Daily Archives: April 24, 2022

If youve ever paid attention to the architecture of Bobst, everything is angular. There are no curves in that god-forsaken building. God-forsaken not in the sense that its dilapidated rather, that its uninspiring. The atrium floor is mesmerizing, but as you look up, physically mimicking the act of worship, all you see are square light panels: bleak, bland and blinding. Perhaps its a blank canvas, one on which you can project your own dreams about making it in New York City.

New Yorks greatness is one of modernitys most fascinating myths capturing the most archetypal imaginations, so ubiquitous that it smudges the epistemological line between fiction and reality, where mythology becomes history and history becomes mythology.

Mythology signifies the will to exist and the denial of death. Predecessors mythologized with vigor to inspire and reinforce the meaning of existence. But as vigor withers away, myths stultify into rigid norms and traditions, cliched at best and disillusioned at worst.

The Statue of Liberty stands as a towering monument to American myths like freedom, opportunity and hope. It was the symbolic beacon for immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now it is a tourist destination, a small landmark to look out for if youre enjoying the south-facing views from Lower Manhattan, dwarfed by the downtown skyscrapers. The Statue of Liberty represents an idealism that has faded into history: still there, but not what it used to be.

The Western God was handed his philosophical death sentence at the turn of the 20th century. In the search for a secular belief to fill the ideological void, New York City mythologizes the greatest atheist narrative of the modern time. At the time, New York was the commercial nexus of the United States, in charge of almost half of all imports and exports. Underpinned by its diverse population and American capitalism, the culture industries the standardization and mechanical reproduction of cultural and artistic works under capitalism in New York rose to prominence. With the aid of Madison Avenue advertisers, the culture industry fulfilled New Yorks postmodern prophecy when it manufactured a simulacrum of New York City so towering it overshadows the original. New York is what it is, but its self-perpetuating myth edges toward pure simulacrum.

New York City lies in the unconscious of the Gen Z zeitgeist since the turn of the millennium, at least in part due to 9/11. Growing up in Taiwan, I have always known of a city far, far away called New York and learned of its conventional magnificence. In a way, I consumed reproductions from the culture industry, the standardized narrative of New York as one of the most developed cities in the world. I would naturally want to visit this city, be awed by its vibrance, and shocked by its abhorrent expensiveness and mechanical pace.

It was not until I started watching Casey Neistat vlogs and getting into photography that the myth began to take a toll on me. Back in 2015, Neistat made daily vlogs documenting how he hustled his way from a broke nobody to an indie filmmaker in New York City, glorifying the city and developing a cult-like following around his relentless and perhaps toxic work ethic in the process. His vlogs and histories of how photographers made their name in the city seeped into my consciousness, nourishing a quasi-religious impulse that blossoms into an idealism about New York City.

That was my sole reason to come to NYU to be a part of it, New York, New York. Coming to the city as a college student, I thought I had devised an ingenious solution to take risks for four years in this city without having to worry about survival while doing so.

Unbeknownst to me, idealism is like the Titanic, charting its course toward New York City with grand ambitions, oblivious of its impending doom. I wanted to make it as a street photographer in New York City, like how street photographers before me did in the good old days. It wasnt until I walked into the museums in the city that I realized everything I wanted to do and could think of had already been done. There are pictures of every single street corner of Manhattan. Specializing in street photography no longer has the same vigor and prestige as when Joel Meyerowitz walked up and down Fifth Avenue for decades or when Bruce Gilden snapped flash photos of people right in their face on the streets of New York. Even if I were to make it, lined up in front of me are hundreds of more experienced and talented street photographers. The frontier has settled into an established town, treasures discovered, legends made and the unknown explored.

Cultures are most energetic, disruptive and exciting at their genesis. Once they begin to propagate as a form of idealism, they have already stultified into norms, traditions and institutions. Photography seen in the galleries in the most run-down part of town is vitalizing. Photography seen in the Museum of Modern Art means it has established itself in the public consciousness. Photography in the Metropolitan Museum of Art means its creativity has legitimized into a tradition. Photography seen on the walls of luxury condos and skyscrapers means the culture industry has successfully appropriated the art, and the cause is lost. Idealism gradually becomes untenable. Holding onto nostalgia is walking forward in thickened mud or trailblazing in known territory.

The culture industry manufactures idealism into the oppressive structure it once set out to disrupt. History reiterates itself. The stultified structure awaits the next revolution to topple its oppressive regime. The process of genesis, growth, institutionalization, destruction and recuperation endlessly reincarnates itself.

To move beyond idealism means to trace the movement back to its roots and recuperate the creative energy, to interiorize the exteriority of New York City propped up by the culture industry and to reverse the postmodern mimesis. In lay terms: regulating social media use rather than consuming products of mass media, straying away from daily routines, and paying meticulous attention to your reaction to every irregularity in the city might help to move beyond the cliche idealism. Even though post-structuralists have deconstructed virtues like sensibility and intuition, the Kantian pure reason, searching for individual interiority serves the same function as identifying discursive systems and ideating counternarratives the post-structuralists embrace.

Inward reflection fuels the light that guides us out of the looming specter of stultified idealism. Instead of conforming to what New York City is, make New York City your own. New York City cannot be the city of your dreams, but it can be the city on which you build your dreams.

Street photography is about finding the surreal within the real. The surreal breaks free from the constraints of the real, norms and traditions, opening up new avenues. In this case, the avenue is Seventh Avenue. At the intersection with Greenwich Avenue, the steam coming from the manhole, shining under the street light, resembles how the moon would shine onto shifting clouds.

Taken on the first snow day of 2022, this scene casts the city in a light contrary to its conventional image. New York can be quiet, solitary and calm despite the heavy snow. There are no people, but you can put the pieces together. The scene shows no iconic New York City streets, but its iconic New York City.

Unconstrained by the linearity of the regular city streets, the parks liberate the imaginations and compositions. This scene is a self-portrait of the photographer, seen contemplating how New York City is wrapped up into a giant ball of cliches and how to move beyond.

Original post:

New York cannot be the city of your dreams - Washington Square News

THERE ARE TWO KINDS OF PEOPLE in this world: those who really listen when they hold a seashell to their ear and those who dont. Cecilia Alemanis exhibition The Milk of Dreams, the main project of the Fifty-Ninth Venice Biennale, is for the former. Titled after a whimsical childrens book by Leonora Carrington, the show harbors a dark-kerneled exuberance, embracing sensuality sentimentality, and spirituality to yield a surprising light, even joy.

