Shadowtime

On Benjamin from Nikil Saval:

In Shadowtime’s very last scene, the entire stage set—props, curtains, everything—is turned backwards, the lighting turned from low spotlights to harsh, blinding fluorescence. “Wake up,” it says. “That things simply go on as they are is the catastrophe.”

Yes but not until the last scene? Surely the reversals and exposures of the avant-garde in themselves are no longer enough.

Update: A bit more promising from one of the editors of n+1 here.

Update the Second: Or from some rag in NY here, (complete with pictures of the whole gang) (hat tip please to The Decline):

At a time when older forms of media are supposedly being swallowed up by newer ones, the impulse to start the kind of magazine Partisan Review was in the late 1930's or The Paris Review was in the 50's might look contrarian, even reactionary. If you are an overeducated (or at least a semi-overeducated) youngish person with a sleep disorder and a surfeit of opinions, the thing to do, after all, is to start a blog. There are no printing costs, no mailing lists, and the medium offers instant membership in a welcoming herd of independent minds who will put you in their links columns if you put them in yours. Blogs embody and perpetuate a discourse based on speed, topicality, cleverness and contention - all qualities very much ascendant in American media culture these days. To start a little magazine, then - to commit yourself to making an immutable, finite set of perfect-bound pages that will appear, typos and all, every month or two, or six, or whenever, even if you are also, and of necessity, maintaining an affiliated Web site, to say nothing of holding down a day job or sweating over a dissertation - is, at least in part, to lodge a protest against the tyranny of timeliness. It is to opt for slowness, for rumination, for patience and for length. It is to defend the possibility of seriousness against the glibness and superficiality of the age - and also, of course, against other magazines.

For those of you who like to write, or at least drink beer in the city:

Dear Subscribers,

Issue three will ship from Michigan on Monday, arrive at headquarters
on Thursday, and we will have a big party on Saturday the 17th, in New
York.

Our space has sort of fallen through, but we have a great rock band,
Oakley Hall, and we know where to buy beer, and we'll think of
something--so, in short, next Saturday, and the details are
forthcoming.

Please come and bring your friends.

--The Editors