controversy did a lot of things in McLuhan’s case. I 
think, for one thing, it exploded his work forever. 
Again, it’s this Humpty Dumpty analysis that you 
can’t put it all back together again. Sure it’s 
difficult to read his work. You can read his work in 
many ways, you can read it as fragments. You can 
also try to read him whole, which is the enterprise 
I’ve been engaged in and that’s a marvelous—I 
mean it’s like taking a brain bath. But in all of that, 
you can’t make the mistake of forgetting that the 
very controversy McLuhan’s ideas provoked, 
fragmented his work forever. Now to understand 
McLuhan, you also have to understand all these 
fragments that show up nestling like little nuggets