Alemanis biennale was delayed due to Covid, and she clearly spent the extra time wisely. You can feel the research saturating the rooms. Of the more than two hundred artists, at least 180 have never exhibited in the Biennales main exhibition before. The curators definition of surrealism is elastic, encompassing any number of nonmainstream perspectives, but the striking continuity of themes and textures prevents the film of tokenism thats settled over past Central Pavilions. The result is a show so patently indifferent to the zeitgeist that Jamian Juliano-Villanis reliably charming paintings felt jarringly adrift, like a Starbucks cup on board the Starship Enterprise.

In the Central Pavilion, pride of place goes to the 1987 Elephant by Katharina Fritsch, winner of one of the two Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement. Her fellow laureate Cecilia Vicua commanded one of the galleries just to the left, unleashing leopard ladies across social media streams, while Paula Rego unsettled some sleep with the sadistic puppetry of her Seven Deadly Sins, 2019. Amy Sillmans riveting suite of drawings paired smartly to Bronwyn Katzs Gege, 2021, a raft of bedsprings and pot scourers, while Ulla Wiggenss paintings of serenely ordered machines would find a delayed echo in the Arsenale with Zhenya Machnevas tapestries. But the core of the show was The Witches Cradle, a warm, carpeted den teeming with powerful women such as Toyen, Carol Rama, Dorothea Tanning, Remedios Varo, Baya Mahieddine, Leonor Fini, and, of course, Carrington. In one of the biennials more controversial moments, video footage of Josephine Baker squares off against Mary Wigmans Hexentanz (Witchs Dance), 1914. Triggering, one curator declared. But then, what do we expect from witches if not Double double toil and trouble?

Starting with its title, The Milk of Dreams is unapologetic in its ambitions, even in its quieter moments. (Luxuriate in Virginia Overtons blown glass buoys bobbing serenely to the soft submarine moans of Wu Tsangs Of Whales, 2022). And it proved adaptive. When one of Belkis Ayons muscular collographs couldnt make the trip from the Russian Museum in Saint Petersburg, Alemani chose to substitute a giant, obvious printout rather than rearrange the works to cover the absence. Meanwhile, prominently hung last-minute behind Fritschs Elephant in the room is a 1967 gouache by Maria Prymachenko, the self-taught Ukrainian artist who made headlines earlier this year when her works were (thankfully mistakenly) thought destroyed in Russias ruthless offensive.

Multinational though it may be, the Central Pavilion is still not immune to border disputes. In 2019, for the Ukrainian pavilion at the Fifty-Eighth Venice Biennale, the Lviv-based collective Open Group proposed that the Antonov An-225 Mriyathen the worlds largest cargo planewould fly over the Giardini, momentarily blocking out the sun. The Mriya was destroyed on an airfield outside Kyiv this past February, but its shadow loomed larger than ever on events throughout the week. While its future seemed uncertain, the Ukrainian pavilion managed to open after curator Maria Lanko personally drove Pavlo Makovs Fountain of Exhaustion out of the country. Late last week, the PinchukArtCentre announced that in lieu of its usual ritzy Future Generation Art Prize showcase, it would be putting on This is Freedom: Defending Ukraine. Sited at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, the exhibition features work by Prymachenko, Nikita Kadan, and the daily war diary, published by Isolarii and artforum.com, by Yevgenia Belorusets alongside a smattering of Pinchuks pet artists, including Olafur Eliasson, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. Instead of the traditional concertViktor Pinchuk has always known how to entertainthis year the opening featured a taped address from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. (When I asked a friend why the embattled politician would possibly make time for this, he demurred, Where else could you reach this many arms dealers under one roof?)

For their part, the organizers of the Biennale pledged to ensure Ukraine was represented. Just a few days before the opening, they facilitated a third tribute in the form of Piazza Ucraina, a clearing in the Giardini, where the charred remains of a structure sat alongside a tower of sandbags, of the sort used to protect public sculptures. Right off the Ponte San Biasio delle Catene, Galleria Continua secured a storefront for their artist Zhanna Kadyrova to set up a fundraiser. Titled Palianytsia after a type of Ukrainian bread, the exhibition consists of new loaf-like sculptures shaped from river stones, collected while the artist was sheltering in the countryside. Theres also a documentary by Ivan Sautkin, which is still in-process. I feel guilty being here, seeing old friends, sleeping easily, Kadyrova confessed. Its like suddenly waking up in my old life and I have to remember this is not my life anymore. Kadan expressed a similar disorientation in a short talk with Artforum editor David Velasco, part of a breakfast event hosted by Jrme Poggi at the Serra dei Gardini. Broaching the topic of the Russian pavilion, which remained shuttered after artists Kirill Savchenkov and Alexandra Sukhareva and curator Raimundas Malaauskas all withdrew their participation, Kadan voiced his support for resistance while maintaining the need for boycott: As Putinism transforms to pure totalitarianism . . . Russian intellectuals will face a challenge to become real dissidents.

The war wasnt the only thing unsettling pavilions and their respective nation-states this year. For Spain, artist Ignasi Aball shifted the building slightly off its axis to correct an earlier architectural mistake. Czech and Slovakia didnt open their pavilion at all (its still under construction after suffering substantial water damage in 2019). At the German pavilion, Maria Eichhorn performed an elegant dissection of the walls, revealing the bricked sutures where the Bavarian pavilion meets the Nazi-backed expansion from 1938. Croatias offering lacked walls altogether, but only because artist Tomo Savic-Gecan styled it as a purposeful parasite, crashing other presentations with randomly timed interventions. Zineb Sedira dipped into the wells of Algerian cinema to spritz the French pavilion with a little camera-ready insurgency, while the Dutch pavilion handed over the keys to their prime Giardini real estate for a pavilion swap with Estonia, where Kristina Norman and Bita Ravazi parlayed obscure botanical research into a critique of Dutch colonialism. (Fool me once, right, Netherlands?) For New Zealand, Yuki Kiharas raucous Paradise Camp pitted Gauguin against his Pacific-dwelling muses, while for Sovereignty, Simone Leigh thatched the roof of the US pavilion in the style of colonial expositions. Stationed in front, the artists twenty-four-foot bronze sculpture Satellite merged a monumentally scaled Dmba headdressa means of communing with ones ancestors that was later appropriated by modernists like Picassowith a satellite dish that amplified its intended function. And while some might read that as a triumphant reclamation of the form, inside, Leighs Sentinela version of which exerts a powerful presence in the newly christened Tivoli Circle in New Orleans, where it has taken the place of a former Robert E. Lee sculpturelooked unnervingly subjugated in the claustrophobic confines of the rotunda gallery.

