Southern literary quarterly, one of the two journals that carried McLuhan's early essays. Dialogue 73 gives it a second role: after Tate resigned the editorship, Ransom recommended McLuhan for it. Bob treats the post McLuhan never took as the fork in the career — the literary-editor life he avoided by going to Carpenter instead.
Across the dialogues
Turned from a publication credit into a counterfactual — the editorship McLuhan was recommended for becomes the career he did not have, and its refusal the condition of the one he did
The counterfactual is used to argue that McLuhan's mistake — putting forward a point of view in the little magazines — was productive, since it moved him off the track that ended in an editor's chair.
"He could have ended up being editor of Sewanee Review, but no, he went in, met Carpenter, and went on a whole other level."
The two journals are named as the whole early publishing base, which is what makes the Southern introduction Giovannelli supplied decisive rather than incidental.
"a huge amount of his early work was published either in the Kenyon Review or the Swanee Review."
Connections
Bob's fork — the editorship not taken is what left McLuhan free to meet Carpenter.