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There are two categories in the literary system I’d like to celebrate at high speed: the lonely writer, and the magazine And before we celebrate one writer in particular, I want to perform a mini pause and consider that second category, the magazine, the category of which The White Review forms such an elegant example I guess I think that the fact that such a magazine exists is one proof that literature might still be possible in this distracted era For the lonely writer needs the magazine, very much – the magazine and its lonely editors Because, speaking as one such melancholy novelist, it has to be admitted that, given the amount of pre-existing stories and myths and objects and products in this world, it’s basically crazy to want to add to this giant heap The wish to do so is a small conundrum of vanity And one possible instrument for the solving of this conundrum is an editor Laziness, after all, is natural Moral murkiness, stylistic self-satisfaction, lack of sense of humour: these are the usual modes of the writer alone with her computer screen To avoid such things it’s therefore useful and dispiriting, usefully dispiriting, to have in your head the presence of an acerbic and disappointed editor, as a totem of that other absent presence, the disappointed reader   But while it’s true that if I think of a quick list of magazines I love from the last century or so – beginning with The White Review’s ghost, La Revue Blanche, then moving on through T S Eliot’s Criterion, Georges Bataille’s Documents, Marguerite Caetani’s Botteghe Oscure, Cahiers du cinéma, Phyllis Johnson’s Aspen, The Paris Review – they’re sometimes associated with particular editors, just as also they might be associated with a specific group, and even a specific manifesto, I’m not sure in the end if editors or groups or manifestoes are precisely why magazines are so important The real machinery of a magazine is how it converts the solitary act of writing into something social It gathers writers together, as in some allegorical apartment block It makes visible works and