The heavy emphasis on decolonization made me think back to the kerfuffle over the Portuguese pavilion, which kicked off last fall with one jury member sabotaging forerunner Grada Kilombas proposal, arguing that the idea of racism as an open wound has already been the subject of numerous other approaches; so the proposal presented does not allow us to see how in an exhibition you can review, criticize or extend this idea that has already been discussed and even exhibited in multiple ways. Kilombas near-perfect scores got tanked in the averages and the Portuguese went with Pedro Neves Marquess project, Vampires in Space.

Contrary to the opinion of the ornery jurist, there are still myriad useful and productive ways to discuss decolonization. The Nordic pavilion was a perfect example. In commissioner Katya Garca-Antns final bow after her brilliant run at the head of Norways Office of Contemporary Art, she joined forces with archaeologist Liisa-Rvn Finborg and activist Beaska Niillas to create The Smi Pavilion, an exhibition dedicated to a nation that is currently spread across the political borders of four countries. As documented by Anders Sunnas massive painting installation, the Smi now find themselves prosecuted for the simple acts like herding reindeer on their own land. Artist Mret nne Sara used reindeer sinews to create intricate hanging sculptures. Smell it, Niillas urged, nudging me closer to the sweet, musky center. She worked with a perfumer to produce the smell of hope. And that one, he added, gesturing to a sculpture on the other side of the pavilion, is the smell of fear. Careful, Garca-Antn warned. That one sticks in your nostrils. She was not wrong.

Another standout was Magorzata Mirga-Tas, the first Roma-identified artist to feature in a national pavilion. Her hand-stitched textile collages mingled zodiac iconography with Roma life, blanketing the walls of the Polish pavilion in a conscious echo of Francesco del Cossas Hall of the Months at the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara, Italy. These are the frescos that inspired Aby Warburg and his thoughts on the movement of images, curator Joanna Warsza explained. And yet, in all of his cross-references, there is no mention of Roma culture, which was everywhere. Mirga-Tas seeks to correct this omission, inscribing Roma narratives into the larger canon. Some of her portraits are of grand scale, like the Swedish activist Katarina Taikon or the scholar Ethel C. Brooks; others are more personal, including the villagers of the Polish settlement of Czarna Gra, the artists hometown.

Indeed, the real work is expanding representation respectfully, something Alemanis main project pulled off seamlessly. Despite the pandemics economic strain, this year saw the debut of pavilions from Oman, Nepal, Cameroon, and Uganda. (A project from Namibia fell apart when it turned out to be one of those sketchy-Italian-curators-suckling-the-sweet-teat-of-sponsorship situations, sparking protest from the countrys art scene.) Meanwhile, in its sophomore outing, Ghanas Black Star group show assured us that the country hadnt tapped all its wells with its blockbuster 2019 debut.

OF COURSE, what good is all this art, if you dont have a place to discuss it? In the uneasy grip of the pandemic (which Biennale-goers seemed all too ready to declare as over, despite current spikes across continents), and against the doomsday black backdrop of potential nuclear war in Europe, the question How have you been? has rarely felt so weighty. (Did Ralph Rugoff curse us by titling his biennale May You Live In Interesting Times?) While the circumstances put a damper on the wash-rinse-repeat cycle of Bellinis and courtyard cocktail parties, and the conspicuous absence of yachts opened Venices maritime vistas in disorienting ways, there were still plenty of meaningful activities to keep folks engaged outside the Giardini walls.

My social calendar kicked off Monday at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi with The Italian Paintings, a survey of works by Stanley Whitney organized by curators Cathleen Chaffee and Vincenzo de Bellis as an interim project before the artists pandemic-delayed retrospective, now scheduled to hit the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2024. The palazzo is still residentialthe family was celebrating Easter at the same time as the VIP cocktail partyand the decadent silk-covered walls meant there could be minimal interventions. In a seafoam green room that held some of Whitneys earliest works made when he first moved to Rome, I overheard artists Amy Sillman, Pamela Wilson-Ryckman, and Marina Adams discussing painting techniques. When I caught up with Sillman later, she was in conversation with Lissons Alex Logsdail about Anish Kapoors new palazzo: not as in a show, but a palazzo he bought. Sillman shrugged, Im a New Yorker, I cant help but be curious about real estate. The next night at a reception for his exhibition at the hallowed Accademia, Kapoor brushed off inquiries about a rumored foundation. Its all very much in experimental stages, he assured me. More like a toy. But, like, a toy palazzo.

Believing we are wise is a sure sign of madness. But believing we are mad is not the same as being wise. I caught this line while standing in front of a Bosch painting depicting early neurosurgery that was hanging in the Fondazione Prada, where curator Udo Kittelmann and artist Taryn Simon joined forces for Human Brains: It Begins with an Idea. The show itself was structured to mimic cerebral passages, punctuated with sleek vitrines of ancient scholarship that sought to understand how we understand. As our guide, renowned audio book narrator George Guidall, filmed by Simon in paperback-scale, recites relevant passages from contemporary authors, including Salman Rushdie, McKenzie Wark, Alexander Kluge, and Esther Freud. Have you been watching these conferences this past year? artist Ken Okiishi asked me as we settled into one of the amphitheaters, where we watched a scientist from the ARUP Laboratories in Salt Lake City placidly dissecting a hippocampus. They were great for when you were in the kitchen cooking. What I appreciate is they dont try to couch them for art audiences. This is just, like, hardcore neuroscience.

If Venice nightlife had been known to go full throttle for biennials past, this year set a more subdued tone. My postpandemic mindset kept me far from the crush of the Bauer Hotel terrace, but thankfully Performance Space New Yorks Pati Hertling and dealer Donny Ryan devised a cozy alternative at Come Bar, where they set up a series of nights hosted by individuals and organizations including Artists Against Apartheid, Bidoun, Wu Tsang, and Sable Elyse Smith. On Monday, I caught up with Hertling over my first Campari of the week. Host Precious Okoyomon had yet to show (maybe putting the final touches on her massive Arsenale installation?). Everyone keeps asking me when the performance will be, but theres no performance, Hertling sighed. We just thought it would be nice to have artists host. Surveying a crowd that included Okoyomons fellow Biennale artist Kerstin Brtsch, dealer Isabella Bortolozzi, patron Alia Al Senussi, artist Nash Glynn, and the incoming director of New Yorks Swiss Institute, Stefanie Hessler, Hertling, Precious or not, was onto something.

