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Infinitys Kitchenis an independant

publication of essays, fiction, poetry, art andwhatever else thats cooking. Tis is a place for

creative people to work out their ideas.

Te work featured in this publication is ownedby the creator(s) of that work. If you want to

republish any of that work, you should askthem, because unless noted otherwise that work

is protected by copyright. Some of the worksin this issue are not protected by copyright, butby the creative commons licence, which in this

case means share and share alike, but give creditwhere credit is due. Panspermia is licenced in

this way by Leonard Richardson. Te CreativeCommons is a really interesting concept, devotedto expanding the range of creative work availableto build upon and share. You should check it out

at http://creativecommons.org

Please direct all inquiries to Editor Dylan Kinnettvia e-mail at, [email protected].

Poetry

Cartersville Elegy by David Glen

root nine, pollinated by R. Moose Jackson

Prose

Disconnect by J Utah Taylor

The New Communication as Isolation by Ed Zahniser

Panspermia by Leonard Richardson

Images

April Loveday

Comic

Blue Leader vs. Tech Support by Robert Rackleff

Editor

Dylan Kinnett

Design

Matthew Lincoln Yake

Special Thanks

Ashley Collins

Kimberly Hopkins

Sarah Williams

Infinitys Kitchen no.1


3/9

Have you ever read a work of literature, or seena work of art, and thought to yourself, I dontunderstand it! Have you ever had the distinctimpression that nobody else understands it ei-ther? Tese things can happen for different rea-sons. Here are some examples.

Maybe were all too stupid to understand. (Hey,its possible, depending on the crowd.) Lets notdwell on this reason, since it isnt very likelythat the whole crowd is stupid, I hope. Maybeits just that we werent paying attention, or wewerent interested. Tats more likely.

Maybe you would understand, if only you hada key piece of information, but you dont. Tatkey information is often a bit of historical or so-cial context. Even in our own time and place,context can do a lot to aid understanding.

Other things fail to be self-explanatory, but itisnt on purpose. Some works of art or litera-ture have plenty of well-intentioned contexts,but that context has no bearing on the thingin question. Other things are loaded with a dif-

ferent kind of context, which we could calladvertising, or, lets get real and call it bullshit.At times like these, what weve got here is afailure to communicate. Te key word here isfailure.

Is the context hidden from you somehow, onpurpose? Some things fail to be self-explanato-ry. You assume these things make perfect sense,but people dont talk about it, on purpose. Youknow its merely an assumption. You know, se-cretly, you dont really understand. Call it a caseof the emperors clothes. In cases like these,

were all waiting for that little child to laugh atthe Emperor.

Similarly, the context and understanding maybe available to some people, but not available toothers (for the reasons above). Tis leads to situ-ations where either you get it or you dont.

All the stuff I have just described makes peoplefeel uncomfortable. I think that stuff is dan-gerous because it can make art and literatureunwanted. As the editor of this new arts and

I Dont Get ItDylan Kinnettliterature publication, thats the stuff Im goingto tackle head on, avoid, destroy, etc. As a readerof this publication, you are encouraged to dothe same. While collecting the contents of thisfirst issue if Infinitys Kitchen, I wanted the finalproduct to make sense. I hope it isnt imposingtoo much to say that, along the way, a themeemerged, or maybe just a question. Te deviceswe have for travel and communication, how dothey relate to the distances between us?

As a post script, heres a tip: sometimes, theresnothing to understand. For example: the story

with no moral, the image with no picture, oreven the picture thats merely a picture, justplain music. My point is that understandingisnt everything. Art is not science.

Whether or not you like it, however it makesyou feel, those things are up to you.

2Infinitys Kitchen no.1


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riving fast in a southbound lane, my speedom-er tops 110 mph. My heart begins to race. Slowly,release the gas and pray that my speed drops fastefore the upcoming bend in the road. Not fastnough and so I take a wild run around a fewurves before slowing down to a reasonable speedr handling these country lanes. Tere is a bar

head and I decide to pull in to catch my breath.unny things happen when you try to outrun yourars: you find a whole new set of problems that goway when you slow down then you catch upith yourself and youre back where you started.

Te bar holds a rustic and sentimental charm tobeing reminiscent of the old farmhouse my

andfather holed up in for the last years of hisfecomplete with variations of structural dete-oration and tetanus dangers, and accompaniedy an unmistakable air of hopelessness and broken-ess. Walking in, I fall into the trance of a steadycking in the background. An old blues man whont that old, but weathered in the soul, sits andcks on a haggard guitar.

is hands carry small scars across the tops ofacked-skin knuckles. He is white, wearing an eyeatch, and sings in a gurgled tone, with tears from

years of pain welling up and clogging in his throat.Te words that come out are plain, wild, untamedand lonely. His hands move steady across the fret

board with deft intensity and intuition. He is raw,yet clean as razor cut flesh.

