March 2016

From the CommitteeTrivia nightLast Friday evening, we held our annual trivia night. We are very grateful to our wonderful community for their ongoing support which made our fundraiser a fantastic success. The committee would again like to thank Ken MacDonald for his continued enthusiasm as our excellent quiz master. Everyone commented on the fun they had and said that they would be happy to return next year! We raised an outstanding $2500.

Winter raffleThis will be returning this year so, again, we request our generous members to dig deep and provide goodies to go into the raffle and also buy lots of tickets. They will be for sale at the Library on Saturday mornings and at the April, May and June Sunday markets. The raffle will be drawn in early July.

Membership driveThere are forms attached to this newsletter. Membership fees were due in January, and if you have forgotten to pay them, it is never too late. You can pay at the Library, or send the fees to our excellent treasurer, Judy Wilford, 18 Ash Tree Drive, Armidale, 2350.

Our new libraryThis has not gone on the back burner because of our fascinating political situation with Tony Windsor putting himself forward for this seat in opposition to Barnaby Joyce. This would therefore be an excellent time to keep our need for a new library in the forefront of their minds! We encourage you all to write to both these potential members to reinforce the committee's letters. Attached to the

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

newsletter are some wonderful suggestions, which can be accessed to give you some ideas about what you could include and how to phrase it. Of course, many of you will have creative ideas of your own. Please write.

The Committee wishes all the members a Happy Easter.

Book review

The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde was first published in 1890, and caused a sensation as it was thought to be a corrupting influence.

Dorian Gray is a vain and selfish, but extremely good looking, young man of generous means. He uses his position and wealth to act with complete disregard for others and he suffers no remorse for his cruelty and spitefulness. His friend, the artist Basil Hallward, paints his portrait, and Dorian wishes that the picture would exhibit the ravages of ageing in exchange for his remaining for ever youthful and beautiful. As the portrait begins to reveal the passage of time and Dorian’s moral disintegration, he compulsively covers it and hides it away from sight. Time goes on, and he is more and more disturbed by the picture, which acts as his conscience. The unexpected ending of the novel is entirely satisfactory.

Wilde has written in beautiful prose, with humour and wit. Wealthy society in Britain in the late 1800s is satirised and Dorian Gray is a symbol of moral degeneration, never taking responsibility for his actions.

I was not immediately attracted to this book and read it for the first time only recently. It is masterfully written and it is not surprising that it has become a classic.

Event in the Library

Renowned Australian author Hazel Edwards will be presenting a Skype workshop, How to write a non-boring family history upstairs in the Library on April 2. The workshop, organised by the New England Writers Centre, will go from 10.30am to noon. The engaging Skype session will show participants how to write family histories that are memorable, readable -- and not boring! Based on Hazel’s very successful book of the same name, the workshops will cover such essential family history skills such as researching and interviewing; how to organise material and structure your book; handling family secrets; publishing options; and much more.Every workshop participant will also receive a digital (ebook) copy of Hazel’s book, How to write a non-boring family history.

When: Saturday April 2 10:30 - 12How much: $40 for NEWC members, $50 for non-members

New in the Library

As we move towards the end of daylight savings this year, towards winter and the sound of time’s winged chariot, I thought it would be engaging to list this month’s selection of new Library items in order of how long it would take to absorb each one…

So, for instance, Jenny Hval’s fifth album, Apocalypse, girl, takes only 39 minutes to play: hailed as one of 2015’s most original albums, the Norwegian artist has composed (the Guardian reviewer wrote) “an erotic sonic futurescape of spoken word, warped choirs, sci-fi electronics and her typically pillow-soft vocals”. The Stanley Clarke Band bring us 45 minutes of Up blues-influenced jazz, and Topic Records have re-released Folk music of Bulgaria, twenty-six tunes recorded in 1954 and 1963, exhibiting what the liner notes call the “rich peculiarities” of this culture.

Promised Land Sound play Nashville garage rock with a blurry psychedelic edge on For use and delight. The choir of Worcester College Oxford have recorded twenty-five contemporary carols on Nowell sing we. All the joys of New Zealand reggae are again released on Fat Freddy’s Drop’s Bays.

Other contemporary, not-too-long-to-play albums are available from Matthew White (Fresh blood soul), Brian Wilson (former Beach Boy feeling No pier pressure) and John Grant (experiencing Grey tickles, black pressure).

Steaming out of Melbourne come a series of Short blacks – 13 little essays so far in book format (some as short as 39 pages), “brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind”. Among them are Killing the black dog (Les Murray), The one day: a memory of Anzac (David Malouf), Regions of thick-ribbed ice (Helen Garner) and Fat city (Karen Hitchcock writing like this: “'I ask a young 200-kilo patient what he snacks on. 'Nothing,' he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: 'I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I'm addicted to eating. I'm addicted.' He punches his thigh”). Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author of such books as Awakenings and Musicophilia was diagnosed with terminal cancer in January 2015. During the months before his death in August, he wrote a series of what the Washington Post called “heart-rending yet ultimately uplifting essays…. about how he wished to live out his days and about his feelings on dying. Now collected in a beautiful little volume, Gratitude is [his] lasting gift to readers”. From that 45 pages to Linden Hawthorne’s 64 might seem like a big step, but the pictures in Rhododendrons: an illustrated guide to varieties, cultivation and care with step-by-step instructions and over 135 beautiful photographs make it an easy read once you’ve passed the book’s title.