For those who wanted to go even further off the beaten path, the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) was offering Something Out of It, a teaser of their next edition, which is set to open in September. The two-pronged exhibition of Tommaso de Luco and Pauline Curnier Jardin was the initiative of Francesco Urbano Ragazzi, the curatorial duo of Francesco Urbano and Francesco Ragazzi, who previously installed Jonas Mekas in a Burger King and in 2019 helped Kenneth Goldsmith share Hillary Clintons emails with the world. (The presidential candidate herself put in a surprise appearance to finally address that overflowing inbox). Were trying to show other facets of Venice, explained Urbano as I stood in the security line outside Casa di Reclusione Femminile della Giudecca, a womens prison known for its progressive outreach. (Prisoners tend to an organic garden and sell craft wares through various shops.) The location captured the imagination of Curnier Jardin, who is simultaneously developing a project for a former prison in Kabelwag for LIAF. The site where Kurt Schwitters was once imprisoned is now, oddly enough, a film school in a tiny town at what feels like the edge of the world.

For the Venice edition, Curnier Jardin zeroed in on the prisons history as a sixteenth-century convent, though as she reveals in her new film Adoration, not all the women may have taken those vows voluntarily. More precisely, the voiceover tells us, the nuns at the Convertite were former prostitutes, even though we dont really know what prostitute meant at the time. They are simply said to have been the most beautiful sinners in the country and we know how dangerous they could be. These beautiful sinners started a curious tradition of putting on plays during Carnival, which were open to the public and became all the rage with the Venetian upper crust.

Curnier Jardins film is projected in the same hall where those productions were staged. These days it serves as the parlor where prisoners are allowed their only contact with the outside world. To create Adoration and its accompanying murals, the artist conducted several workshops with the women who live within the walls, asking them to draw their associations with celebration. She then used the drawings as raw material, mixing in existing footage from her earlier research into salles des ftes. The reception was held in the courtyard, with an array of strawberries and chocolate bars laid out on simple folding tables. Normally, with my projects I like to find the hidden violence we try to avoid looking at, Curnier Jardin told me. Here I wanted to approach things from a different angle to tap into joy. From that panopticon courtyard, I realized we could still hear the sea.

Kate Sutton

Excerpt from:

Kate Sutton at the 59th Venice Biennale - Artforum

In 1983, a whacked-out Johnny Thunders pulled up the jeans that he had slept in, hobbled out of his abode and through the cobbled streets of Paris where a punk of his persuasiveness surely had no place, and he entered Studios WW. Therein, he pulled up a chair, swung his dogeared guitar off of his back and delivered perhaps the finest one-sitting acoustic punk performance that there has ever been. He did all of this for a few thousand bucks from his label so he could get more smack.

Eight years on from that fabled recording ofHurt Me, Thunders would be found dead at the Inn on St. Peter hotel. Although other theories have come in since, thanks to Dee Dee Ramone saying, they told me Johnny had gotten mixed up with some bastards, the official cause of death was drug-related causes. In fact, as singer Willy DeVille who lived next door to Thunders explained, when he went to see them take out the body, rigor mortis had set in to such an extent that his body was in a U shape. Adding: when the body bag came out, it was in a U. It was pretty awful.

This tragic end and the hodgepodge way he went about his musical collaborations in his final years have led to him almost becoming the forgotten frontier of punk in mainstream circles. However, before the poison took over, he was punk all the way. He recognised the central tenet of youthful music that needed to be reclaimed from stilted prog right away, Rock n roll is simply an attitude. You dont have to play the greatest guitar.

When Thunders plugged in with the New York Dolls he tapped into a future that he was almost fated to herald and fall away from. The band hurled all of their old heroes into a sort of DIY shaker, with a bit of inherent New York art scene anarchy and poured it out in a glug of electrically shambolic drug-fuelled performances. As their leader and spokesman Thunders once retrospectively declared: The Dolls were an attitude, if nothing else, they were a great attitude.

Along with that attitude, they had the complexion of Alaskan vampires, clothes ordered at random for the big catalogue of the bad taste store, and an overall oeuvre that sits in the dictionary under the word punk. Most importantly, however, they seemed to find themselves in the right place and time to seize the zeitgeist, usurp the sixties and spawn something entirely new. Musically they were no more important than any of the other sages on punks journey, but it was the scene that was stirred up from their sonic stew that gives credence to their patent for punk.

Heralding from Queens, a bit of attitude was always going to be in his makeup. However, like a numen who wandered in from the wilderness with rogue tidings, not much is known of his early life. It is until 1967 that he pops up in any musical sense after his first performance with The Reign. With his proto-punk ways already underway, he wasnt likely to just strum away in the background for long when his power chords and crunching tones had you looking for the other 999 guitarists surely hiding behind a curtain.

Thus, he quickly became Johnny Volume and formed his own band, Johnny and the Jaywalkers. But volume wasnt loud enough and simply crossing the street in an improper fashion wasnt very rock n roll either, so this too was merely a draft of what would later never be finished. In an on-brand move he took up a job in a leather shop and in a slightly less on-brand move, his sister started styling his hair like Keith Richards.

Then one day, this leather-clad vagabond was practising when future Dolls bassist Arthur Killer Kane, had his ear twisted by Thunders singular sound. I heard someone playing a guitar riff that I myself didnt know how to play. It was raunchy, nasty, rough, raw, and untamed. I thought it was truly inspired. []His sound was rich and fat and beautiful, like a voice. He might not have been the most accomplished guitarist, but who needed to be when you had a testimony like that.

The Dolls didnt take long to form after that, but they were fated to embrace tragedy fairly soon. In 1972, a year on from their formation, they were on tour in England when their drummer Billy Murcia passed out following an accidental overdose. He was force-fed coffee in an attempt to revive him, but it only led to asphyxiation, and he was found dead the following morning at the age of 21. This darkness would hang over the band even as they moved on, found a new drummer and managed to secure a record deal.