A lump forms in my throat as I find a seat in theback. Closing my eyes, I catch hint of cinnamonand vanilla. Opening my eyes it is as if I see herbefore me, with her soft clean hands and cleareyes aglow with acceptance and love. I shed a tear.Standing in a moment of decidedness I moveacross the room to the telephone. With callousedhands I pick up the phone and dial. It rings as Ihear his words:

I will go to the mountains *ring*I will go to the sea

*ring*I will run fast as lightnin *ring*But trouble still finds me.

She picks up the phone and my breath is taken.All of my well-planned dialogue is forgotten. Istumble in words, muddled between the heart andthe head. Disconnect.

DisconnectUtah Taylor

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dothemathcomics.com


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Forty-three miles from the city, the interstateWidens to four lanes. Four lanes, wanderingDown from the foothills of the AppalachiansAlong the old Norfolk-Southern alignmentInto the phosphorescent jewel of the South.Everybody ends up here eventually, kicking

Around Ponce in the small hours, idly chasingWhatever life they were promised: its like

Prague, but for Southern kids with slow accentsWho, in fairness, never ached to leave anyway.

For our grandparents the directions were simple:Follow the coal road north until it turns to steel,

Ten follow the steel west until it becomesSomething else. Something else was good life, such

As it was, and Im told that from the top floors ofMidtown you can see the good life stretching outFor miles, all the way to the Chattahoochee and

Beyond. Tis was the slow, steady churning of theirExile: something else. But beneath something else

Home was never Pittsburgh Cleveland Muncie Detroit,And most returned, empty-car diasporans, having

Raised children and sent them onour parents neverKnew home, really. Different now, perhaps. But

On this dark stretch 42 miles from the city, Ill letMyself be drawn along these same inveterate rails,

Running out the night.

Cartersville Elegy David Glenwe was just passinby some empty lot, pocketsfull of seeds culled from fertile mindsour old-timey odysseypassin thru the valley of corporate shadowsas is my customto lighten loadI throwed thembroadcast in wild arcs that passedright straight crossthat fatbelly moonupon return migrationthe very next year we spieda post germination panoplythat lot sproutin volunteersblackhoods growin up tallin the new England nighthangin heavy with the fruits of resistance

a guerilla garden ripe for harvestplus more seeds for next planting moontimes comin soon whenour little backyard plots are gonna bustup the sidewalks, run over rooftopsovergrow the road to damnationfor we set rootstoo deep to pull, employpilgrims of cross-pollinationcultivate chaos coyote mind liberationand damn!our dreams travel fast on the wind.

root nine,pollinatedR. Moose Jackson



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Have you noticed how each leap forward inommunications technology makes us moreolated from each other and the environ-

ment?

We updated our home pulse/tone phone toself-contained all-digital telephone answer-

ng machine. It has I dont remember howmany memory functions. Ieep the old phones hand-et in my van and pretend

o talk on my car phone,oo.

ritish Airways carries thisigital impulse to the ex-eme in their first-class trans-Atlantic ser-ice. Each seat is like its own phone booth.

Te airline issues each first-class passengerpair of pajamas. Tey still use the Hindi

word pajamas to invoke Britains glory daysf empire when the sun never set on Englishooking.

Phone booth is a nostalgic termlike Si-amese twins since theres no longer a Siam.odays phone booths arent even stalls.Teyre more like communication versionsof those feed bags once hung from the snoutsof inner-city delivery-cart horses.

Superman cant change into his Lycra tightsin a nose bag. Its alla computer-graphicsblur.

Te true image of anera lags one step be-hind its true metaphor.Tis shows in the field

of medicine and health. Te 19th centurysbig killer, tuberculosis, was called consump-tion. Ten we licked tuberculosis orthought we did now material consump-tion is killing us emotionally and spirituallyand murdering the less-developed world.

Te 20th centurys latter-day big scary killerwas cancer. It was taboo to mention it asthe cause of death in obituaries. Were stilltoo sophisticated to nickname it. Cancersamount to uncontrolled development. Tatskilling the environment, too. We all want17th-century English manor houses withspreading green grass lawns. o get them wegobble up willy-nilly the worlds most pro-ductive farmland. Uncontrolled growth: theobituary code was So-and-so died after aprolonged illness.

