Where the Talk Is Rarefied, Signs of Life By FELICITY BARRINGER
Lingua Franca — the magazine for intellectuals, on campus and elsewhere — which closed down last fall, is poised for a resurrection, its founder said last week.
Jeffrey Kittay, a former professor of French who created the magazine in 1990 but had to discontinue it after last November's issue, when his major backer withdrew financing, said he had made a bid to buy the magazine's assets from the bankruptcy court.
But this time, he said, he is bringing more to the publishing enterprise than just a new, or returning, financial backer (whom he will not name). He has lined up experts on how to produce a publication designed for a rarefied audience of academics and intellectuals: the staff of The New York Review of Books.
Two staff members at The New York Review confirmed that they will be advising Mr. Kittay on marketing and distribution.
Mr. Kittay would not elaborate on what kind of help and advice he would be receiving from The Review, except to say the publication would not be providing financial support.
Whether his efforts to reclaim the magazine will succeed remained unclear. "The bankruptcy court owns it now," Mr. Kittay said. "You have to approach the bankruptcy court and bid for it."
He said he had done just that about two weeks ago and did not know if any competing bids had been made. The bankruptcy trustee in charge of the case, Robert Geltzer, did not respond to a message left at his office on Friday.
During its tenure, Lingua Franca attracted an audience devoted to its tales of intellectual arguments and the personal bile that sometimes accompanied them.
The magazine gained widespread attention in 1996 when it broke the news that Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist, had hoodwinked a humanities journal into publishing a bogus essay that was a jargon-laden parody of the work of literary theorists.
Lingua Franca's circulation reached a peak of 20,000, but by the time it halted publication, that had fallen to about 12,000. "In our attempt to save money we stopped promoting it," Mr. Kittay said.
Asked why he thought that he could succeed the second time around, he replied: "I think I've learned how to do it. I think I understand the economics better and the challenges better."