Thus, New York Dolls blaze of glory careened off track by 1975 and Thunders began looking elsewhere amid the CBGB punk scene that he had helped to spawn. He formed The Heartbreakers with Jerry Nolan and former Television songwriter and bassist Richard Hell. This roster once more would be a legendary one that went off like a firecracker and fizzled out just as quickly. By 1977, The Heartbreakers had broken.

The title of his next record said it all,So Alone. That might have been how he was feeling at the time, but the studio roster said anything but. For the album, Thunders was joined by Phil Lynott, Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Chrissie Hynde, Steve Marriott, Walter Lure, Billy Rath and Peter Perrett. And yet perhaps this period was the biggest paradigm for what would become the posthumous motif of his life: No one really knows me. People think they know me.

Because after that album, he almost wanders into the wilderness that first wandered out of. He pops up sporadically with albums like Hurt Me and in bands like The Oddballs, but everything is short-lived and shrouded in drug-addled obscurity. His final track was titled Born to Lose, and while it would be poetic to say it was fitting, that only adds to the false legacy that has befallen him. He was a forebearer of a movement that the world can be grateful for and the reverberating hum of his guitar will never truly be quelled in that sense.

He wanted to change. As he once said, Im gonna try to be cured. Ive been on heroin eight years, and I want to try a different style of life. It made me split up from my wife. It ruined a lot of things for me. Sadly, he ran out of time. But in the window he had with us, he was always an illuminating force.

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Punk and poison: The trailblazing life and sad legacy of Johnny Thunders - Far Out Magazine

As Passover 2022 approached, many Jews, especially the members of the large ex-Soviet and post-Soviet Jewish communities in North America, Israel and Germany, drew parallels between the war in Ukraine and the story of deliverance, with Putin playing the role of a latter-day Pharaoh. However theologically or historically imprecise, such parallels were emotionally genuine while also reflecting a particular wartime zeitgeist, through which myth, folklore and historical memory form the texture of the Jewish imagination.

Both Passover and Easter are, of course, moveable religious celebrations, their dates determined by ponderous calculations based, respectively, on the solar and lunar calendars. Some years Passover precedes Easter in Western Christianity, while in other years Easter happens earlier than Passover. (In Eastern Christianity, Easter occurs after Passover.) While Passover always begins on the 15th day of the month of Nissan on the Hebrew calendar (usually March or April), the First Seder does not always fall on Erev Shabbat. When Good Friday coincides with the First Passover Sederand Passover overlaps with Easterthis connection animates Jewish-Christian relations with special significance. In 2022, Passover started on April 15, Western Christians celebrated Easter on April 17, and Eastern Christians will have celebrated Easter on April 24. Passover and Easter will not align this way again until 2029.

However, what makes the 2022 Paschal season particular remarkable is that this spring, in a rare conjunction that occurs only about every 30 years, all three Abrahamic religions share a week of religious celebrations. In 2022 the holy month of Ramadan, during which Muslims celebrate the creation of the Quran, began on the evening of Saturday, April 1 and had its second Friday at the same time with both the First Seder and the Western Christian Good Friday.

Thoughts about this religious confluence filled me, a longtime Jewish student of interfaith dialogue, with hope renewed as I celebrated Pesach and enjoyed a quiet weekend at Cape Cod. On the afternoon of Monday, April 18 I was catching up on work after three days of family time, garden work and a partial internet detox. In a quick succession, three news items flashed across my desktop. First I learned of hundreds of antisemitic leaflets left on the doorstops of homes in the Los Angeles area in the early hours of Saturday April 16, the morning after the First Seder. Printed in caps at the top of the leaflets was the sentence Every Single Aspect of the Ukraine-Russia War Is Jewish. The leaflets provenance has been linked to a notorious antisemitic group. Printed left of the sentence at the top of the leaflet was a Star of David with the word Jude insidejust like the ones the Nazis forced the Jews to wear on their clothes; to the right of the sentence were a five-point star and a hammer and sickle, presumably representing Communism and the Soviet Union. At the center of the leaflets, facing each other, were photos of Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, and of Russias President Vladimir Putin, who is not Jewish. In the photos both Zelenskyy and Putin wear kippot. Printed below the leaders photographs are lists of Ukrainian and Russian politicians, all of whom are labeled with small Stars of David, which is supposed to indicate their Jewish origins or connections.

Facts do not matter to the grotesquely freakish imagination that draws inspiration from both the legacy of Christian Judeophobia and the explosions of modern, political, racialized Jew-hatred of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, The International Jew, and the Mein Kampf variety. I will not waste the readers time on annotating the list of politicians printed on the leaflets. Instead, I will point out that like in many other cases of such blatantly antisemitic propaganda disseminated by hate groups, the leaflets peddle the old canard of Judeo-Bolshevism and, more broadly speaking, the tried and false allegations of an international Jewish conspiracy.

By seeking to pin the war in Ukraine on the Jews, such propaganda also makes use of political, economic and religious conspiracy theories to have surfaced since the beginning of Russias invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The leaflets thus bring to mind the history of blaming wars, revolutions, and disasters on Jews, a history most fully and violently betokened by the Nazi rhetoric on the Jewish question. In the leaflets demented illogic, Zelensky as an apparent Jew conspires with Putin the Jewish puppet to unleash a bloody war that somehow helps Jews control the world. Such reptilian theories, mostly wallowing in the dirt of ultra-nationalist Russian media spaces but occasionally surfacing in the mainstream media both within and without Russia, mash the Jewish origins of Ukraines president and of Ukraines minister of defense, the position of Jewish oligarchs both in Russia and Ukraine, and Israels involvement in the conflict into a slimy ball of lies, absurd claims and QAnonian explanations. Who would believe the nonsensical assertion that Jews and Israel would stand to benefit from a war between Russia and Ukraine?

The leaflets thus bring to mind the history of blaming wars, revolutions, and disasters on Jews, a history most fully and violently betokened by the Nazi rhetoric on the Jewish question.

The sheer, rancorous idiocy of the message is probably the reason why the appearance of the antisemitic leaflets alleging the Jewish nature of the war in Ukraine has not received much coverage in the national newsthis and the actual events of the war. The news that on April 18 Russia launched a new offensive in Ukrainehas dominated the front pages and news hours. Even though the offensive, now in its third day, has become known as the battle of Donbas, Russias troops are seeking to gain control of a broad swath of territory in Ukraines East, South-East and South, including its industrial heartland and what remains of the unconquered Ukrainian coast of the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea, from Kharkiv down to Donetsk and Mariupol (as of this writing, still heroically defending its last stronghold) and possibly (I say this with horror and trepidation) all the way to Odessa.

