ArtSake

Not to be obvious, but it’s a really unexpected thing to read a literary voice unlike any you’ve read before. Maybe that’s why reviewers of Northampton author Jedediah Berry’s The Manual of Detection can’t seem to agree on which artist to compare him to, invoking voices ranging from Franz Kafka to Ray Bradbury to Terry Gilliam.

But they do seem to agree that Jedediah’s debut novel is a dazzler. The Boston Globe called the book “surreal, absurd, and cerebral, full of sly humor and winks” and a review in The New Yorker praised Jedediah’s “ability to create the feeling of inhabiting a strange and haunting dream, with its own persuasive logic and somnambulant pacing.”

We caught up with Jedediah to ask a few questions about his novel, influences, community, and what’s next for this fascinating original voice.

ArtSake: The world of your novel, with its flourishes of detective noir, carnival lore, and turn-of-the-century Spiritualism, is so fully-realized. It strikes me as both a synthesis of various pulp traditions and a completely unique invention. Did you do research to create it, and if so, from what sources? Did it emerge entirely from your creative process?

Jedediah: The template for that worlda labyrinthine and anonymous city unmoored from any particular time periodwas one of the few things I had a strong vision for when I began writing the novel. But it did evolve over time and came together neighborhood by neighborhood. You’ve rightly identified several of the influences, and even though the book is informed by detective fiction and film noir, it’s meant to feel more like a fairy tale than anything else. I kept the city unnamed for that reason, and while each specific location is perfectly mundane (a train terminal, an office building, a bar) I tried to imbue them all with a kind of archetypal relevance.

There’s the Agency itself, the giant bureaucratic mystery-solving organization which employs the main character, Charles Unwin. It has a geography all its own, and I remember looking at maps of Dante’s Inferno when I was originally sketching its floor plan. The whole place is very regimented, and employees of various rank (clerks, underclerks, detectives, etc.) are kept separate from one another: Unwin must break the rules by ascending and descending over the course of the novel.

At the other end of the spectrum is the Travels-No-More Carnival, the lair of some of the book’s worst villains. It’s a wild and unkempt place, and if the Agency functions as the city’s conscious self, then the Carnival is its unconscious.

All those boundaries, though, are meant to be permeable and deceptive. Still, the setting functions as a symbolic map of the story.

ArtSake: Your protagonist Charles Unwin, while easy to root for, is not so much an anti-hero as an un-hero, a detective who’d rather just be a clerk instead of the other way around. Did you have to fight the urge to develop him in more flattering ways?

Jedediah: One of the pleasures of working on this book came from dropping my bumbling main character into situations he was completely unprepared for, and then discovering that he could surprise me (and his adversaries) each time. Unwin is fastidious to a fault and entirely uninterested in being a hero. But he’s also possessed by a kind of stubborn bravery that bears him through some very tricky circumstances.

Most importantly, having a main character so far out of his element allowed me to twist the raw material of the novelespecially those familiar detective story conventionsinto some new shapes. It’s Unwin’s peculiar perspective, and his need to catalogue, classify, and arrange, that I often adopted while thinking about the genre. That shows in the book, I think.

ArtSake: Maybe it’s the economy, but writers’ day jobs always interest me. Yours is particularly interesting: you’re Assistant Editor at Small Beer Press in Easthampton. How does your editorial work inform your writing?

Jedediah: It’s part of the same conversation, in part because I feel very much at home with Small Beer Press, which is known for publishing fiction that challenges notions of genre and form. Many of the people we publish have had an influence on my own writing, and I consider it an honor to work with them. The experience is an enriching, enlivening, and often inspiring one.

But in some ways it’s a perfectly separate process. When I’m working on getting a book out there into the worldand with an operation like ours, everyone gets involved in most every stage of that processI’m often trying to think from within that book’s singular perspective, which means leaving some of my own preoccupations at the door.

ArtSake: You live in Northampton, where there’s an active community of writers. Do you meet with a writers group or in some way interact with that community? How important is that interaction to your work?

Jedediah: I don’t meet with any formal writing group, but I do certainly benefit from interacting with the many writers who live in the area. Some of them are associated with Small Beer Press, others with the University of Massachusetts, where I earned my graduate degree, or with one of the other nearby colleges. Having a group of trusted colleagues with whom I can discuss issues of craft is invaluable.

Just last weekend, the Juniper Literary Festival took place on the UMass campus. There were dozens of writers there, as well as editors, graduate students, teachers. New books and chapbooks were on display at the book fair while readings, panel discussions, and performances were going on in a gallery downstairs. The place was abuzz with fascinating and energizing conversation. I count myself lucky to be living in an area where this kind of thing happens regularly.

