The Last Page
Walzer, Michael
SOMETIME SOON, the forty-nine years of Dissent will be available online—every article in every issue. Right now, we post a number of key articles on sour Web site as soon as the "real"...
...It would be much cheaper—no printing costs, no mailing costs...
...The waiting is a good thing...
...that you can carry it around...
...Well, there's the problem: virtual magazines have no physical virtues...
...Right now, we post a number of key articles on sour Web site as soon as the "real" issue— paper, ink, and glue—appears...
...I am less fond of academic journals, but the closer they come to magazines, the more ready they are to print letters, invite arguments and counter-arguments, risk topicality, the easier it is for me to make my peace with them...
...I am a lover of magazines...
...we will get it right one day— really, not virtually, right...
...Why do I, as a lover of magazines, find the experience so unsatisfying...
...It wouldn't take up space on my bookshelf...
...Reading them, I feel dispossessed...
...Wait for the next issue...
...According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the original meaning of the word "virtual" (which comes to us from the Latin, via late Middle English) is "possessed of certain physical virtues...
...it is finished, for the week or the month or the quarter...
...and that you can, in anger, throw it across the room...
...that it speaks to today's urgencies...
...and a few weeks later, more again...
...In fact, there are many magazines that I hate reading...
...And I realize now that this isn't only because I can't hold the real thing and turn the actual pages...
...They respond, one might say, to the urgencies of the second...
...Someone who lives on the Internet doesn't need the actual magazine...
...We writers hold forth in these pages that you hold in your hand, and we accept the risk that you will hold us to be wrong...
...Soon we will have ask ourselves whether there is any point to the paper, ink, and glue...
...Reading them is a breathless and, potentially, an endless experience...
...It is also because I value this finite object, where writers have committed themselves to these ideas and arguments, which I can read, and finish reading, and put aside (or throw away...
...And this valuable time between issues is closely connected to the physical reality of each issue, which has to be edited, printed, bound, and mailed...
...I disagree fiercely with the articles they print...
...the number is growing steadily...
...SOMETIME SOON, the forty-nine years of Dissent will be available online—every article in every issue...
...So, again, what is the point of the actual magazine, the material object, the paper, ink, and glue...
...But sometime soon Dissent will be available on my Palm Pilot (of course I don't have a Palm Pilot, but sometime soon I might have one), and I will be able to carry the Palm Pilot around and even throw it across the room...
...But I love the form of a magazine, the platonic idea of a magazine: that it is written for the moment...
...Sometime soon I 12 n DISSENT / Summer 2003 I won't need a bookshelf...
...Why not a virtual Dissent, floating in cyberspace...
...And then I wait for the next issue...
...A fairly indiscriminate lover: flimsy weeklies, glossy monthlies, heavy (but pugnacious) quarterlies—I love them all...
...And lots of people live on the Internet...
...I wish their editors, as Irving Howe once said, many years of political failure...
...and after a few weeks, we post more articles...
...It can't be updated...
...It's not just the content that warms my heart...
...It gives me time to think about what I've just read—and it gives the magazine's writers time to think about what they will write next...
...They are infinitely updatable...
...The virtue of paper, ink, and glue is also the virtue of ideas and arguments given material form, fixed in time and space...
...That's what a real magazine is...
...There already are virtual magazines, and they possess the virtues of a magazine to the nth degree: they are far more responsive than any printed magazine can possibly be to the urgencies of the moment...
...maybe it's not the content at all...
Vol. 50 • July 2003 • No. 3