Pretty soon youll only be able to get a 17th-century knock-off, three-acre suburban lawn onBritish Airways first-classtrans-Atlantic service.

Have you noticed howpeople will mispronouncethe California valley hot-bed of digital develop-ment as Silicone Valley?Tey dont say SiliconValley. Teir deep fearof technological changeshows up as this bodilylanguage. Call it soma-tized fear. Silicone Val-ley metaphorizes breast

implants as technologicalcancerthe ideology ofunrestrained growth.

Does somatizing fearseem far-fetched? Well,digital can mean per-taining to the fingers andtoes. And not everythingdigital can be reduced tothe binary yes-no, on-off,in-out protocol of cyber-

space. Tat leaves out 18 fingers and toes.o be binary in that digital world is to be allthumbs. Tat implies oppositional. o beall toes has been an unexplored figure ofspeech since we quit hanging from trees.

Breast implants and pre-Viagra penile pumpsexpress the desire to increase our bodies vo-cabulary. (Animal behavior scientists call thissomatized language mating display behav-ior.) Tose whose cell phones permanentlyaccessorize their persona merely express a lessradical urge to increase the bodys vocabularypower. Te concept of cell phone clearly

The New CommunicationAs Isolationd Zahniser

Material

consumptionis killing usemotionally andspiritually.


pen, gouche, and collage on paper/21 x 16/2005/aprilloveday.org


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eaks to giving voice to the body at the mostasic level of cellular organization.

n the more-than-human world of matingehavior, outrageous bodily expression gen-ally has been embedded in the male of theecies. Witness the bizarre plumage and

he contorted dance steps of many sexuallyoused male birds. Cell phones render this

ender-neutral for the human.

nything somatized risks assuming the hu-an bodys ambiguities, as hinted at above.

Te phrase all thumbs hooks into greatetaphorizing power, but the phrase alles does nothing. Yet both phrases couldmain undifferentiated as all digits or evenll digital.

o-called primitive cultures invest the taskf reflecting on such issues of multi-layeredxpressiveness in the shaman. We often rel-gate them to the etymological end of the barhat bills itself perhaps too highly asrisprudence. Te ambiguities of a concept

like cell phone, which can express, etymo-logically, both communication and isolation,may even be an oxymoron (c.f. juris + pru-dence).

Carry-out meals have boomed synchronouslywith the proliferation of mobile phones. Allthese people ricocheting about encapsulatedin air-conditioned private automobiles needsomeone to talk to on their portable phones.

Who can I call? Let me see. I could just or-der out Chinese tonight and nuke it in themicrowave.

Tis becomes one economically potent in-terior monologue when newly linked to apermanently accessorized but ambiguouslyloaded device of isolating communication.

Whereas emerging global citizens in the 1980smight have declared Te world is my home,its not that simple now. Everywhere maybe nowhere. Better yet might be the sloganMy home is my world. Among the 4th-cen-

Go, sit in yourcell, and your cell

will teach youeverything.Marcus Aurelius

tury Desert Fathers, Abbot Moses instructeda brother: Go, sit in your cell, and your cellwill teach you everything. Marcus Aureliussaid most of our problems stem from our in-ability to stay in our room. Oft-transplantedtrees cant bear fruit. If you must move about,adopt the turtle as your role modellikethose 30-foot RVs with satellite V hook-ups in national forest campgrounds.

When I dial an overseas number directnow, there are so manydigits that maybe byadding four more wecan dial up the dead.

Do not go gently intothat good night with-out your cell phone.

Battery life will become a huge issue. Tiswill be one step back toward so-called primi-tives custom of burying one with all onespossessions. So-called primitives sent offtheir dead equipped and accessorized for

the afterlife. Tis will be like metaphysicalpayback for a lifetime of layaway purchases.Renewing this burial practice would wreakhavoc with the fortunes of estate and probatelawyers and set IRS customer-service tacticsback several decades.

Most obvious of the cell phones etymologiesof isolation is the prison cell. It even sug-gests that ultimate, solitary confinement butas confinement to the solitary. Couch-po-

tato-dom imposed fromwithout.

Or does communicationtrack developments intransportation? Couldthe increasing isolationfrom proliferating com-

munications devices result from the evolu-tion of transportation?

ransportation once meant traveling about,across, or over the world. But modern trans-portation (other than space travel out of thisworld) takes one through the world. rans-portation models encapsulation. One movesthrough the world without encountering theworld. One moves without reference to localconditions. Te first-class Brit Air phonebooth is a capsule within a capsule. One

thinks of the mammalian bodys catchy ployof coating fats to ship them through the wa-ter-based blood of its circulatory system.

