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WORK TITLE: The Voyager Record
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.anthonymichaelmorena.com/
CITY: Tel Aviv
STATE:
COUNTRY: Israel
NATIONALITY:
http://thenormalschool.com/six-poems-from-the-voyager-record-by-anthony-michael-morena/ * http://www.theestablishment.co/author/anthony-michael-morena/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:Bar-Ilan University, Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing, M.A., 2015.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Essayist, poet, and fiction writer. The Ilanot Review, guest editor; Gigantic Sequins, reviewer.
WRITINGS
Contributor of short stories and poems to publications, including the Normal School, Ninth Letter, Flapperhouse, and Queen Mob’s Tea House.
SIDELIGHTS
Anthony Michael Morena is a writer, essayist, and poet from New York who lives in Tel Aviv, Israel. He has contributed stories and poems to various publications, such as the Normal School, Ninth Letter, Flapperhouse, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. His first book of essays and poems is the 2016 The Voyager Record: A Transmission. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Bar-Ilan University’s Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing. Morena has worked as guest editor for The Ilanot Review and is a regular reviewer for Gigantic Sequins, a Philadelphia-based biannual, black and white literary arts journal.
The Voyager Record is a collection of poems, flash fiction, and essays inspired by the famous gold-plated record sent into space on the Voyager space probes in 1977. Two identical phonographic records were created to accompany the space craft on their infinite journeys, each containing twenty-seven songs, 118 images, and greetings in fifty-five languages. If they are ever found by an alien intelligence, they will provide a glimpse of the diversity of life, achievement, and art on Earth. Astronomer Carl Sagan contributed content to the record. So far, the Voyager craft have traveled the farthest and fastest of any human made object, reaching to the Sun’s heliosphere, the edge of our solar system and entering into interstellar space.
In The Voyager Record, Morena presents an ekphrastic work commenting on various elements and contents of the record. Morena offers insight into the naked line drawings of a man and woman on the record, which has garnered controversy with some calling it pornography. Since only the man, and not the woman, has his arm raised, either in a gesture of welcome or to show human physiology, some say that woman looks subservient to the man. Discussing his use of an encyclopedia-type narrative, Morena said in an interview with Kelly Lydick online at Guernica, “I wanted to offer that level of factual engagement in the pieces but also comment critically on the record and still sing along with the songs as they played.”
Morena also comments on the musical choices on the record, comparing Bach and Chuck Berry. Calling the record Earth’s mixtape, he laments on what is not on the recording, such as hip hop, the Rolling Stones, fat people, and gay people, and offers suggestions for what he would have included in the record’s “Sounds of Earth” section, such as a mouse click and the dook noise of Facebook alerts. Digital librarian Nabil Kashyap commented on the Full Stop Web site that Morena presents “the jokey, unadorned prose and scattershot inclusiveness of which suggests something found, an artifact of a procedure more than an intentional whole.”
Taking themes from the record such as alienness, Morena offers his opinions of being a non-Jew from New York living in Israel, and he fantasizes about the Voyagers’ long journey through space, what they will encounter, what types of aliens will find them, and what the aliens will do with the messages from Earth. Saying that “Morena adopts a wry and conversational tone,” Ann Beman in Los Angeles Review Online noted that he “invites us to glimpse his own alien existence, and blows our minds with interstellar metaphor, the vastness of space, and the question of our significance in the universe.”
Morena also asserts that 1970s morals inhibited an accurate portrayal of Earth, it’s various cultures and people. “Morena has created a compelling read that is at once humorous and poignant, that empathizes with the creators of the Voyager Record and looks back at them with 20/20 vision,” according to a reviewer online at Small Press Book Review. “Morena’s transmission is a celebration of human achievement full of history, pop culture, jokes, and an intangible soulfulness,” declared a writer in Publishers Weekly.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly April 18, 2016, review of The Voyager Record: A Transmission, p. 94.
ONLINE
Full Stop, http://www.full-stop.net (March 9, 2017), review of The Voyager Record.
Guernica, https://www.guernicamag.com/ (March 1, 2017), Kelly Lydick, “Kelly Lydick speaks with Anthony Michael Morena about hybrid writing and the Voyager space mission as art.”
Los Angeles Review Online, http://losangelesreview.org, (March 9, 2017), Ann Beman, review of The Voyager Record.
Normal School, http://thenormalschool.com/ (March 1, 2017), author profile.