The start of the second phase of Russias war in Ukraineboth the movement of ground troops in the East and the massive artillery and air bombardment of other regions, most notably Lviv located in the Western part of the country only 40 miles from the border with Poland, a NATO memberhas overshadowed an attack on Israel, which would have otherwise received more coverage. On April 18 Gaza militants fired a rocket into Israel, which the Iron Dome defense system successfully intercepted. Occurring just a little less than a year since the start of the May 2021 conflict in Israel, when scores of rockets were fired from Gaza by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the latest hostility came amid escalating Arab-Israeli tensions in Jerusalem. I hope I am terribly wrong here, but this feels like the beginning of a new round of confrontations and rocket-launchings.

Why the timing of this particular strike by the sworn enemies of Israel? By shifting the attention away from Israel, the war in Ukraine has emboldened the Palestinian extremists. At the same time, the war has reignited Jewish repatriation to Israel from both Russia (and, concomitantly, its close ally Belarus) and Ukraine while also creating an influx of refugees into Israel. Finallyand I would not put this past Putin and his native KGB culturerenewed tensions in Gaza have the potential to divert Israel from getting more involved in supporting Ukraine.

By shifting the attention away from Israel, the war in Ukraine has emboldened the Palestinian extremists.

To summarize: On Monday, as the world resumed its daily tasks following a weekend of triple religious celebrations, Russias new offensive deafened out both a local outburst of antisemitic hate in Los Angeles and a warning-like rocket strike from Gaza into Israel. Both the new Russian offensive and the rocket strike from Gaza started on the Western Christian Easter Monday, six days before Eastern Christian Easter, three days into Passover, and over two weeks into Ramadan. While the offensive and the rocket firing are not causally connected in a clear or direct sense, a measure of intersectional thinking offers some keys to understanding the historical moment.

There is, of course, a long history of linking Jewish, Christian, and Muslim religious dates and tropes with the timing, meaning and significance of historical violence and wars. This is hardly surprising, and I probably would not have brought it up were it not for the conspicuous timing of the April 18 Russian offensive in Ukraine and the rocket strike against Israel. Many times, the holiday of Easter has either occasioned or lent its name to outbursts of anti-Jewish violence and commencements of military operations. Think, for instance, of the Easter 1389 Pogrom in Prague, of the 1903 Kishinev Pogrom, or of the so-called 1940 Easter Pogroms in Poland. Recall, for example, the spring 1972 offensive in Vietnam, often called the Easter Offensive. But we should also not forget that in Egyptian (shall we say, revisionist?) historiography, the 1973 Yom Kippur Arab-Israeli War is celebrated as the Ramadan War.

As most totalitarian leaders who are no longer fighting for the legacy of their rule but for their own survival, Putin badly needs a measure of military success that his propaganda machine will then spin into a full-blown victory. In the barrage of anti-Ukrainian ideological warfare that Putins regime employs to brainwash its people into Orwellian submission, the Russian Orthodox Church has been given a distinct, predictable (and particularly sickening) role as the anointer of Russias war against Ukraine. I do not know to what extent the religious timing has played a part in the decision by Putin and his henchmen to launch the 2022 Easter Offensive in Eastern Ukraine. However, there is no doubt that another date looms large ahead of Putins advancing troops. Historical rather than religious, this date is cloaked with the mythology of Holy Russia as the savior of the world. I am thinking of May 9, the Sovietand RussianVictory Day.

As a student of World War Two and the Shoah in the Soviet Union, I cannot resist fleshing out one more historical parallel. The late April 2022 situation in the Ukrainian war theater invites a comparison to the state of affairs on the Eastern Front in the spring of 1942almost exactly eighty years to date. After an attempted blitzkrieg of late February 2022, Russias troops failed to take Ukraines capital, Kyiv, and were stopped and repelled at the Kyiv direction. Like Nazi Germany following its defeat at Moscow in December 1941, Putins Russia has regrouped and refocused the direction of its main strike. And like Hitlers troops in the late spring of 1942, Putins troops have concentrated their new offensive in the East and South-East (except they are moving not eastward but westward). The late spring 1942 Nazi offensive led to their retaking of Eastern Crimea, to the Soviet defeat at Kharkiv, and to the rapid advances across the Don toward the Volga and Caucasus. It was then that the very survival of the Soviet Union was at stake, and it was not until the end of 1942 that the Nazi armies were finally stopped and defeated at Stalingrad.

What will be the Stalingrad of this war? Kharkiv? Dnipro? Zaporizhzhia? It is hard to tell. But I am certain that the bleeding, devastated Ukraine will win her Patriotic War. And I only hesitate a little when I paraphrase the famous Soviet slogan of World War Two: Ukraines cause is just. Victory will be hers.

This, finally, brings me to the question of what we as the Jewish community and as individual Jews can do to help Ukraine repel Putins troops and achieve her victory. While I am still in favor of Israels guarded neutralitycoupled with Israels tacit strategic and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, I believe that American and Canadian Jews could do more to convince our leaders and elected officials to engage a different kind of assistance. While I am well aware of the many risks of NATOs military involvement, I also wonder if this is not the time to push hard for a no-fly zone. And I certainly believe that the United States and the NATO alliance are not doing enough for Ukraine.

The time to act is now, during this week of Passover, during this Passover Offensiveas Ukraines destiny hangs in the balance.

And so I say to you, Jewish-American supporters of Ukraine: Call your congresswomen and congressmen, call your senators. Ask your non-Jewish friends and neighbors to do the same. The time to act is now, during this week of Passover, during this Passover Offensiveas Ukraines destiny hangs in the balance. Back on March 16 I called the local office of Representative Jacob Daniel Auchincloss of Massachusettss 4th Congressional District, for whom I voted in the last congressional election. Born to a Jewish mother and raised Jewish, Congressman Auchincloss is an ex-Marine and a first-term congressman. I will not wait for Passover to end before making another call to ask my congressman to do his part in supporting Ukraine.

