Joel Schalit

Theory of Labor

If it were up to me, I’d write in the morning, edit in the afternoon, and make music after dinner. In reality, I’m lucky if I get to do anything besides edit. Still in the throes of recovering from a simultaneous magazine and book launch last October, (followed by a US book tour in November), I’m anxious to get creative again.

Since I returned to Milan, I’ve been consumed with editing Zeek, and troubleshooting the inevitable problems one encounters with a brand new site. Starting out each morning writing short posts for the magazine’s Facebook group and Tweeting related copy, I publish an article each weekday, while Jo Ellen handles the columnists.

It’s a decidedly different experience than when I worked as the editor at Allvoices, writing and editing between five and six pieces a day. But, once I found the stories that needed covering, I had no problem losing myself in my flow of responsibilities. Today, I can expend just as much time doing half that, without blinking an eye.

I have three partially completed book outlines to finish, which I began last year, that I plan on returning to. I’ve also started working on several audio projects, including a set of remixes of American belly dance recordings from the 1950s, together with an essay about the records I’m using, that I am anxious to complete.

First things first, though. As soon as I’ve resumed writing my weekly column, in all likelihood, I’ll feel like I’m on top of everything else.

Coming to a Conclusion

In 2008, I edited three books, an international news portal and a Jewish cultural periodical, led the design of a leftist publisher’s website, and completed the last two revisions of my own book, Israel vs. Utopia. It was an incredibly exhausting year. Nevertheless, I put to use every conceivable kind of editing skill, in every publishing context, that I’d ever acquired, and somehow, got it all done.

This past week, the website I designed finally launched, and I received physical copies of two of the three edited books in question: Martin Bull’s Banksy Locations and Tours, and Naoki Inose’s A Century of the Black Ships: Chronicles of War between Japan and America. Bull’s book is already out in the US. Black Ships is forthcoming in April. The third title, James Horrox’ A Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement, will be out in June.

It is enormously gratifying to see these long-term projects slowly being released. As tempted as I am to share it, yesterday I got a chance to look at a very advanced draft of my own book’s cover too. In preparation for my publisher’s catalogue, after five years of steady work on IvU, I was positively thrilled to have this labor of everything, for lack of a better term, moving to its design phase.

I’ve been absolutely fried these last two weeks, and have been doing very little personal blog writing, shy of entering a link here and there. There’s more news yet to come. In the meantime, check out my first entry for the Religion Dispatches blog. It was written on my friend Evan’s suggestion, and published Tuesday night.