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Arena at 40.

Article Excerpt
In the seventeenth century, a magazine was a store of ammunition, a journal, the record of an individual's travels, perceptions or memories in situ. By the nineteenth, these original definitions had been added to. The journal was now a record of meetings and meanderings in a new situation, that of networks of writers and thinkers now independent of all ties to religion or court; and the magazine, in an era when differing parties purported to have abandoned arms for parliament and debate, became a store of ideas.

For two centuries, magazines and journals have been at the centre of revolution and reform, from the Rambler to the Edinburgh Review to the Nineteenth Century to the Bulletin, the New Statesman and right up to Meanjin, Private Eye, the Nation Review and the one you are now reading. Their purpose has been not only to advocate a way into the future, but also to record the pathways taken that have become the past. With their letters and replies, they imitate a conversation, but they are not one--they either begin or approach the condition of permanence, an argument about how things were, or were understood at the time. They preserve gestures and acts as effectively as a shower of volcanic ash on a city.

No-one bothers to store ammunition with total indifference to its use. The most effective magazines have always been those whose general point of view has been formed prior to its first issue, but which is willing to have those views partially or substantially transformed by the debates which flow through it. No honest...