Small Press Book Review, http://thesmallpressbookreview.blogspot.com (March 9, 2017), review of The Voyager Record.*
Six Poems from the Voyager Record by Anthony Michael Morena
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The Golden Record is what Carl Sagan and his collaborators called the collection of sounds, greetings, images and music that they sent into space mounted on the Voyager spacecrafts in August and September of 1977. The record itself is made out of gold-plated copper and is covered by an aluminum seal electroplated with uranium-238. The seal has coded visual information that tells how to play the record and where to find the planet Earth. Its contents were assembled over the course of six short weeks. The bulk of the record is made up of music and pictures—118 images, an audio collage of Earth-sounds, and 27 musical tracks—but it opens up with words. The record contains audio greetings in 55 different languages, the living and the dead, all of which roughly translate to “hello, out there, from here.” There are also 15 a bit more substantial messages recorded by delegates from the UN Outer Space Committee, a spoken message from the Secretary-General of the UN, a typed list of U.S. House and Senate members, a letter from the President of the United States and one recorded whalesong.
¤ ¤ ¤
Before the Golden Record there was the Pioneer plaque, attached to Pioneer 10 & 11 and sent into space about five years before Voyager. The message from Earth contained on the plaque is a simple line illustration of a naked man and a naked woman standing next to each other.
The two figures take up about a third of the plaque’s 6 x 9 inches. The man is holding up his hand as if he’s waving “hello.” But he isn’t waving his hand to say “hello.” The plaque’s designers—Carl Sagan, his wife Linda Salzman, and astronomer Frank Drake—assumed that any aliens who find the plaque won’t know that this gesture means “hello.” The man was drawn holding up his hand to display his opposable thumb and the flexibility of his limbs. This was done so the aliens will understand that we have parts that move. The aliens won’t see the image and assume that we are as rigid in being as we are in representation, hard lines on metal travelling through space. The man and the woman are not holding hands so the aliens won’t assume that we are a conjoined, duplex being. The only hair on their bodies is on their eyebrows and heads. The woman kind of sways on her hips, chillin. In the original sketch she had a vulva, but NASA had it erased.
¤ ¤ ¤
The public reacted badly.
NASA was sending porn into space. On TV and in newspapers, the genitals and the breasts were airbrushed out of the picture. The woman looked subservient to the man. How come she wasn’t waving her hand? She and the man next to her were obviously white. Or they were not. Because of this controversy, the Voyager record does not contain a photograph of naked man and a naked woman among its 118 images.
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The first part of the “Sounds of Earth” audio collage is an acoustic rendering of the solar system planets as they rotate the sun. It is called “The Music of the Spheres.” It is the literal realization of the ancient concept of the musica universalis, as transcribed by Kepler. Laurie Spiegel performed the song electronically. Not many people include it as part of the musical selection on board Voyager. It’s the closest thing the Voyager record has to a bonus track.
¤ ¤ ¤
The Voyager record still exists. Out there, now almost at the limits of the sun’s influence, past the dwarf planets named after esoteric gods. Sedna, Haumea. Carl Sagan thought that the record might last a billion years. But then it was always a billion with Carl Sagan. We could still put our hands on it. If we wanted, we could get it back. Or we could let it go, forever, more or less.
¤ ¤ ¤
The aliens who discover the Voyager record are always on fire. They have bodies, somewhere beneath all those flames. You can tell because of the smell. And because sometimes pieces fall off. This is how they reproduce. When they reach out to retrieve the record from Voyager, it melts.
Anthony Michael Morena is the author of THE VOYAGER RECORD (forthcoming 2016 from Rose Metal Press), an ekphrastic look at the music, images and text launched with the Voyager space probes in 1977. He is an expat getting an MA in fiction, who also does poetry. Originally from New York, he currently lives in Tel Aviv along with his wife and son. He also reads fiction for GIGANTIC SEQUINS, a Philadelphia-based black and white literary arts journal.
Anthony Michael Morena is a writer from New York who lives in Tel Aviv. In 2015 he received his MA in creative writing from Bar-Ilan University. His poetry and prose have appeared or will soon in The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Flapperhouse, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. He has also been a guest editor for The Ilanot Review and a regular reader for Gigantic Sequins, a good-looking, biannual, black & white literary arts journal. The Voyager Record: A Transmission (Rose Metal Press 2016) is his first book.
