Joel Schalit

Introducing Souciant

“Souciant is a magazine of politics and culture. Or culture and politics. It all depends on your starting point.” So reads the mandate, as I managed to pen it, of the new periodical I co-founded. Launched yesterday, after six months of preparation, Souciant is now three quarters of the way through its second day of existence, at least according to Greenwich Mean Time. Charlie Bertsch, Souciant‘s US-based co-editor, started off his day just a couple of hours ago, firing off the magazine’s first Twitter posts.

Designed by my wife, Jennifer Crakow, and media designer Courtney Utt, Souciant is published by my old pal Rich Jensen, in Seattle. Rich and I go back fourteen years, having first met at Elliot Bay Books during the reading tour in support of the NYU Press Bad Subjects anthology. Not long thereafter, we started working together on distributing music when the Christal Methodists hooked up with his former firm, Sub Pop records, through the late, great Candy Ass label. We released two records together.

It’s a dream team if I ever saw one. Everyone brings complementary skills to the table. Though I’ve worked with great  publishing crews before, I’ve never had the opportunity to work with such a clear-minded, experienced group of people. Looking at a regular Monday-Friday schedule, combining a single daily feature with regular micro blogging,  I’m hoping to strike a reasonable editorial balance. With the right content, published on a consistent schedule, we should be able to build a decent, loyal readership.

This week got off to a late start. Our web host had a server meltdown on Monday, so we couldn’t start publishing until Tuesday. There’s a continuous stream of technical problems to attend to, constant copy crises, the works. A classic first week, by any stretch of the imagination. Though I’m frequently frustrated by the errors I encounter, there is no avoiding them. If there’s any value in launching a new online periodical, it’s learning the patience required to manage anything of value properly. I can live with that.

Minimal House

We finally redesigned joelschalit.com.  We’re still in the middle of fixing things, but this is what it’s going to look like, with the addition of new images at the top of the landing page. Still, the emphasis is upon spare.  Check back later this week, as things fill out. There’ll be major content updates across the board.

Work In Progress, Part II

Last Monday, the visual design of the new Zeek website was completed. Now in the hands of developers, it will be a couple of weeks before we can begin usability testing, and start migrating Zeek‘s archives. The handiwork of Richard Winchell, its an elegant and simple platform that will prove easy to build on. This snapshot, though tiny, ought to give you a reasonable sense of what it will look like.

We already have a new editorial schedule in place to follow the site’s relaunch. Regular readers of the periodical will find the content familiar, but all the same, the new site design will help enhance the magazine’s traditional literary strengths. I am particularly anxious to use this opportunity to demonstrate the difference in our cultural sensibilities, in ways that we presently cannot show.

The completion of the site also allows me to return to writing projects I had to push to the side these last three months, as I’ve helped prepare this and the print edition, in addition to editing the old site. A fractured wrist notwithstanding (I fell off my skateboard in late June), I’ve only just gotten full use of my left hand back. I finished my first article in two months, a 2400 word essay, last week.

Fans of Israel

We didn’t have all the artwork we needed. Rifling through my files this afternoon looking for backup images, I happened upon this photograph, of Israeli flag-branded fans. Taken at the Ace Hardware at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel last May, I’d gone to the store to look for electrical fixtures for my parents’ new home. Imagine what a hoot it was to find something packaged in such a purposeful way. “Hah hah, very funny,” responded my father, as I pointed out the box to him with a big grin. “It’s always about the double entendre,” he laughed.

Whether we end up using the photo for the issue, I can’t tell you. Its still too early. Still, its one of hundreds I stumbled across that I took over the last year, precisely for such reasons. The day after turning in the fall print edition of Zeek, I’m surprised I even had the energy to spot it. The first time I’ve edited the venerable quarterly, its going to be a good issue, I think. It was nice, and somewhat challenging, going back to print, however briefly. The issue leads off with a fascinating interview of philosopher Judith Butler, by Mark LeVine.