Maxim D. Shrayeris an author and a professor at Boston College. His recent books includeVoices of Jewish-Russian LiteratureandA Russian Immigrant: Three Novellas. Shrayers newest book isOf Politics and Pandemics

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The Passover Offensive and the Easter(n) Promises - Jewish Journal

Imagine you are the literary editor for a major American newspaper, like The New York Times or The Washington Post. You know that getting a good notice in your paper can launch the career of a young writer and you are far from indifferent to the fate of literary culture. You majored in English and once nurtured dreams of being a novelist yourself. But tens of thousands of fiction titles are published each year and it sometimes feels like most of them are piled up on your desk.

So, what are you to do? How do you decide what gets covered and what ignored? Spoiler alert: it is not meritocratic.

You are to some degree condemned to judge books by their covers. You quickly get quite good at it. Anything by a Big Name author, a new title by Margaret Atwood or Jonathan Franzen, is a publishing event and of course needs to be reviewed by one of your go-to writers. That piece will go the front of the section with a large author photo.

As to the others? Some genres do not stand a chance. Romance fiction? No way. Sci-fi, fantasy, thrillers? No, no, no. In general, that which seems like literary fiction will attract your eye and it is not hard to pick those out from the pile, based on the blurb or the publisher. Occasionally, you might do a round up of recent crime writing.

But remember, you are working for a newspaper, so it helps if the book treats a story that is topical or in some way relatable to current events. Every so often you can cover a suite of books under an eye-catching theme, and make it into a longer piece about fictions response to Climate Change or the #MeToo movement, a phenomenon that a recent n+1 editorial about the dismal state of criticism has derisively dubbed CRT the Contemporary Themed Review.

These pieces might risk coercive homogeneity, ironing out differences in tone, theme, structure or style, in order to intervene in the Zeitgeist, but with any luck these will get a bit of reaction on Twitter, which is the name of the game.

Books of the year and best of lists are other ways you can get into the slipstream of social media. It is fandom, not analysis, that gets the most attention, spiced up with the occasional eye-catching takedown or hatchet job.

We are a long way from critics as the arbiters of taste, the gatekeepers of culture who might introduce readers to vital and new literary forms and thereby provide an antidote to the algorithmic conformity and banality that hangs over contemporary book culture.

Phillipa K Chongs Inside the Critics Circle gives us a snapshot of contemporary reviewing from the perspective of a sociologist. Unlike a lot of state of culture interventions, the book is not a polemic or a jeremiad, but a dispassionate inquiry into the world of editors and reviewers in the United States based on some forty interviews.

Inside the Critics Circle is about critics as journalistic reviewers, a category she distinguishes from literary essayists and literary academics, both a little further along the chain in the process of consecration through which an author is deemed significant enough to enter the literary canon. What emerges is a tale of contingency, precarity and uncertainty, from the moment books get selected for review all the way to the future prospects of newspaper critics and criticism.

While the book is US (indeed New York) focussed, there are surely lessons for other countries. The same precarity afflicts reviewing culture here, with the dwindling of on-staff critics in most newspapers and the need to compete for online attention.

There are still prominent book reviewers who are not themselves novelists (Geordie Williamson, chief reviewer for The Australian comes to mind). But the circuits of book festivals and dinner parties are small, with an even greater potential for coteries and back-scratching.

But in some ways, the everyday little accidents of fate are the most chilling. How many major new novels, for example, get overlooked because the editor cannot think of a suitable reviewer on one particular day? Chongs interest here is exclusively on fiction reviewing and one of the distinctive and consequential features she highlights is that, in the US at any rate, there is currently a tendency to ask novelists to review novels.

And why would they not, you might ask (and so might they). Novelists understand the form, having practised it themselves and are, therefore, qualified to evaluate their fellows. True, we do not expect films to be reviewed by directors or restaurants to be reviewed by chefs, but then novelists and critics both seem to be using the same material the written word. And now, since most newspapers have far fewer if any on-staff critics than they used to, and most reviewing is done on a freelance basis, many fiction writers are only too happy to have a bit of extra income, especially when the gig might also increase their visibility.

Yet, there are some drawbacks to this arrangement. I do not want to open the Romantic can of worms between the creative and the critical sensibility, but let us just say that one does not guarantee the other. Sure, there are examples of great novelist-critics. But there are also (looking at you, Susan Sontag) those whose criticism overwhelmingly outclasses their attempts at fiction.

I am reminded of that scalding quip by the Cambridge critic Eric Griffiths on AS Byatts Possession (1990): the kind of novel I would write if I did not know I could not write novels.

The palming off of reviewing as a side-gig is a sign of the dwindling status and prestige of the role of the critic and there are some regrettable unintended consequences. Indeed, some of the stories that Chong tells suggest that President Biden should sign an executive order forbidding the practice.

You see, novelists, when reviewing someone elses efforts, often have more skin in the game than a professional critic and arguably can muster less distance. They know how hard it is to write a novel, and how devastating and embarrassing a snarky review can feel.

More selfishly, why would a novelist give a bad review to someone who might be reviewing their novel the following week? What if that writer is a judge on a prize committee? What if others judge the negative review to be motivated by malice or envy?

There are unpredictable and even long-term consequences. Chong records one instance when a reviewer was confronted, years later, at a party by the wife of someone who had been on the receiving end of a bad review: You know, you have ruined his life!

So instead of writing bad reviews, reviewers tend to play nice or couch what they feel. What if they really loathe the book? They can talk around it, giving a plot summary or reflecting on the wider literary field of which the book forms a part, maybe throwing in some tempered evaluation in the final paragraph.

However, all these considerations disappear when reviewing the book by a really famous author. You should never go hard on a first-timer, but big game is fair game. There is an unspoken rule that you can punch up, but not down. The celebrities can take a bit of rough handling.

It will not have the same effect on their sales and they go to different parties to you anyway. Bad reviews and contrarian takes can get people talking, which is why the hatchet jobs end up getting anthologised.

That readerly pleasure is far less guilty if aimed at a tall poppy. If you have decided to let loose in your review on the latest Franzen, there is a bit of incentive to go in hard and not to be mealy mouthed. It is a good way of getting noticed. Franzen does not rely on reviews for his success, the way a fledgling novelist might, and look at the amount of space that gets devoted to him in the books section, space that might be nurturing up-and-coming talent.

Still, you never really know who will read your review. Once it flies into the world, it is outside your control and always to some extent a risky business, as one of the chapter titles here puts it.

Uncertainty of various sorts is the structuring theoretical frame of Chongs book, which is divided into three parts, each about one sort of uncertainty.

