Paperback Jukebox

His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem

And then there is the discovery of a message in the form of a hyper-powerful stream of neutrino radiation seemingly sent by a long gone intelligence, galaxies and galaxies removed from earth.  And then there is the attempt by the multitude of the planet’s best scientists to decode said message, and comprehend it. 

The memoir of Peter E. Hogarth, a renowned mathematician and prominent figure on the team charged with the decryption and study of the message, His Master’s Voice (HMV) is Hogarth’s attempt to set some part of the record straight concerning the His Master’s Voice project. 

Producing far more written material in and around it than the Manhattan project ever did, HMV and, in Hogarth’s eyes, the few accomplished works concerning it, remains utterly lost amidst conjecture, opinion, faith, politics, and the tales told by the many chroniclers—but few experts— of the great successes that came from the discovery and subsequent research. 

For this discovery so far baffles those involved, that even the progress made does little in Hogarth’s eyes to mask the fact that humanity’s best efforts to unravel the message are futile.  Of course, there was a shot at a terrific new weapon at one point, which terrified Hogarth and the other scientists involved in the discovery, and really only increased the presence of various government entities and operatives.  And new fields of scientific inquiry are born out of this project, despite the secrecy, quarrels, and the infighting amongst the scientists. 

So this is a story about our earthly confines: our protocols and structures, our agencies, and sciences, languages, and resources, and the way the aforementioned allows for and simultaneously hinders, humanity’s first, and perhaps only, chance at deciphering a “letter from the stars.” 

But our poor best efforts are only ever a ragged beginning.  I think of Joyce’s description of eternity in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man: all the grains of sand that ever were, piled into a mountain a million miles long, wide, high, and then that bird……

and imagine that at the end of every million years a little bird came to that mountain and carried away in its beak a tiny grain of that sand. How many millions upon millions of centuries would pass before that bird had carried away even a square foot of that mountain…..

And the bird disassembles the mountain at one grain every million years until the mountain disappears, and the mountain rises again and falls and rises again:

….as many times as there are stars in the sky, atoms in the air, drops of water in the sea, leaves on the trees, feathers upon birds, scales upon fish, hairs upon animals, at the end of all those innumerable risings and sinkings of that immeasurably vast mountain not one single instant of eternity could be said to have ended….

And still, even Joyce’s eloquence, or the math that Hogarth would allude to during the project, lives only in the strange space between what we can comprehend and what we can express.  And by the end of HMV, a handful of scientists posit two convincing hypotheses that not only claim that the message is a natural phenomenon, but that it essentially ties together the beginning and end of our universe and every universe thereafter. 

So in HMV, dumb luck allows us to stumble on that which ties a universe worth of time and space together with the ones before and the ones to come.  Or still, as Hogarth thinks, the message was sent by someone well beyond our understanding, if only because we were not able to twist its components into some sort of weapon.  That this “letter” resisted such an earthly initiative is, to him, the final proof of that.  How else but with what we know already would we even attempt to understand such a universe, or an eternity of them?  Regardless of origin, it’s as if we’ve reached our limits before we’ve even begun, and we don’t know. 

And we don’t know. 

 

Dave Carillo is working to complete his MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh.  He lives with his wife and his dog in an apartment near you.

The Marx Bros. Scrapbook by Groucho Marx and Richard J. Anobile

            Several months ago, while reading an issue of Schizo by the ever-amusing, often-offensive Ivan Brunetti, I read a page called “Great Moments in the History of Western Civilization.”  The page relates an anecdote about Harpo Marx, and, in one panel, Brunetti explains that the source of this anecdote is The Marx Bros. Scrapbook (Crown, 1973), which Brunetti calls “a true literary masterpiece.”
            A week or so after reading the Brunetti comic, I happened upon the Scrapbook in Indiana, Pennsylvania, while packing up a collection for the used bookstore I’m employed by.  The book was among a few volumes on film in a colossal library of music-books put together by an old Indiana University music professor.  Upon finding the Scrapbook, I immediately set it aside to “borrow” from my boss.
            I only recently became a big Marx Brothers fan—unlike a friend of mine who claims to have walked through the halls of his high school like Groucho half of his high school career in homage to his great hero.  I remember my father forcing us kids to watch Marx Brothers movies when we were young, and I even remember thinking then that Harpo was the best and that Grouch reminded me of my grandfather.  Only as an adult, though, have I been able to appreciate the utter greatness of films like Animal Crackers and Duck Soup.
            And Brunetti was not overstating the greatness of the Scrapbook.  The volume contains many photographs, newspaper clippings, and such, but the most important and most entertaining part of the book are the many interviews Richard Anobile conducts with Groucho.  At the age of 83, Groucho comes off as witty, sarcastic, and wry as ever—in fact, while reading these interviews, it feels as if Groucho’s great wit has advanced with age.  Though maybe it’s just all the cursing.  With as pleasingly filthy as Groucho’s mouth and mind come across in the Scrapbook, it’s abundantly clear this is not something that came with age, it was simply something Groucho toned down for the screen.
            How dirty can Groucho get?  Pretty dirty!  Already you get a taste of what’s to come, when, in the Introduction, Groucho proposes to Anobile that the book be called Why a Fuck (an allusion to a scene in Groucho’s first film).  Other highlights include Groucho calling Hitler a cocksucker, his discrete way of talking about Chico’s very active sex-life (“Chico was no help.  All he did was go out fucking and shooting pool.”), and his discussion about hating Harpo’s harp numbers.  And then there’s the way this interview begins:
                       
                   ANOBILE:  Now where were we?
                   GROUCHO:  I think we were talking about cunt!
                   ANOBILE:  We always seem to get around to that but I think we left off with I’ll Say She Is…

            In the context of Brunetti’s work, it’s clear to me why he loves this book so much (and I love it, too, now—thanks for the tip, Ivan!).  For me, it’s a great book to read a passage from, set down, and come back to after a few days.  It’s not too hard to find where you left off—just look for the last great Groucho line you read.  Though, those are everywhere in here.

 

Scott Silsbe was born in Detroit.  He nows lives in Pittsburgh where he is a writer, bookseller, editor at the New Yinzer, and rocker in the band Workshop.