Their conversation is just the tip of the iceberg. The theme of the issue is of course Israel. The rest of the edition’s articles, featuring pieces by Shai Ginsburg, Etgar Keret, Keith Kahn-Harris, and the late Benjamin Tammuz, hopefully will prove to be as interesting to others as it has been to me. Granted, the last thing I want to do is read it again. Nevertheless, it was a joy to work on, and we’ll be releasing it in time for my book tour in November. My publisher has been gracious enough to ask bookstores to stock it at my readings.

Work in Progress

In a matter of weeks, Zeek will cease publishing at Jewcy. As many of you already know, the periodical is moving to a brand new home, hosted by The Forward, America’s oldest Jewish newspaper. In the final stages of a redesign, we’ll be debuting a brand new site too, put together by Jennifer (who created the wireframes) and Richard Winchell, a terrific visual designer. It’s going to be a wonderful publishing platform, if only because of the people who pieced it together. Hopefully we’ll provide it with content of equal quality.

I’ve been working as Zeek’s online editor for the last three months, though I’ve been supplying the same amount of content since February. Following the completion of the book, I’ve had the opportunity to step up my day-to-day work at the mag. So far, its been extremely gratifying, and a nice change of pace. I’ve often worked as an editor in order to give myself a break from writing. Even though I’m supposed to be writing a column (and will be doing more of that) its nice to worry about other folks grammar for a change.

Despite the fact that we had not planned on returning to the US this summer, it turned out, obviously, to be an ideal time. I could not imagine doing this level of editorial work and planning at such a distance. This way, when we return in the Fall, everything will be built, and we can get to work, wherever we are. I’m enjoying the idea of editing Zeek in Milano. The Italian tie-in seems so distant from what English-language Jewish publishing is about here, with its division of coverage always split between the US and Israel.

Last Day in London

The day after I returned our rental van at the Europcar office on Clapham High Street, I flew back to Milan, formally concluding our half-year sojourn in the UK. Before I left, I made sure to purchase copies of my two favorite British periodicals, and read them on the flight home.

Given how hard we struggled while we were in town, our only consistent solace was having access to what remains, in my view, one of the most interesting news industries in the world. As has often been said about the BBC’s World Service, British newspapers and magazines oftentimes project a more ideal United Kingdom.

Well, not every publication, by any stretch of the imagination. Take a look at the country’s tabloids, for example. They’re equally representative. But, the inclination to say so, when one can only attribute such sentiments to four or five publications in toto, says a lot about the cultural significance of said periodicals.

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.

How I Spent My Year

Between the books, music and film, I’d be hard pressed to find any signs of demoralization in 2008. Quite the contrary, in fact. For further reference, check out my year end top ten published in Tuesday’s Zeek.

Investigative Journalism

By Saturday afternoon, Britain’s leading tabloids had already determined the identity of the terrorists that had raided Mumbai.

With the Evening Standard already having established the guerrillas’ nationality, The Daily Express narrows things down to their hometown.

All The Sun can do is recycle another paper’s already problematic headline – albeit with a more in-your-face layout. (Note the use of  ‘rampage’. It’s not as tough as ‘butchers’, but still provocative.)

Meanwhile, The Daily Telegraph chooses to indulge the same anxiety by returning to the nationality issue, this time sans the headlines. The understatement of the query’s still front-page positioning is important.

My colleagues here have not had the best things to say about the state of this periodical. Though it’s allegations might very well be accurate, you have to question the timing of this article’s publication.

Unidentified Public Sphere

Working as the editor of an international news aggregator, I had my worst fears confirmed. In the US, as newspaper and magazine circulation continues to constrict, most foreign news is now imported. Subscribing to hundreds of Middle Eastern and South Asian periodicals and blogs as part of my job, even though I’d mastered receiving my news via RSS years before, the longer I did this work, the more I longed to go to an old fashioned newsstand and walk home with three or four periodicals. Friday evening, I did just that.

I was particularly taken with the idea of reading through The National. Published in Abu Dhabi, in the weeks leading up to its launch last summer, it was subject to much hype in the US. In between hiring former editors from newspapers such as The New York Times, and starting up in a publishing environment like that which presently exists in the United States, Americans were indeed curious about it. The fact that English-language Arab periodicals are experiencing a spike in US readership due to the war definitely helped.