Anthony Michael Morena: The Art and Artifacts of Space
Kelly Lydick speaks with Anthony Michael Morena about hybrid writing and the Voyager space mission as art.
By Kelly Lydick
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Image courtesy of Rose Metal Press.
Humans have always been attracted to the idea of life “out there.” It boggles children, fascinates adolescents, and mesmerizes adults. But what do we really expect to find “out there”? Little green men? Tall lanky human-animal hybrids? Telepathic light beings that can travel without vehicles but instead by thought? Speculation fuels the unknown but serves to assuage what humans desperately want to believe: we are not alone.
In 1977, two identical spacecraft launched from Cape Canaveral, each carrying the same gold-plated record containing messages from Earth: twenty-seven songs, 115 images and greetings in fifty-five languages. Carl Sagan and his team had assembled a message to the beings in the universe, a compendium of items portraying the people of Earth.
When I came upon Anthony Michael Morena’s The Voyager Record: A Transmission, I experienced fascination—and then a bit of existential relief. The strange and interesting Golden Record as the subject of its contents, Morena’s series of poetry and prose passages are woven together in a hybrid form to speculate upon the meaning and significance of this cultural artifact and its launch into space.
In conversation with Anthony about his new hybrid work, The Voyager Record, we discussed the cultural, historical, and political implications of timeless art and artifact. I found that Morena’s reflection and response to the late-1970s Cold War event lead by Sagan’s team is a reminder that artifacts don’t have to be launched into space to have far-reaching intimations.
—Kelly Lydick for Guernica
Guernica: The Voyager Record, in its hybrid form, points out the irony of timelessness inherent in creating a permanent cultural artifact. Why the choice to create a hybrid work that blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction, particularly with the subject of The Voyager’s records?
Anthony Michael Morena: The record is a hybrid thing too, but that connection came after the fact. The Voyager Record’s style wasn’t preplanned; it really developed organically. Around the time I was writing the first pieces that became the book I stopped at Wikipedia, of course. People can spend hours reading article after article on Wikipedia. It’s exactly what infotainment means. It’s thrilling, it’s a type of narrative, the encyclopedia entry. I wanted to offer that level of factual engagement in the pieces but also comment critically on the record and still sing along with the songs as they played. And that was how I balanced the material. It was possible to be informational and educate people, and that carried a lot of weight that supported the places where I wanted to subvert the facts, or invent outcomes for the record, or fantasize Carl Sagan’s life, or inject my own. It felt like its own genre, and one that could be contra-factual and still true. Here is an account of an event—in this case the creation of a record launched into space to represent humanity—and the text is busy presenting how different alien species will respectively misunderstand it. Even the fictional parts are trying to explain something.
Guernica: How does The Voyager Record serve to recontextualize how we view “history” and the delineation between what we call “history” and what we call “storytelling”?
Anthony Michael Morena: The record isn’t a historical narrative, so it doesn’t have a plot. It’s a collection of data and artifacts, and the book kind of emulates that. Not too long ago somebody asked me what kind of value the Voyager record has since it’s an object of its time. I don’t think that this person had ever looked into what’s on the record. If they had, they might know the contents are somewhat timeless. Yes, there are pictures of westerners wearing mass-produced late 1970s fashion, but there are also people from indigenous societies who aren’t wearing mass produced clothes. Nobody’s using a smart phone but there also aren’t any pictures of cannons firing from tall ships either. Styling choices really don’t matter much when you’re trying to give an alien intelligence and idea of human life and the Earth’s environment. I think that person had the idea that the contents were dated because the record is a record. Most people think records are very dated technology. They’re also a very effective way to preserve data in space for an unimaginably long period of time—longer than the Earth is expected to exist. It’s a lot more effective than say, flash memory, which is what we think of as a very up-to-date technology. A message on flash memory would start to degrade within the first hundred years, so you can see how that would fail even on the level of Voyager being a time capsule. If another message were created today, a record would still be the best way to keep it intact. The format has limited storage, but that’s the constraint that makes the project a challenge for curators. What do you pick? And what story are those choices going tell? And people still buy vinyl. Vinyl sales are up.
Guernica: Do you believe that history is outdated the moment it becomes documented?
