Infinity’s Kitchen

Infinity’s Kitchen no. 3

Saturday July 11, 2009

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Now, the third issue of infinity’s kitchen has been printed and you’re in for a treat.

We’ve included a paper boat inside the printed publication. Assuming that all the folds are in all the right places, you should actually be able to float this boat, at the park or in your bathtub, and I hope you will. I hope you’ll first take the opportunity to unfold the boat and read Hao Cheng’s delightful story, “Paper Boats”. I also hope you’ll try to fold the boat yourself, because it’s fun!

The story “Saved” presented an interesting creative problem to the editor and designers of this issue. For a publication that is online and in print, in an issue about objects, it seemed to fit perfectly. It is a hypertext, in that it is a nonlinear composition, but it is also a collection of objects: a receipt, a printed chat log, and a newspaper clipping. We tried to present the story in that light.

“In Absentia” is intended to look like one of those old publications that you may have held in your hand at one time, the one that is a guide to the programs on TV. Anymore, those guides have been redesigned or replaced by digital listings, but this was a story about memory and about “channel-surfing” through the memories. The story has been illustrated with the typographical conventions of those channel listings, to highlight that aspect of the story.

The objects in mind here aren’t always of the paper variety. The concrete poem, “A Few Weeks of Light Principle” is one of many excellent concrete poems that have been submitted to Infinity’s Kitchen since the previous issue, which was devoted to the form. In this poem, the text is “frustrated” as one would be when trying to make sense of the instructions that often accompany the furniture that comes from the store inside a box. You have to assemble it yourself. The directions don’t always make perfect sense, in any language. The mind wanders.

You are invited to encounter these objects in any order you like and to make of them what you will.

Essential Moments: Herstories and Loss

Tags: essay Sunday November 15, 2009

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By Rebbecca Brown

To make the language express what it does not ordinarily express: to make use of it in a new, exceptional, and unaccustomed fashion; to reveal its possibilities for producing physical shock; to divide and distribute it actively in space; to deal with intonations in an absolutely concrete manner, restoring their power to shatter as well as really to manifest something; to turn against language and its basely utilitarian sources, against its trapped beast origins; and finally to consider language as the form of Incantation.

Antonin Artaud The Theater and Its Double

Shattering of discourse reveals that linguistic changes constitute changes in the status of the subject – his relation to the body, to others, and to objects; it also reveals that normalized language is just one of the ways of articulating the signifying process that encompasses the body, the material referent, and language itself.

Julia Kristeva Revolution in Poetic Language

To tell it all in a sentence is not what I wish to do I wish to tell it all in a sentence what they may make it do.

Gertrude Stein How to Write

Moving Foreword

The following pages are an exploration in language and loss, which I believe rely intimately on one another. If words are understood in relation to their negative differential relations, this concept denotes presence based on absence. The presence of this story is also based on absence. It uses language to explore a space of loss, a negative space, and attempts to use positive terms in order to define these fissures. It also explores the futility of language as definitive and determined.

One Hour of Television

Monday November 9, 2009

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One Hour of Television is a bleeding, screaming, literary freak-beast adventure novel created by new Canadian voice-sensation Kristina Born. Told in poetic-micro-burst segments, Born transcribes a filthy world of wicked science, consumerism, bomb building, and Texas hold em. From a boiled pot of Gary Lutz, Andy Kaufman, and pure human fear, One Hour of Television is a story of mad consumption that will, through its paper, consume you.

In a recent interview with The Faster Times, Kristina Born the author has some interesting things to say about how the book was created, and what sort of style it is written in.

I wrote the majority of OHT during the summer after my second year of university. I came home and worked a 10-hour graveyard shift at a local gas station. I was alone from 8pm-6am and since no one came in after about 11 or so, I had very little actual work to do. I wanted to give myself a writing project for the summer, so I decided that I would write a small story based on every element in the periodic table. I looked up each element on Wikipedia and took down a few facts that jumped at me, and wrote them in no particular order. After 11 at the gas station, the rule was that I had to write three sections, and then I was allowed to read Infinite Jest until around 3, when I mopped and started making coffee for the truckers. After about three weeks, some themes started to emerge and I realized it was a book.

To me, it’s a novel. I really hate the terms “novella” and “novelette” because they don’t mean anything. It’s a short novel, that’s all. I’m not a poet and I would never describe my writing as prose poetry – which also doesn’t mean anything – and if I read something like Anne Carson’s DECREATION, which is a lot of different things, it seems pointless to me to try to classify it as plays or essays or poetry. It’s a book and it’s good.