. There are a number available for a couple of Euros, but free versions seem suspiciously absent. Or maybe the German publishing companies are better at SEO. Still, I'm annoyed that the German Project Gutenberg claims to have the text of this book, but when I went there all I got was a 404 error.

• I must give Hayden White some credit: he wrote two books claiming that history was useless. He then gave up his job as professor of history to take a job as professor of literary criticism. I was first exposed to modern literary criticism in ACE English (a college class taken during high school). That exposure convinced me that literary criticism was useless. White's book has done nothing to disabuse me of that notion.

I grind my teeth when I come across phrases such as "…it is possible to imagine a conception of history that would signal its resistance to the bourgeois ideology of realism by its refusal to attempt a narrativist mode for the representation of its truth…" My first marginal note comes on page "ix", and reads "Pointless obfuscation". Later notes include "You have got to be kidding" and "Stop dodging the issue!" And his attempt to disentangle his work from the Holocaust deniers that love to quote him was not terribly convincing.

• The two best sentances in my paper: "According to Nietzsche, French history could not be the same history as German history. Histories created futures, and as their futures were disjoint, so must be their histories."

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