Epistemic uncertainty refers to the absence of clear criteria on which one can base aesthetic judgements. Reviewers evaluate characterisation, plot and language, but ultimately any assessment will have a subjective element that could potentially be at odds with that of other critics.

Social uncertainty refers to the unpredictable way readers (and editors) will respond to a review and how critics write to accommodate this unknown. Institutional uncertainty refers to the overall purpose of newspaper reviewing, how it fits into the cultural ecosystem, and how critics think about the future of criticism.

The arc of the book follows the review process, beginning with editors deciding what books should be reviewed and by whom, then considering how reviewers go about the process of evaluation, then concluding with their reflection on the value and impact of reviewing as whole.

Yes, many broadsheets have cut back on review sections and others have replaced it with the sort of feature articles or profile pieces that puff up celebrities at the expense of critical discernment. Yes, the on-staff book critic has been outsourced to pay-per-gig freelancers. Nonetheless, paid reviewers (albeit paid per review) are still with us, despite predictions since the rise of the new media that they would go the way of the rag-and-bone man and the bus conductor.

One reason for that is because old-fashioned print media has found a way to move into and work with the internet, rather than compete with it as a medium. If this shift has entailed some vulgar chasing after clickbait, it has also enabled online review sections and longer form writing.

Online-only publications like the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Sydney Review of Books have enriched reviewing culture immensely, while older publications like the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books and Australian Book Review, have adapted to digital culture and reached new audiences, without losing their quality or altering their core identity.

Of course, the wider blogosphere means that all niche and minority interests can find assessments and conversations online. Interested in reviews of those derided genre novelists? You can glut yourself on your smartphone. Have a hankering for experimental avant-garde poetry? Ditto.

The conversation about quality literature is more diffuse than a generation or two ago, which is one reason that the social standing of a major newspaper reviewer has declined. Yet the reviewers interviewed in Chongs book still justify their work with appeals to a wider good, as well as to an investment in their own professional standing.

So what is the good of book reviewing? How do we or more pointedly how do the paid reviewers themselves justify the existence of newspaper critics in an age of Yelp, TripAdvisor and Goodreads? A world in which, in other words, it often feels everyone is reviewing everything all the time?

The critics interviewed here, maybe understandably in the current precarious circumstances, are a little bit too ready with their elbows when it comes to asserting their own worth and purpose. They insist that they fill a vital niche between the amateurs on the one hand, the mere enthusiasts that populate the blogosphere, and the academics who are too arcane, specialised and out of touch.

I do sometimes think that bloggers are kind of dumb, as a general rule, confesses one charmer.

Allegedly, the amateurs on the internet treat books as mere entertainment and the serious business of self-improvement needs the paid reviewers in the newspapers. But they themselves must not get too high falutin, lest they become as abstruse and naval-gazing as the academics. Yes, there is porousness between the three categories and it is not uncommon for academics, for instance, to review for newspapers.

But they code-switch when they do so successfully, adjusting the register for a wider audience. One reviewer quoted by Chong, himself an academic, criticised another reviewing academic for being too pretentious in his intellectual outlook and for being so far above his own readers that in the end, rather than doing a service he does a disservice to the book that he is reviewing.

As for literary theory, predictably and very unoriginally it evokes the greatest populist swagger from the literary journalists. Outside invading small countries, the worst thing that men do is to invent literary theories, proclaims one respondent, possibly a recovering academic, who has a PhD in English.

Perhaps surprisingly, apart from a glancing mention of gender politics in the conclusion, there is very little in Chongs book about diversity, race and sexual identity, issues that have been prominent in recent public discussion of the arts and its organs of dissemination.

If this is so for the United States, where many cultural institutions made public commitments to racial inclusiveness following the events of the summer of 2020, it is also true in Australia, where there are frequent calls for decolonisation and racial justice and organisations like Stella campaign for gender equity in the literary world.

One would expect that the subject position of a reviewer and the increasing expectation for diversity of the books reviewed must be a consideration in editorial decisions and in the self-positioning of reviewers. If so, we do not get much discussion of it here.

That also means that any incipient tension between the demands of aesthetic and political realms remain unexplored. Does the need to represent a multiplicity of voices and experiences in the media, especially those voices which have been marginalised and silenced, make it harder or easier to argue for the function of criticism at the present time?

Does the current self-examination by institutions of culture, including universities, museums and newspapers, about their own historical implication in oppressive or discriminatory power relations make the role of the reviewer-as-expert, as the privileged purveyor of judgement, harder to sustain?

Chongs respondents are all anonymous, presumably in the interests of scholarly objectivity, but it would be interesting to hear their views about these most livid areas of our current cultural conversations.

Reading this book was, for me, something of a cross-disciplinary encounter. In my own subject, literary studies, self-reflexivity borders on the obsessive. Literary academics, like a lot of scholars in the humanities, are forever examining the whys and wherefores of what they do. What is the value of doing English? How do we justify our discipline in an age when the social and cultural capital of the humanities is frequently challenged by the econometric thinking of politicians and policy makers?

It is salutary to look at how a sociologist handles the value of criticism question, which is, bluntly, with a lot more lucidity and less theoretical agonising. Chong goes to the practising reviewers and asks them to describe what they do and why they do it, then subjects their answers to qualitative analysis. The questions she raises what status do we give to someones taste? Is there an extra-subjective element to aesthetic judgement? are pretty venerable ones.

Chong does not go to Kant or Hume to come up with answers, but rather goes to the reviewers themselves. There are benefits to that approach, but also costs: questions go a-begging and many presumptions remain unchallenged.

More than a philosophical angle, I would have welcomed some more genealogy and intellectual history. How did the reviewing ecosystem evolve into its current state? What was it like thirty years ago? How has reviewing culture shifted in recent decades and what are the cultural, social, and institutional explanations for these changes?

In saying that, I may be violating a fundamental rule of fair-minded reviewing you review the book the author has written, not an imaginary alternative. Chong has given us a valuable, clear-headed inquiry into contemporary journalistic book reviewing.

Her research brings calm illumination to these troubled waters. Her own non-judgmental approach gives us a crystal exposition of how and why judgements are made by those, editors and reviewers, seeking to navigate these uncertain straits.

Ronan McDonald is the Chair of Irish Studies at The University of Melbourne.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Inside the Critics Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times, Phillipa K Chong, Princeton University Press.

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Inside the Critics Circle: This book gives a sociologists perspective on contemporary reviewing - Scroll.in