Tim Rogers’ You Am I will entertain in under one hour with their tenth studio album, Porridge and hot sauce. The San Francisco Symphony is similarly short in playing two John Adams pieces, Absolute jest (“a colossal twenty-five minute scherzo”) and Grand pianola music (composed in 1982 in the Haight-Ashbury district). Swedish clarinettist Martin Frost joins the Tapiola Sinfonietta in Helsinki to perform four Clarinet concertos by Carl Maria von Weber in less than an hour and a quarter.

Moomins on the Riviera has a similar run time in a setting far from their Baltic home. Close by in Italy, Antonio Tabucchi takes only 88 pages to complete Indian nocturne: a novella, displaying those characteristics which Tim Parks, his translator, highlighted in the New York Review of Books (“In everything Tabucchi wrote, the fear of loss and death together with an admiration for decorous, elegant, magnanimous behavior are equally to the fore and in strict relationship to each other”). One hundred minutes of horror may well, in contrast, fly by with It follows.

More sublime, in the same time, is Spring, summer, fall, winter and spring, a Korean chronicle of the life of a Buddhist monk from childhood to the end of his days. Somewhat small, at 160 pages, but not shying away from the big questions, is Jacques le Goff’s Must we divide history into periods? At 139 pages, beautifully produced to show the company’s command of their medium since 1263, is Rags, rabbit skins and invisible watermarks: 750 years of papermaking in Fabriano.

Other works under 200 pages this month include Obfuscation, in which Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum propose a user’s guide for privacy and protest, “offering us ways to fight today's pervasive digital surveillance -- the collection of our data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers”; equally dark is Vladimir Sorokin’s fictional The blizzard, featuring nineteenth-century Russian zombies; and Joanna Walsh’s capture of the surreal, sanitised and peculiar Hotel environment (“Luxury, sex, power, anonymity, privacy…hotels are where our desires go on holiday, but also places where our desires are shaped by the hard realities of the marketplace. Part memoir and part meditation, this book visits a series of rooms, suites, hallways, and lobbies - the spaces and things that make up these modern sites of gathering and alienation”).

Between two and three hundred pages are some food books (Herring tales: how the silver darlings shaped human taste and history; Homemade takeaways: how to make your favourite takeaway ... but better: 100 recipes; and Alessandro Pavoni’s Lombardian cookbook: from the Alps to the lakes of northern Italy), some novels (Nocilla dream, Spanish daring from Agustin Fernandez Mallo; Four stories from the inimitable Alan Bennett; and the audacious reimagining of an episode from John Lennon’s life, Beatlebone by Irishman Kevin Barry), and various works of non-fiction:

Ilan Stavans examines Quixote: the novel and the world; Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets produces a glorious little volume of Arabic poems in a bilingual edition; Lauren Redniss creates a wonderful pulsing study in Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, a tale of love and fallout, interspersing Chernobyl and other insights into the Curie’s generational lives with full-page colour and a font of her own devising; and Adelaide’s own philosophical favourite son leaps to life again with the publication of Never mind the bourgeoisie: the correspondence between Iris Murdoch and Brian Medlin, 1976-1995..

Breathing deeply, we approach the works between three and four hundred pages in length. Appropriately enough, here are The summits of modern man: mountaineering after the enlightenment (Peter Hansen); Perfume: a century of scents (Lizzie Ostrom); The undesired (Icelandic suspense from Yrsa Sigurdardottir); and The astronomer and the witch: Johannes Kepler’s fight for his mother (Ulinka Rublack).

Other historical insights are available from hipster lecturer Christopher Oldstone-Moore (Of beards and men: the revealing history of facial hair), The Oxford illustrated history of the Reformation, archaeologist Patrick Kirch (A shark going inland is my chief: the island civilization of ancient Hawai’i), and food historian Bee Wilson (First bite: how we learn to eat).

Shirley Jackson has been dead these last fifty years, but because The lottery is regarded as “one of the most terrifying stories written in the twentieth century” it is now reprinted with other stories. Further American fiction fulfilling the 3-4-hundred page criterion

comes from Jennine Crucet, encapsulating the Miami Cuban dilemma, in Make your home among strangers and Sunil Yapa, revisiting Seattle protests against the World Trade Organisation with Your heart is a muscle the size of a fist.

Final fascination in this category comes with three real-world investigations: Janet Vertesi is Seeing like a Rover when she explains how robots, teams, and images craft knowledge of Mars - the now-familiar-to-us harsh, rocky, rusty-red Martian landscape is constructed by team members who develop an uncanny intimacy with the sensory apparatus of a robot that is millions of miles away. A similarly complex job of interpretation is described by Ellen Elias-Bursac in Translating evidence and interpreting testimony at a war crimes tribunal: working in a tug-of-war (“How can defendants be tried if they cannot understand the charges being raised against them? Can a witness testify if the judges and attorneys cannot understand what the witness is saying? Can a judge decide whether to convict or acquit if she or he cannot read the documentary evidence? The very viability of international criminal prosecution and adjudication hinges on the massive amounts of translation and interpreting that are required in order to run these lengthy, complex trials, and the procedures for handling the demands facing language services”). Raymond Tallis, neuroscientist, author and polymath, has written The black mirror: fragments of an obituary for life, looking back on his world from the standpoint of his future corpse – now read on….

