If you’ve ever wondered why blogrolls are so long, all you need to do is quietly weed out the items in your blogroll that aren’t in fact blogs, haven’t changed in months, and are not edited by your boyfriend. Within twenty-four hours, you get email like this:
I was just about to write you a note thanking you for linking to us, until I went to your site and saw that you un-linked! Traitor!
Evidently the young turks behind the new literary journal n+1 have finished their first issue, which will soon be printed, and are consequently greedy of press. Subscribe, because they are as talented as they are ambitious. You want to be in on the ground floor. You don’t want to be fishing around on ebay for back issues later, in a desperate attempt to repair the holes in your collection. And you don’t want to be on their bad side. (I certainly don’t, anyway. The links of everyone, whether quiet or petulant, have been restored.)
As the author of the terrifying email that restored all of Caleb's delinquent acquaintances to the good graces of his BlogRoll, I come here in the dead of night to say that we've finally thrown some new content (from the upcoming issue) up on nplusonemag.com. And we'll begin to creak into further new content in the coming weeks. No one linking to us will have anything to be ashamed of, in the future.
I've learned a lot in the week since Caleb generously and visibly linked to us. One, that it's good to be linked to–people have come to visit. (Caleb's is the only link to us currently in existence.) Two, that no one–not a single human being, as far as I can tell from statcounter.com, which informs us where people came from (i.e., this blog, or a Google search) and then what pages they looked at–heeded Caleb's call to subscribe to n+1. What does this mean? Perhaps on the internet no one likes to be bossed around. So I suggest, in closing, that people visit our site, but that they refrain from subscribing. Until then,
-Keith