Anthony Michael Morena: That’s not an easy question to answer because so much of what happens never makes it to the level of documentation. Technology is changing a lot of that. Our behavior, as it becomes more intertwined with tech becomes more documentable. Obviously, this can be as problematic as it is useful. There is so much still that can escape ever being recorded, and there is a lot that people want to keep hidden. It makes me think of Kurt Waldheim on Voyager. He was the Secretary-General of the UN whose speech opens up the Golden Record. What no one knew at the time of the recording was that he had kept his extended service as a Nazi officer and his possible knowledge of war crimes out of the history books. He lied about it. Srikanth Reddy wrote an interesting poem about this called Voyager, one part of which is an erasure of Waldheim’s memoir, pulling this story out of the absence of the truth that Waldhiem was presenting to the world, and now to space.
Guernica: You mention that the message from Jimmy Carter on the Golden Record is intended to speak for all Americans. Despite that only a few people hand-selected its contents, how does The Voyager Record serve as an instigator to question what is deemed culturally important, and who has the authority to choose what cultural artifacts will or won’t be documented into a larger canon?
Anthony Michael Morena: As Americans, we’re allowed to take a certain amount of ownership over the record and Voyager: It was funded by tax-payer dollars. It was a product of the space race, a front in the Cold War, and on that level it’s propaganda. It’s an everlasting victory over the Soviet space program. Just because the record tries to represent humanity doesn’t mean it succeeds. The project team was predominantly American and exclusively white. I think for all of that they did everything they could to make the contents of the record as inclusive as the decision-makers at NASA allowed them to be. Of course they failed. The music is a good example of the imbalance. Out of the twenty-seven songs, there are three Bach tracks, one by Mozart, and two by Beethoven. A lot of the non-European recordings are only heard in snippets, and their performers aren’t named. The good thing is that no one has to agree that this record represents them. But at least it was an attempt. The results could have been so much worse. New Horizons launched in 2006—the spacecraft that just passed Pluto is also going to journey beyond the solar system—and it doesn’t carry any message on behalf of the world. I think there is an American flag pin on board, that’s about it. Corporate space companies could start to launch interstellar probes someday, we have that to look forward to. I live in Israel now, where the state-backed historical and cultural narratives are at odds with the Palestinian ones: geographical features and regions are renamed in Hebrew, archeological finds are politicized, whole neighborhoods can suddenly be bulldozed. The end goal is erasure: Things have always been like this, there is no memory of it being any other way. It’s a bad situation, and it’s dangerous. Jimmy Carter knows all about it. I wouldn’t want to see that record.
Guernica: The notion of life on other planets is a persistent fascination of contemporary culture. How do you see that The Golden Record represents another attempt by humans to seek meaning within the larger context of the universe?
Anthony Michael Morena: Imagine that there is no other life in the universe. It’s possible. Eventually the entire planet will disappear—the sun will grow so big the Earth will be swallowed up—and us with it, too, if we haven’t gone already. The record and Voyagers will be the only evidence of who we were. Evidence is the wrong word: the record can’t be evidence if there isn’t anyone out there using it to prove our existence. Tree falling in forest stuff: without observation the phenomena doesn’t even exist. That is what having no context would be like.
Humans have always supplied ourselves with beings to ensure our own context in the universe, whether those beings were there or not. Gods, angels, spirit ancestors. Aliens as we usually think of them are a fairly recent addition to folk mythology. There’s a certain baseline for them in the popular imagination, but I’m not sure the fascination is expressed the same way all over the world. I think on the record you see that difference when cultures take different tacks when it comes to what to say to the aliens. To some extent the greetings were really individual efforts, but they do reflect some cultural identity as well. Some people address the aliens as they would elders, with reverence and respect. Others are standoffish. Some scientists think that contacting alien life forms is a bad idea, and tried to dissuade Sagan from even making a record. Stephen Hawking has said something like this. That in contacting an advanced alien society we would be inviting the same kind of exploitation and violence that colonialism wreaked on Pre-Columbian cultures in America.
Guernica: The Voyager Records, far as we know, have yet to be found by any beings. If it were found today, what would you hope that the recipients would conclude about the human race based on its contents?
Anthony Michael Morena: Unless aliens have taken some Riker-in-full-alien-facial-feature-prosthetics, keep-the-Enterprise-behind-the-moon sort of low-key observations we can be certain the records haven’t been found. NASA is still in contact with the Voyagers, telling them what to do. If any creature were already close enough to find the probes, they would be close enough to see us, too. Which means they could compare the two, do the side-by-side comparison: Earth on the record, and the Earth as it is. I hope they don’t judge us too harshly. I hope they at least keep the record in mind when they do.
