At 10 I wanted to be an artist, practiced a hysterical form of Christianity, talked to trees, and turned a sunset at a local park into a visionary experience. My great-aunt lured me to Evangelical Christianity with the strangeness of Gospel stories where Jesus always ended up angry at his disciples’ failure to understand. I sympathized with being misunderstood, and latched on. Besides, Christianity was a forbidden fruit in Soviet Russia so I had to worship in secret. This was unnerving but also alluring. I was a breathless romantic who wanted to be surprised by a knight on a white…
Imagine walking up to your academic colleague in the humanities and saying: “I can’t wait to get the new book by X. It’s supposed to come out tomorrow in City Lights. Have you heard of it? It’s supposed to be amazing!” If this sounds far-fetched, then you’re like me, and hundreds of others: you’re just not that excited by contemporary academic writing.
Or imagine: “Hey, I just returned from a conference on Transnational Aesthetics and it absolutely blew my mind.” Same response here: this seems like a scenario out of science fiction. Why would a conference generate the hype of…
We often denigrate pulp fiction by saying it embodies a consumerist approach to art, that a thriller leads us to consume the book for plot and such. But we are not being fair to alternate meanings of consumption. What about being consumed by emotion, being consumed by fire?
It occurs to me that food can be thought of as the most Zen-like, non-instrumental kind of art. While a meal is literally made for the sake of consumption, the chef also prepares it with regard to aesthetic pleasure — pleasure that is visual, olfactory, gustatory all at once. After reading a…
Natalya Sukhonos
Poet, mother, dreamer, academic, not necessarily in that order.
