history: March 2005 Archives

According to Raymond Williams.

I'm trying to find the full text of a quote excerpted and ellipsed by Stuart Hall (1986). The closest I've found is:

This clip from the "Museum of Media History" reminds me of that book (by David Mamet, but not the famous playwright?) I couldn't finish because it was too weird. Actually, the concept wasn't weird, it was an illustration of what historians do, trying to piece together the (or a) "story" about something that happened when only bits of the archival record remain.

According to John Laprise's posting to the AoIR list, the clip "presents a great futurist history peering at where the Internet is going." The art of it is (given my newfound "understanding" gleaned from Darian Leader) the empty and confused (poorly transmitted) places, the passages of temporal (mis)transmission that (en)force silence and waiting. Anticipation and impatience fill this time-space of nothing, capturing that which we don't usually perceive - the headlong rush of activity and momentum.

Ward Churchill is an angry man and, if one can read through/past the accusatory outrage, he's got a compelling and deeply disturbing argument for why Some People Push Back. He's about to lose his job, it seems, at the U of Colorado. An open letter of protest is making the rounds, email criticalthinking@pitzer.edu to join signatories such as Henry Giroux, Immanual Wallerstein, and Allen Wood among many others.

I never read Hunter S. Thompson, but the tributes to his "gonzo journalism" valorize his anger. What made his anger acceptible - even laudatory - while Churchill's is denigrated?