The essayist whose contribution to Rosenthal's 1968 collection McLuhan: Pro and Con contains, at page 137, the only occurrence of "millenary ecstatics" in the book — a phrase Bob had attributed to McLuhan since 1968 and built a quadrant of the Tiny Note chart on. Cameron, having looked it up before the session, produces the correction live. The page holds the unwinding of that attribution and the residue Bob keeps from it. New to it — start with dialogue 70.
Across the dialogues
Enters as the correction that unseats a fifty-year attribution — the essayist whose passing parenthesis turns out to be the sole source of a phrase Bob had built a chart quadrant on
The phrase is not McLuhan's — the correction arrives from Cameron's own checking, not from anything in the archive prompting it.
"It's in an essay by a guy with a sort of Polish name, Klonsky. Milton Klonsky mentions it in his essay."
What Klonsky asserts is one step weaker than what Bob remembered: not McLuhan coining a phrase, but Klonsky reporting a course title.
"He says that that was the name of the course that McLuhan gave at Fordham."
The sentence read aloud undoes the attribution twice over — it is a parenthesis, it spells the word differently, and it may be the author's own joke.
"McLuhan is well known as a convert to Catholicism, bracket, now teaching a course in millinery ecstatics at Fordham. So it may just be a phrase that Klonsky made up."
Cameron declines to press the point past the evidence, leaving the provenance genuinely open rather than replacing one confident attribution with another.
"I would not argue about it. If Klonsky says that's what he was... what the course was, I'm happy to accept that."
Connections
Klonsky's essay appears in Rosenthal's 1968 collection McLuhan: Pro and Con, at page 137.
Bob had credited "millenary ecstatics" to McLuhan for fifty years; Cameron locates it in Klonsky's essay instead.