ANTHONY MICHAEL MORENA
ohmeANTHONY MICHAEL MORENA is a writer from New York who lives in Tel Aviv. His book The Voyager Record, about the music, images and sounds on board the two Voyager interstellar spacecrafts, will come out in 2016 from Rose Metal Press. He also reads fiction for Gigantic Sequins, a black & white literary arts journal. He wants everything to be alright.
Anthony Michael Morena
alessandro-lupi, red figure, blue bulb
Alessandro Lupi
from The Voyager Record
She asked me what I was listening to. I told her about Voyager, and the interstellar record and the attempt to sum up all of humanity in one record. The next song started, ethereal and spare, “Flowing Streams,” 流水.
“Why would they send the type of music aliens would like instead of sending real music?”
“That’s not alien music,” I explained. “That’s Chinese.”
alessandro-lupi, red figure in chest
I like the indifferent greetings the most, the hesitant ones. The Rajasthani greeting says: “We are happy here and you be happy there.” The Arabic greeting is less indifferent, but still wary. It says: “Greetings to our friends in the stars. May time bring us together.” Which doesn’t tell the aliens not to come, but maybe not to come over just yet.
alessandro-lupi, figure mounting stairs
The aliens who discover the Voyager record are confused by the 55 greetings. They have difficulty with linguistics. Is each word a separate meaning? What does one word have to do with the next? Does each word represent the sounds of a different language? Does each phoneme? Where does one word end and the next word begin? Is this one language with many facets to it, expressing with sound a mood, a face to each feeling, a so-many chambered heart—like the aliens’ heart, which has fourteen? Why, 55 times, do these people say the same thing over and over? Did they think that we would not get the point?
alessandro-lupi, figure mounting stairs, different angle
The aliens who find the record have no ears, no auditory system of any kind. They communicate through a series of signs that they tap on each other’s chests. One tap for yes, two taps for no. They have no audio technology because they never needed to listen to anything before. The data on the Golden Record that they can understand—the images—is all that makes sense next to the rest of this gibberish. But they want to understand, so they build two massive speakers, lay their curling heads between the boxes, and let the woofers rattle their brains.
alessandro-lupi, figure in chair
As I listen to the Bulgarian folk song “Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin,” I picture your destruction by a thousand micro-impacts spread out over time in the empty regions of space, in the Oort cloud, which I imagine as dust, or space filled with dust, hard rock bits and ice. Battered, Voyager rolls away from each hit, as this song plays accompanying soundtrack. The receiver dish shatters without noise, Voyager lists and is cold. This was not a suicide mission, but no extra steps were made to protect you other than to put a cover on you. They did not bury you in a black box deep within the craft. Does it make you a more valid artistic work that you were never viable? If you are ever found, what will be left will not be you but something unintentional. Each impact makes another tiny perforation in you, punctuating song. You become a remix: not many songs, but one. “Izlel je Delyo Hajdutin” is about a rebel Bulgarian who fought the Ottoman Turks. They said he couldn’t be killed by ordinary means, but only by a silver bullet. You are made of gold plated-copper. The song has bagpipes too, playing just like a fucking cop died.
alessandro-lupi, the whole room
The essential difference between a robotic mission like Voyager and a manned mission is the difference between a linear narrative and a cyclical one. We want people to come back to the circling world, like a record, so we can start again. From scratch. A cycle’s humanity is its finality: it has to end somewhere, it has to begin again. Voyager, on the other hand, may never stop.
Anthony Michael Morena author photoAnthony Michael Morena is a writer from New York who moved to Tel Aviv, where he lives with his wife and son. The Voyager Record, forthcoming from Rose Metal Press in 2016, is his first book. He reads fiction for Gigantic Sequins, tweets semi-regularly at @anphimimor, and is currently at work on an MA in creative writing.