ArtSake: What’s next for you?

Jedediah: I’m writing a lot of short storiesone of them, about a mad scientist preparing for the end of the world, will be in the next issue of the literary journal Conjunctions. I’m also working on a new novel, which is part historical fiction, part folkloric re-imagining of the American Revolution. There are some other long projects also vying for my attention, though. I’ll have to see which of them wins out.

Jedediah Berry was raised in the Hudson Valley region of New York State. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and works as assistant editor of Small Beer Press.

Images: Jedediah Berry, photo by Lucy Hamblin; cover image for THE MANUAL OF DETECTION by Jedediah Berry (Penguin Press 2009).

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George Fifield is the founder and director of Boston Cyberarts, Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which produces the Boston Cyberarts Festival. The 2009 festival takes place April 24 – May 10 at dozens of locations across Greater Boston.

We asked George to offer some insight as to how the region came to be known as a nexus of art and technology.

The Boston Cyberarts Festival came about as I began to understand the incredible history of art and technology that had occurred in the Greater Boston area. At this time in the mid 90s, I was writing a column for Art New England, and in my search for ideas, I slowly came across this history. Of course, this made perfect sense as Boston has always been a center for technology. Boston is where the future is beta-tested.

But the convergence of this technology with art came about in the 1960s. One program was the WGBH New Television Workshop, officially founded in 1972. Though video artists were mostly working in New York, the first television presentation of this work was a WGBH show called The Medium is the Medium in 1969, which presented six video artists to a national audience.

Subsequently, WGBH started an artist-in-residence program allowing video artists in the television studio to use the equipment for the very first time. The first artist in residence was Nam June Paik, who while here invented the Paik Abe synthesizer, the first machine that controlled the distortion of the existing video signal. This synthesizer was distributed around the world. This led to the New Television Workshop, through which hundreds of well known and aspiring artists came to make work.

The first-ever video art exhibit in a museum, Vision & Television, occurred at the Rose Museum in Waltham in 1970.

M.I.T. has germinated many programs of technological art, including the Architecture Machine Group, the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), the Visual Language Workshop and the Media Laboratory. CAVS, established in 1967, was especially famous for the number of important artists who worked and visited there. Boston area art schools are well known for the excellence of their art and technology courses.

Boston companies that specifically advanced the technology of art were numerous, like Avid and Z-Corp. Some followed a tradition of working directly with artists to develop their technologies, following the close relationship between Dr. Edwin Land and Ansel Adams in developing the Polaroid camera.

But while digital art works were being presented and exhibited by a select number of Boston area organizations, there had not been a major event highlighting the art and the artists combined with a public education effort. So the Boston Cyberarts Festival was created in 1999 to recognize and celebrate this long tradition of innovation in the arts and focus attention on local artists in this important field.

Today, this region is known worldwide as having one of the highest concentrations of digital artists, including key innovators. Its academic institutions have built up excellent departments in digital art, new media and electronic music. The digital media industry, especially computer game development, has grown and added an important component to the creative economy sector.

The Festival can take no credit for the concentration of digital artists who live here the area is a great place to be an artist, with ample exhibition and performance opportunities and many jobs, including teaching for support. But I do believe the Festival can take some credit that the world knows about us.

Images, top to bottom: Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, “Paik/Abe Synthesizer,”" 1969 and still from “Nam June Paik: Edited for Television,” 1975

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On the Keepers of Tradition blog, Massachusetts state folklorist Maggie Holtzberg has distilled some of the techniques she learned at a recent meeting of folklorists on how best to preserve digital multimedia. Archiving work (as well as preserving and providing access to those archives) is the bread and butter of folklorists, but since so many artists are now either working in digital media or documenting their work that way, any artist might be interested to hear some of the best practices Maggie took away from the meeting. Here are a few tips on preserving your digital media:

Multiple copies of files in varying formats keeps material safe. For example, store a recent field recording or photo shoot in several places: on a server, on two external hard drives, and on a CD.

Don’t write on a CD! The top surface of the CD is susceptible to damage, not just the bottom. If you must, write with a water-based, permanent pen on the inner plastic circle of the CD. Avoid “sharpies” as they might interfere with the top (lacquer) layer of the CD.

Store CDs in regular sized jewel cases, not fiberglass or paper sleeves. Store them vertically, not horizontally. Buy CDs in jewel cases, not in spindles.