First-class air passage becomes a movable ex-periencebut not of the world. Its powerfulcold up there at 36,000 feet. No, its more likeyoure inside your V. You experience not theworld but a generalized passivity of viewing.Flying first class is like watching Lifestyles ofthe Rich and Famous reruns from inside yourV set. Enforced isolation compounded.

10Infinitys Kitchen no.1 pen, gouche, white out, tape, and collage on paper8 x 20/2005/aprilloveday.org


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Ah, youre just in time to see me test my pan-spermia cannon. Stand back! Only seasonedprofessionals dare approach this potent geo-thermal-powered device! As a professionalscreenwriter and lifelong extropian I amuniquely qualified to build and operate andtake the credit for this machine. Back, I say!

First, the apple test. Bang! As you can see, Ihave fulfilled mankinds eons-long dream ofaccelerating apples to escape velocity. Withluck, that apple will land on a foreign planetand take root there. Tis device makes me the

Johnny Appleseed of the cosmos!

Now, the plum. Te cannon is now aimeddirectly at Mars. Te Martian terraformingprocess begins now, with this plum! Bang!

What is it now? It seems my overzealous as-sistant, Behemoth Radix, has loaded thepanspermia cannon with marshmallows.You fool! Marshmallows are not the seed ofinterplanetary life! Except perhaps in the am-monia clouds of certain gas giants... yes, yes.

Behemoth, your progress astounds me. Letthe cosmos be filled with gaseous marshmal-low balloon-creatures! Bang!

What? Who dares disturb my demonstra-tion export of picturesque Earth life to theuniverse? Ah, General, your question please.Yes, I suppose it could be used as a weapon,if the enemy lived on other planets, and ifmore than anything they hated having freshfruit delivered through space to their door. Ifind your obsession with militarizing each ofmy inventions disturbing, to be honest. First

it was my fun bomb, which you thoughtcould be modified to deploy munitions otherthan fun. Ten, your ludicrous plan for mytop-secret stealth glider. Frankly, your naivetastounds me. But keep those checks coming!

Te jet airline traveler is as isolated from theorld as the young married professional mananding in the dairy aisle of the supermarketlking on his cell phone. Tis man is oblivi-us to the real human actions and interac-ons that surround and enmesh him. Every-here around him human beings are making

hoices and considering tastes, opinions,ousehold economies, and aesthetic judg-entsdesires, even. All around him human

eings are approving and admiring or criticiz-g choices by a stunning range of subtle cri-ria. Here the mans spouse, and their young

hild in the grocery cart, are also resenting hishoice of isolation and the fathers are ourost distant relatives syndrome.

xistentialist philosophers posited this isola-on-cum-alienation in the 1960s as the hu-an condition itself, a view resoundingly

ooh-poohed later. Are we seeing it re-emergea technological lifestyle choice?

Te child in the grocery cart may as well beexperiencing his father as though the childwere watching televised NASA officials inHouston commenting on video images of thefather floating about the space capsule.

In such a real-world context as the grocerystore, however, only the mans spouses anxietycan be described as free-floating. Te gravityof the situation lies with the contrast betweenthe man choosing this isolating self-encapsu-lation and, as a result, his spouse experiencingfree-floating anxiety.

On the other hand, should the man be or-dering Chinese carry-out for the familys din-ner, the above is as speculative as a fortunecookie.

YOU WILL FIND LOVE WIH YOURCELL PHONE.

121 Infinitys Kitchen no.1

PanspermiaLeonard Richardson


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This Kitchen Needs More Cooks

We are accepting submissions for Infinitys Kitchen no. 2.Were looking for all kinds of writing; the more experimental, the

better. Here are some invitations. Is your life or your wit interestingenough to warrant a semi-regular column? If youre a bibliophile an

audiophile or a screenhead, perhaps you should write reviews. Maybeyou would like to have your own work reviewed? Recipes are fun,

but even more fun are recipes for things that arent food. Te quizzesin some magazine are a guilty pleasure. Got a hard-hitting cover

story message? Lets hear it. Find someone interesting and grill themwith banter, repartee, etc. We like visual stuff too, like photography,

paintings, collage or even cartoons.

Please send examples or submissions of the kind of writing youd liketo publish in Infinitys Kitchen. [email protected]

is the e-mail address. If your work is published, youll be paid in theform of contributors copies, and of course the rights to your work

would remain your own.

Infinitys Kitchen no.1

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