Is anyone not exhausted yet? Only three titles this month in the four- to five- hundred page publications: first, a picture book,

derived from Brandon Stanton’s blog site, Humans of New York: stories (Here’s someone’s favourite: an old and a young lady standing together. The young one says, “She loves life more than anyone I’ve ever known. I hope she doesn’t mind me telling you this, but recently she’s had some health problems. And her health got so bad at one point, she called me and said: ‘I was starting to wonder if there was any reason to go on. But then I had the most delicious pear!’”); second, an art book, William Vaughan’s tribute to the life of Samuel Palmer: shadows on the wall, showing how his nineteenth century British landscape paintings link William Blake with the Pre-Raphaelites; and third, a new novel from Paul Murray, reviewed by US National Public Radio like this: “This is the funniest book about investment banking and the European financial crisis you'll read all year. Probably. I mean, who knows? It's possible that the field of banking fiction is just full of laughs, but I doubt that anyone out there has captured the absurdity of it, the gallows sense of laughing so you don't scream all the time, the way Paul Murray has with his new novel, The mark and the void.”

Three more between five- and six-hundred pages long: one on Ireland, published in the US (Diarmaid Ferriter’s A nation and not a rabble: the Irish revolution 1913-1923); one on a Welshman, published in London (Over the top and back: the autobiography by Tom Jones); and one on the quintessential English document, published by the quintessential British publisher (Magna Carta in the Penguin classics series, with a new commentary by David Carpenter – of all the books published on the subject last year (on the 800th anniversary of its composition), this is, as the Claremont Review of Books wrote, “the most thorough and detailed”).

As for our remaining behemoths, only Thomas Laqueur’s The work of the dead: a cultural history of mortal remains is going to present a continuous challenge through its 711 pages as he explains why humanity has universally rejected Diogenes’ approach (saying that when he died, his body should be tossed over the city walls for beasts to scavenge). The others are more accessible because their contents are broken down into manageable size. So, Robert Hughes’ The spectacle of skill: selected writings introduces a new generation to “thunderously outspoken” sections from his previously-published books, and includes 125 never-before-seen pages from the unfinished second volume of his memoir, which he was working on at the time of his death in 2012. There might be 775 pages in Drawn & Quarterly: twenty-five years of contemporary cartooning, comics, and graphic novels, but every one is filled with pictures.

1992, an Italian ten-part television series, runs for over eight and a half hours, and subtitle reading may become wearying, but few countries do politics in as complex and as ruthless a manner as the Italians. In Ghost, Louise Welch has chosen 100 stories to read with the lights on – an average length of only 79 pages each. Philip Hensher has made such a generous selection of stories for The Penguin book of the British short story that there are now two books: volume one from Daniel Defoe to John Buchan, and volume two from PG Wodehouse to Zadie Smith – each volume, of course, over 700 pages long….

Letter to politiciansSome points you may find useful:+ A new library in the CBD could function as a hub of our community, a centre for our cultural and social life. At present Armidale has no such centre.

+ City suburbs and country towns which have invested in new libraries have been able to reach out to all levels of the community, such as young people, families and the disadvantaged. What facility do we have at present that can do this?

+ Armidale is lucky in that the proposed site for the new library is owned by the Council and sits next to a group of other public buildings, such as the Town hall and the Council Chambers. A library here would complete a civic precinct, an accessible community centre, which would also help to bring people to the shops in and around the Beardy Street Mall. Proximity to libraries is good for business!

+ A new library would have room for easy access to the collections for all, including the elderly and disadvantaged who find much difficulty in using present cramped library facilities. And we can have access to resources which currently have to be stored in makeshift spaces inaccessible to the public.

+ A new, well designed library could be used by a wide range of community organisations.

+ Computer services (at present very limited by lack of space) would be greatly expanded - a service vital for the many in the community who do not have their own computers or internet access. Increasingly, such lack of resources means real disadvantage .

+ Armidale needs small and medium public meeting spaces that are comfortable, well-equipped and easy for all to reach. A new library could incorporate these.

+ A well designed library in the heart of town would make our town much more attractive to people thinking of living here and to visitors. Our current library building does not reflect what we have to offer here.

+ Although times are hard, makeshift solutions to our present problems (such as relocating the current library to empty shops)will mean that in a few years these problems will be repeated and much needed community facilities will still not exist. Our children will be left to pay for our lack of will and foresight

+ In the 1950s, the citizens of Armidale decided to honour those fallen in war, not with a conventional monument, but with a bricks and mortar memorial, an investment in Armidale's future as well as a celebration of heroism and sacrifice. Can't we do this same?

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