Migrate, migrate, migrate. Dale Hecker of Harvard University Libraries reminds us that “Digital materials are surprisingly fragile. They depend for their continued viability upon technologies that undergo rapid and continual change.” This is true for analog as well as digital materials. Afterall, who can use a floppy disc anymore, let alone play a wax cylinder or a 78 recording? If your archive is full of DAT (digital audio tape) recordings, as ours is, make sure you copy them onto the latest technology and back them up on a server. Scan slides and create TIF files as your preservation master files. Then create “use” files for editing, printing, and emailing.

Metadata matters. It is important to include information about the information that has been collected. Describe the context, content, format, and authorship of the material. Who conducted the interview, where, and when? Is this interview part of a project or collection? What kind of camera, microphone, or sound recorder was used? What software? Is the material restricted in any way?

Read the full post.

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When organizing a Commonwealth Reading Series event this past February 2009, I was sorry to learn Cam Terwilliger, a 2008 Fellow in Fiction/Creative Nonfiction, would be unable to participate. But I had to admit, he had a terrific excuse: he’d be in a different hemisphere that month.

I’ll let Cam explain where he was and what he was up to, as he’s graciously agreed to share his Massachusetts-artist-abroad story as an ArtSake guest blogger.

The Nomad Life by Cam Terwilliger

I recently spent a little over five months traveling through parts of Asia in search of I don’t know what. Six months ago, I had just finished a book of short stories and wanted to get away from my routines for a while. But, to be honest, the specifics of my travel plans didn’t extend beyond the following two items: a one-way ticket to Japan to visit a friend, and the vague notion I had saved enough money to travel for 4-6 months. When people asked if I planned to write about the trip in my next book, I often replied mysteriously, “Um. Maybe eventually.” In truth, I have no designs on travel writing, and the next book I plan to write is a historical novel set during the French and Indian war. So what on earth was I doing on a trip to Asia?

Laos: I spent a lot my time driving through the countryside on a motorbike.

At the outset, I had many ideas about using this trip to challenge myself, to experience a true sense of freedomno job, no schedule, no telephone. I had the impulse to see what happened when the world lay open for my perusal, to blow up my life and see what remained. In short, I desired to get to know myself better. This did happen in a way. But it wasn’t the triumphal time I imagined.

From the start, I did everything I was supposed to. I inspected temples. I sampled the live octopus tentacles. I sang the karaoke. I gawked at the world’s largest flower. Still, a sense of unease set in. I had imagined so much freedom would empower me, but more often it gave me a sense of lonely purposelessness as I wandered from Japan to Korea to Malaysia to Thailand. In an email to my sister I described the feeling. I felt hollow. Part of this was merely complaining about the number of tourists clogging up the scenerythough I was little differentbut there was more as well. My very wise sister made the following observation in response to my complaints: “I know that everyone’s impetus to travel is to gain an experience in their livesbut that can only be meaningful if they step outside of themselves. You seem so caught in your emotions and how you are feeling that you haven’t been allowing yourself to engage with the places you are visiting.”

She was right. I was making myself the center of this trip. All I talked about was getting to know myself, challenging myself, me, me, me. I was so fixated on this that I wasnt respecting local cultures on their own terms. This realization cemented itself when I enrolled in a meditation retreat run by several monks in order to escape my own head, but found I was only capable of sitting for hours under their attention, obsessing over my time abroad and what I should do once it was over. Maybe most travelers are this way. But it’s startling to be confronted by the notion that you may, in fact, be a narcissist.

Malaysia: This silver leaf monkey is even more excited about Hawthorne than I am.

Heading for Laos and Cambodia, I resolved to do my best to focus my energies outward, to engage with the places I visited as my sister suggested. As a writer, I naturally turned to words to do this. It’s true I’d been journaling all along, but now I had a different sense of its importance. Instead of holing up to record my thoughts each day, I decided to use my notebook to observe the world around me, without casting my shadow over it if possible. Specifically, I attempted to describe what I saw in three to four sentences. I thought of these short bits as “word photographs,” and I found the work of thoughtfully observing far more rewarding than snapping off so many easily forgotten pictures with my camera. (more…)

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Debra Weisberg (Drawing Fellow ’08), along with Michelle Samour (Crafts Fellow ’03), Audrey Goldstein, and Julia Shepley, all use materials in unconventional ways in Material Drawing, which shows at the Danforth Museum of Art in Framingham through May 17.

Recently, Cate McQuaid wrote a very favorable review of Material Drawing in the Boston Globe. In it, she relates her experience of Debra’s “Glow Drawing” series, unique works with two distinct drawings on one surface, one for day and one for night:

…Weisberg makes light a tangible part of her work in the “Glow Drawing” series, which hangs in a closed-off section of the gallery, where you’re invited to look at them well lit before you flick off the lights.