The Voyager Record: A Transmission
Publishers Weekly. 263.16 (Apr. 18, 2016): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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The Voyager Record: A Transmission
Anthony Michael Morena. Rose Metal (SPD, dist), $14.95 trade paper (168p) ISBN 978-1-941628-04-1
In his funny and conversational debut collection, Morena creates an ekphrastic ode on the subject of the "Golden Record": an audiovisual time capsule intended to represent life on Earth to a potential alien audience, launched in 1977 on the Voyager space probes. Morena describes the contents, including a plaque depicting a man and a woman--sans genitals after public outcry--and science writer Ann Druyan's brainwaves, recorded while she was thinking of her future husband, science educator Carl Sagan. Of the musical inclusions, Morena astutely wonders about lack of context--will Bach seem more modern than Chuck Berry?--before offering his own suggestions: Grandmaster Flash, Norwegian black metal, the Mos Eisley Cantina band. There is a running commentary of Morena's "alien-like position of living in Israel and not being Jewish or Arab," and plaintive fantasies about Voyager returning for him: "I want to go with you, and I never want to come back." He imagines Voyager's possible discoverers in numerous iterations: flaming aliens; earless aliens; a civilization that so reveres Voyager's contents that they refashion their entire society, creating their own Voyager and launching it at Earth, where "We are confused when it returns to us, apparently untouched." Like its subject, Morena's transmission is a celebration of human achievement full of history, pop culture, jokes, and an intangible soulfulness--enchanting and educational at once. (May)
BOOK REVIEW: THE VOYAGER RECORD BY ANTHONY MICHAEL MORENA
Voyager_cover200
The Voyager Record: A Transmission
Lyric Essay by Anthony Michael Morena
Rose Metal Press, May 2016
ISBN-13: 978-1941628041
$14.95; 168 pp.
Reviewed by Ann Beman
In The Voyager Record: A Transmission, Anthony Michael Morena adopts a wry and conversational tone while obsessing over the gold-plated phonograph record launched into space with Voyagers 1 and 2 in 1977. The Golden Record is essentially a ‘70s mixtape of words, pictures, and music selected for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan. It features a selection of 118 images, a collage of Earth sounds, 27 musical tracks, greetings in 55 languages, and directions to our humble planet.
In his musing, Morena considers what this recording contains, as well as what it doesn’t: “There are three Bach tracks on the Golden Record. Three Bach tracks.” But no hip hop, no Rolling Stones, no photos of fat people, no gay couples, and no Grandmaster Flash. He considers updates to the “Sounds of Earth” audio collage, including mouse clicks, keyboard typing, and the dook noise that alerts you to a Facebook message. Also:
The strange recording of an underwater sound known only as Bloop, which was so loud that not even a blue whale, the largest creature to ever live on the planet, could have created it. Some insinuated that Bloop was made by a massive, Lovecraftian monster. The truth is actually much worse: Bloop is the sound of sea icequakes, as the planet begins to melt.
Running through the book on interspersed pages are imagined ironies in which various alien groups receive the Golden Record — species who are always on fire, or who have no ears, or who are smaller than the record’s grooves.
Morena takes inspiration from works such as David Shields’s Reality Hunger, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and David Markson’s work, weaving The Voyager Record out of varied threads. Using a bricolage of historical fact, imagination, and personal reflection, he considers the interstellar recording through the prism of many forms, including a joke, a micro-fiction, a flash story, and an accentual poem. Many of the book’s pages contain a single paragraph, a lone sentence (“The alien-like position of living in Israel and not being Jewish or Arab.”), or one word (“Fela!”), each floating in a white space that invites us to pay attention to context — the context of a word, a sentence, the author, ourselves, humanity, the planet, and so on outward.
In short, with this debut lyric essay collection, Anthony Michael Morena indulges in an obsession, invites us to glimpse his own alien existence, and blows our minds with interstellar metaphor, the vastness of space, and the question of our significance in the universe. That’s a lot to do in 168 pages. The accomplishment is even more impressive considering the amount of white space devoted to each page. Like the Golden Record itself, Morena’s words are provocative curations transmitted through space.
October 27, 2016
The Voyager Record – Anthony Michael Morena
by Nabil Kashyap
Voyager_cover200[Rose Metal Press; 2016]
“What is it?” asks the book, over and over. “What?” Anthony Michael Morena’s The Voyager Record considers and reconsiders the Golden Record, a dreamy, hopelessly insufficient packet of information encapsulating the state of the world circa 1977, copies of which launched aboard Voyager I and Voyager II, two objects that are now very far away, farther away, in fact, than any made thing except maybe radiation. “It feels very much more like an album produced by the world,” Morena writes, describing the Record but also setting the record straight for the work in the reader’s hand, the jokey, unadorned prose and scattershot inclusiveness of which suggests something found, an artifact of a procedure more than an intentional whole.
