There is a value to the much-criticized crawl that zipped along at the bottom of CNN’s window during the attack on Afghanistan, beneath clips of dirty traitors and soldier-heroes and starving refugees. As the world’s other news ticked blithely by, trivialized by the pictures above it, the ephemeral, superficial crawl reminded us of the worth of words that do not move, and of stories told in columns of type, not in video clips or on film. I don’t want to get too sentimental, but isn’t the printed page reliable; isn’t it familiar; isn’t it decent? It feels immutable in a way that other things do not these days. As Walter Isaacson (who is now running CNN) said when he was still at
Time
: “If the world were based on computers and they told you about magazines, you’d think: ‘Wow: what a great technology!'”
Magazines and newspapers (and online versions of these) still often manage to tackle complex stories and say things that have meaning, unlike so much of the media. And meaning, which is so unusual now that content is dead (a friend actually told me that several years ago), meaning generates a ripple of excitement. I found it fun, for example, when Lewis Lapham called the Attorney General “Mullah John Ashcroft” in print, in
Harper’s
, of course. You won’t find “Mullah” John Ashcroft doing the crawl on CNN beneath the story about President Bush and his FPS (Failed Pretzel Swallowing). Now that
Talk
, which had every kind of support behind it, has gone under (in the wake of other recent casualties like
Brill’s Content
,
Lingua Franca
,
Mademoiselle
,
ON
magazine), we can be reasonably sure that the print media is in for further high-temperature shrinking as the economy tightens. This column will check in regularly on the health of content and highlight what’s meaningful in print, in general interest and niche publications, and in the little, spirited, idiosyncratic guys one rarely gets to.
What ‘The Arab’ Thinks
Since the fall of the towers, I’ve listened to and read so much drivel about “Arab casbah culture” and the “Arabs’ nomadic mentality” and about what Arabs think and what really drives “The Arab,” that it was good to find
Al Jadid
, a quarterly published in Los Angeles devoted to Arab culture and arts. The way I found it was unfortunate, however–painful. Suffice it to say that my recent novel (which is about Jerusalem) received from Al Jadid its only English-language notice from an Arab point of view, and the review was not entirely kind. So I was led reluctantly to the magazine, but when I looked into its back issues, I discovered that it contains a wealth of opinion and information that no one else is publishing in English.
I knew Al Jadid was for me when one knowledgeable Arab of my acquaintance told me disdainfully that the magazine was “not influential.” I love that; for me, “not influential” means you can read the thing without having to feel you must agree with it. Consider these noninfluential observations, by Elias Khoury, the Lebanese novelist, essayist and editor, on Saddam (yes, the Saddam) Hussein’s first novel, Zubayba and the King (2000): For Arab military dictatorships, Khoury writes,
Popular
"swipe left below to view more authors"Swipe →
literature became somehow a field associated with the…dictatorship, perhaps because all writing in [such] regimes is like writing intelligence reports. We find a strange mixture between the writer and the intelligence analyst…. Creative writers first become intelligence report writers and then become authors!… The literary world suffered in a terrifying way thanks to this strange combination: Egyptian authors were imprisoned; Iraqi writers lived between exile, prison and assassination; literature in Syria knew a great decline; and in the Gulf regimes, monarchies, emirates and sheikhdoms, the censor is almost the sole author.
Magazines like Al Jadid, which are concerned with niche obsessions or particular groups, also often speak with unintentional authority to the universal, to the general human experience. One of my favorite examples of this–in the Al Jadid “Editor’s Notebook” column by Elie Chalala, in the Winter 2001 issue–is called “Poet and Critic Nouri Jarah Laments Standards of Arab Literary Criticism, Rushing Poetry into Translation.”
The first interesting thing you discover in this great piece is that “individuals seeking political asylum” are trying to pass themselves off as Great Poets from their home countries, in order to claim persecution. That’s a good ruse. Unfortunately, this is the only eccentric thing you discover about the Arab publishing world. Otherwise, we might as well be in New York or London. Jarah states that “decisions of culture [in the Arab world] are based on exchanges of power and influence” rather than on sheer literary merit. He also points out that “the Arab critic-author relationship is one of enmity rather than amity.”
Mmmmmm. Oh yes. Really.
Now I understand where my reviewer was coming from.
Woman on the Go
Working Woman
was closed by new management (a bank) last September, on its twenty-fifth anniversary. The magazine went on “hiatus,” as the holding company that still owns the name puts it. This leaves Woman‘s sororal twin,
Working Mother
, still out there in the market because, as one former employee says, “it’s easier for advertisers to understand Working Mother‘s audience; the demographic is more tangible.” Doctors’ offices are among Working Mother‘s largest subscriber groups. (In case you are wondering,
Ms
.
is still published but is not advertiser-supported.)
Working Woman was intended to target CEO-level women, who make about twice as much as, say, the readership of
Good Housekeeping
(which shows no signs of closing down). But the high-end women were more likely to subscribe to
Business Week
,
Forbes
or
Fortune
. Eventually the advertising community deserted the publication, because it could get at the actual Woman readers better elsewhere: at
Family Circle
, for example, or in the fashion and beauty and shopper magazines.
In an interesting note, Working Mother, which also changed hands and recruited a new staff in September, will now be put out by an editor in chief and a deputy editor neither of whom have ever had children. It’s as if you had a white person editing
Ebony
.