Made with luminescent tape and powder, the “Glow Drawings” are… intricately crafted, often setting thrust and momentum against deep space. Turn off the lights, and everything shifts: Black disappears into shadows, white turns to an eerie, luminous green, like stars suspended in the maw of the universe. It’s a terrific surprise, and such a simple trick. I clapped my hands in delight like a 3-year-old.

You can see Debra’s “surreptitious drawing” (as she calls it), Michelle’s brightly colored drawings on translucent paper (McQuaid writes that her “Bundle” wall “is like a bouquet of alien flowers amid the spare, monochrome palettes of the other artists”), and the rest of the Material Drawing show at the Danforth Museum through May 17. A panel discussion with all four artists will take place on Sunday, April 26, at 3 PM.

Read what other past fellows/finalists are up to in the Fellows Notes.

Images:all from the “Glow Drawing” series by Debra Weisberg, installation view and detail (lights on); installation view and detail (lights off).

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There were no numbers to call to vote for your faves, no two-hour television specials, and no radio disc jockey emceeing the selection process. Unlike American Idol, where you America get to decide, the Guggenheim Foundation’s Board of Trustees have chosen this year’s Fellowship awardees. The fellowship awards are intended to provide financial support to people who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. We like to imagine, as the list of people below suggests, the board of trustees just might have said phrases like “dog, check it out” or “you rocked the house man” in their unabashed enthusiam for the work by this year’s fellows.

Congratulations to this year’s wicked smart Massachusetts Guggenheim Fellows!

Music Composition: Yu-Hui Chang, Assistant Professor, Department of Music, Brandeis University.

Film: Sam Kauffmann, Associate Professor of Film, Boston University.

Fine Arts: Paul Laffoley, Founder, Boston Visionary Cell, Inc: Fine arts.

General Nonfiction: Jessica Eve Stern, Lecturer in Law, Harvard Law School.

Poetry: Daniel Tobin, Professor and Chair, Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing, Emerson College.

Physics: Janet M. Conrad, Professor of Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Engineering: Patrick Doyle, Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

History of Science and Technology: Peter Galison, Director, Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, Harvard University.

African Studies: Ingrid Monson, Quincy Jones Professor of African American Music, Harvard University.

Literary Criticism: Lisa Rodensky, Wellesley College, English Department.

Music Research: Alexander Rehding, Professor of Music, Harvard University.

Law: Jeannie Suk, Professor, Harvard Law School

Astronomy – Astrophysics: Priya Natarajan, Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics, Yale University

Chemistry: Udayan Mohanty, Professor of Chemistry, Boston College.

Photo Credit: Image of Paul Laffoley from his website.

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Last Sunday, April 5, 7,500 households tuned in to see Polis Is This, a film by Henry Ferrini and Ken Riaf about the venerable Gloucester poet Charles Olson, on Boston’s WGBH. Along with the WGBH airing, the film has shown on stations throughout the country and has upcoming showings in New York City and Philadelphia.

Polis Is This, which explores Olson as a poet and larger-than-life figure as well as his complex relationship to his chosen home of Gloucester, started with a Local Cultural Council grant in 1995. Now it’s airing on over 50 PBS stations from Hawaii to Manhattan.

Read about the film and view it online. Learn more about the Local Cultural Council Program.

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For culture junkies like us, trying to answer the question So, whats going on tonight? can incite a mad scramble across several different websites and one or two free newspapers. Luckily, our friends at ArtsBoston are unveiling their new site, and its a must-bookmark for art lovers. ArtsBoston.org compiles just about every event in the Boston area – music, theater, dance, film, museum and gallery exhibits, opera. If you have a performance or an exhibition coming up, make sure its listed. If youve seen something recently and want to share your opinion, you can write a review.

Were particularly psyched about the extensive visual arts listings, which even come with image galleries. But most of all, were relieved that the answer to that pesky question is finally all in one place.

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Last night, Shi-Yeon Sung became the first woman to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra since its founding by Henry Lee Higginson in 1881. Sung won first prize at the 2006 Sir Georg Solti International Conductors Competition. Shortly thereafter, James Levine invited her to become the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s new assistant conductor for the 2007/2008 season. She continues to lead the orchestra’s performances through Sunday.

Watch Shi-Yeon Sung rehearse with the Boston Symphony Orchestra

For more, read Andrea Shea’s excellent piece on WBUR.

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Go here for exciting words strung together meaningfully conveying the sensational honors, events, and news of past fellows and finalists from our Artist Fellowship Program.

In other (fewer) words: read the latest Fellows Notes.

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