The book proceeds in a parade of bursts that try on and discard tactics, from exposition to memoir to speculative fiction. The main strategy is one that to me (true, a librarian) looks deeply familiar. In these moments, the book documents an act of deep cataloging and descriptive bibliography. We encounter Morena as narrator sleuthing out errata and conflicting indexes and digging up the dirt on world music or nature sound selections, operations you see in rare book circles or material text Meetups and less in lyric essays. The conversation orbits around provenance (Sagan, NASA), distribution (solar system), political/personal circumstance (Jimmy Carter/Tel Aviv), material limitation (U-238) and time constraints (six weeks is not long). Add juicy apocrypha (Sagan, again), subsequent citation and reference (Star Trek, West Wing), and of course versioning, what is canonical and what is derivative (Uranium-plated LP or over-sized coffee table edition or 90s CD-ROM reprise or as yet unrealized ideal remix playlist).
Another reason I’m reminded of hardcore bibliophiles is they tend to love things in the world that do. There is a focus on objects that are not merely record and artifact of humans doing what humans do (author thinking, bureaucracy plodding) but also objects that coordinate and mediate and intervene in the midst of battling concerns. Consider the tiny way, for example, that the production of the Golden Record coordinated dozens of governing bodies. Consider the Record itself, an ever-twirling-in-the-dark promise to enact interspecies communication at some unspecified far off time and far off place.
Plus bibliophiles simply love things. An eros embodied by the commodity that achieves escape velocity and breaks orbit, of the market but not in it, the particular object obtains new stature if for no other reason than this collector especially cares for it. Morena cares, cares about caring, which may be the chief take home message.
These are the ways in which The Voyager Record operates. Not unfamiliar, generic bibliographic (or bibliophilic) strategies deployed jauntily and with understated reverence and in the service of a thing that, whatever it is, cannot be said to perform a genre, are what bring pleasure to reading Morena’s project. Granted, a treatment of a recently unboxed 18th century proto-novel will likely make fewer references to Carl Sagan’s love life, Grandmaster Flash and/or Israeli Occupation and yet, the resemblance.
But what is it? There is something strange following this line of reasoning. Circulation, reception, materiality, that kind of thing, they describe the object and its branching implications as it moves through this world. Can it still be bibliography past the exosphere? Can an object constructed ever not be earthbound? Not that these questions are exactly the questions to be asking Morena, but there are related ones. The impulse that makes a multi-threaded, loosely constructed bibliographic heap kind of compelling even as it threatens dissolution, does that impulse still hold up at the interstellar border, or four years past that, which both Voyager I and the Golden Record are by now?
I can’t shake this one image, of a floater, a solo spacesuit against the black and glinting in the gold of the visor, the reflection of a single word. Three letters. One main tack of the lyric essay generally and The Voyager Record in particular is the logic of accumulation – and plus and plus and – a procedure that can be incredibly satisfying. It is a workhorse conjunction performing honestly, skirting imposition by avoiding relation which is the province of preposition, best case doing violence neither to the object of attention nor the reader. Plus, if you need it to, and can perform a subject’s own obsessiveness, so it’s personal too, puts the reader at ease highlighting the narrator’s chief fault, which is too much. But an accumulation always threatens to stack, that is, threatens to make a tower and towers always point somewhere, reluctant teleology. There’s this trope, when someone wants to express way too much, they make a distance. How much is the US in debt? Crisp dollar bills stacked to the moon and back five and half times. Or so says Herzog’s latest documentary, a day’s worth of internet traffic burned to CD would reach up twice as tall as the distance to Mars.
But whose arthritic fingers would be held responsible for burning so many discs? Who would have to keep the team in line when, realizing memory takes a different form now, the project architects long since dead, the question pipes up: Why CDRs at all? Whose frustration in trying to place yet another disc on the stack as gravity gets weaker and weaker, how the stack refuses to adhere to the linear literalization intended, reverting only to discs afloat, and if unfortunate enough to be imparted some hair of inertia, to keep slow hurtling for as close to forever as we dare name. And even at the top most disc, if we were to get that far, does that count as top anymore? Trying to translate immensity into height just as the concept of height dissolves along with every Earth-centric mode of orientation.
That last disc, escaped from your chubby inflated fingers and floating off towards the Oort cloud, ineffectually chasing the Voyager’s forty year head start, that is what this work is like. A real difference in velocity marked on the one hand by pop culture regime shifts, innovations in memory storage, the finite lifespans of main characters, and on the other, a gentle, persistent if inhuman careening toward oblivion. Can we care, too? Such a pile it piles past the bounds of what such a pile might be measured by, so that it floats off, slow-mo reverse shot, the word and either the only apt, articulate hinge between one imaginable black and another. Or else. Suggestive of all the failure of all the relationships, the chains of cause and effect and comparison that backbone the The Voyager Record, which hopes with every new fragment that our histories might be entwined, never squashing the doubt that they are likely unrelated.
Nabil Kashyap is librarian for Digital Initiatives and Scholarship at Swarthmore College.
Anthony Michael Morena’s The Voyager Record: A Transmission – Review by Editor Ann Beman
VoyagerIn his debut lyric essay collection, Anthony Michael Morena aims an epigrammatic lens at the gold-plated phonograph record launched with the twin Voyager spacecrafts in 1977. The Golden Record contains a ‘70s mixtape of words, pictures, and music –118 images, a collage of Earth sounds, 27 musical tracks, and greetings in 55 languages. Morena takes a similar tack in his ekphrastic consideration, transmitting his own record of the Golden Record by using a bricolage of historical fact, imagination, and personal reflection.
Like the interstellar record’s tracks, Morena’s lyric “tracks” take a variety of forms. There is a joke (“A producer calls up Arnold Schwarzenegger one day and …”), a micro-fiction (“Carl Sagan comes home from a long day at NASA …), a flash story, and an accentual poem. Threads run through the book on interspersed pages. One thread imagines the various alien species who might receive the Golden Record, and it’s likely that none of the speculations ends the way Carl Sagan and the UN Outer Space Committee hoped. Another thread considers the context of a haunting Bulgarian folk song included on the gold-plated recording. “The aliens who find Voyager listen to ‘Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin.’ They look at each other, nodding their bulbous, testicle-shaped heads, and know, yes, this is the sound of a well-fed people.”
Often, the book focuses on what’s not on the record. No photo of a naked man and a naked woman. No hip hop. No gay couples. No Grandmaster Flash. Many of the book’s pages contain only one paragraph, or a single word, with each snippet floating in a white space that invites further rumination. Zooming the lens way, way out, the book asks us to consider humanity’s need to nail down our context in the universe. Zooming in invites us to explore personal context. In some of the fragments, Morena explores his own sense of alienation after moving from Brooklyn to Tel Aviv. As Morena explains in our interview, “it’s not one obsession but a few different things that the record unifies. There’s space, there’s culture, love of music, science fiction, nostalgia, social justice, aesthetics.” In effect, his debut collection elegantly and soulfully reaches to grasp the vastness of space, human experience, and manifestations of our attempts to matter.
Review of Anthony Michael Morena’s THE VOYAGER RECORD: A TRANSMISSION
The Voyager Record: A Transmission
Anthony Michael Morena. Rose Metal Press, $14.95 paperback (168p) ISBN: 9781941628041
You’ve probably heard of the Voyager Record, the golden record (or really records) sent into space in 1977 with messages from Earth to intelligent life that might happen upon it. You might have questioned the choice of sounds and images chosen by Carl Sagan and his team to represent Earth. You most likely haven’t spent as much time thinking about or listening to the record as Anthony Michael Morena. Morena has taken his self-proclaimed obsession with the Voyager Record and created a lyric essay that manages to be a critique and tribute at the same time.
In the book, Morena references his own love of mixtapes and playlists, and what is the Voyager Record but a mixtape? What is a lyric essay but a different kind of mixtape? Morena artfully shuffles between the factual, the analytical, the imaginary, and the personal. The book is peppered with snippets from the record, ruminations on the politics behind them, imagined and tragic scenarios of aliens who come upon the record, playlists that could have been, Morena’s own life as an alien in Israel, and fictionalized vignettes of Sagan’s personal life, all orbiting each other and returning.
The book often focuses on what’s missing from the record: where ethnocentricity, privilege, and 1970s morals got in the way of an accurate portrayal of Earth and its people. Morena’s prose reflects this absence by giving us space. We are often left with one subject per page, and one paragraph, one sentence, sometimes one word per page. This steers us toward judgment by simply making a statement and letting us ponder it as we flip. And many pages later, we find the conclusions we’d come to or the questions we’d asked.
Matched with Rose Metal Press’ beautiful bookmaking, Morena has created a compelling read that is at once humorous and poignant, that empathizes with the creators of the Voyager Record and looks back at them with 20/20 vision. (May 2016)