FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ
LIBRARY
NEWSLETTER
June 2015
From the Committee
Annual general meeting
This will be held on 13 July at 10.30am upstairs in the library, followed by a
Committee Meeting. You are all very welcome to attend.
Film fundraiser
We held a successful film fundraiser last month. The movie was Testament of
Youth. Even though it was 7pm in winter, over seventy people braved the cold
and we raised $775.
We need your help!
Again, there is a critical Armidale Council meeting which will be held on
Monday 29 June in the Council Chambers. We hope you could arrive at
approximately 5pm to 5.15pm so we have a large crowd outside...it will look
impressive and show excellent community support for our new library.
The Council will be deciding on the Rescission motion that was put forward by a
group of Councillors to block the decision by a majority of Councillors at their
Library Committee meeting to apply for the next Federal Grant. The application
must be in by the end of July. While this Rescission motion is in place until this
meeting on 29th June, there can be no work done to prepare an application for
the Federal Grant. If we can show huge community support for a new Library,
we may influence one or more Councillors to vote against the rescission motion.
We hope to see you outside Council Chambers at 5 to 5.15pm on Monday 29
June to join us in showing community support for a new Library. If Council
refuses to apply for this funding the probability of building a new library will be
greatly reduced if not eliminated altogether.
There is no need to stay for the entire meeting we just need an initial show of
support.
Book review
The Bush
Don Watson
Don Watson’s book The bush was Book of the Year in the NSW Premier’s
Literary awards for 2015. This book deals with the Australian bush in all its
aspects, and is a blend of science, research, history, family memories, anecdotes
and politics, all beautifully rendered in elegant prose. Watson takes us on a
journey encompassing Australia’s climate, the bush prior to white settlement, the
use and misuse of the land by farmers and settlers over the years, the divide
between the country and the city, the effect of settlement on the aboriginal
population and how the concept of the bush shapes the legend of the Australian
character.
Watson commences his story with his grandparents’ struggle to make a living on
the land. He evokes memories of his grandmother sweeping dirt from the
verandah, of the meat safe, the outdoor lavatory and the slap of the wire screen
door. Following on, is a series of loosely connected essays of the tragedies,
triumphs and follies concerning the bush.
This is not a book to be read continuously from cover to cover but one to be
savoured over time. It is an excellent history, sweeping in scope, and never
tending to sentimentality. The book informs and fascinates and all is told in
flawless poetic language. I read the book in association with another book but
was often unable to put it down at the end of a section. It is eminently readable
and highly recommended.
Marnie French.
New in the Library
We begin June’s selection of new items by highlighting an interesting range of
travel guides: Bradt started in a similar way and at a similar time to Lonely Planet
(intrepid young couple writes up an absorbing 1970s adventure), but whereas our
homegrown publishers have retreated to the ease of mainstream destinations,
Bradt continues to explore the really exotic, bizarre and dangerous locations still
available in our world. Even armchair travel to Nagorno Karabagh is absorbing;
we also have their guides to Albania, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Gabon, the
Gambia, Macedonia, Mongolia, Montenegro, North Korea, Palestine, Sao Tome
and Principe, and Madagascar. Daniel Tudor also takes the road less travelled so
that we are more informed and less prejudiced about North Korea confidential:
private markets, fashion trends, prison camps, dissenters and defectors. Annett Klingner
travels more as the traditional tourist and thankfully only lists 111 places in Rome
that you must not miss: so much less intimidating than titles like 1001 foods you must
taste before you die.
Ole Mouritsen and Klavs Styrbaek, scientist and chef respectively, have combined
their Danish talents to explore Umami: unlocking the secrets of the fifth taste, a
complex savory impression that is not sweet, salty, sour or bitter. Marcia Reiss
explores the history and variety of the Apple, another lovely volume in Reaktion
Books’ Botanical series (we also have Oak, Yew and Bamboo). Nick Balla and
Cortney Burns explain their Bar Tartine techniques and recipes, revealing Hungarian,
Japanese and Tibetan influences on the amazing experimental San Francisco
restaurant scene.
Experimental book display and distribution is presented in Alex Johnson’s
Improbable libraries, an around-the-world photographic study of the way books are
made available to people. Andreas Wagner explores other improbabilities in
Arrival of the fittest: the hidden mechanism of evolution, suggesting that new molecules
and mechanisms acting in a non-random way drive adaptations. Bob Mankoff
has improbably adapted to his long-time job as cartoon editor of the New Yorker
magazine, and now tells his story in How about never – is never good for you?
More improbability from America - which scenario is more likely to be believed:
Thomas Geoghegan’s Only one thing can save us: why America needs a new kind of
labor movement or Darryl Cunningham’s graphic retelling of Ayn Rand’s arc of life
in Supercrash: how to hijack the global economy? The shadows of 2008 also fall over
Ian Klaus’ Forging capitalism: rogues, swindlers, frauds and the rise of modern finance,
suggesting with nineteenth century examples that it was ever thus.
For more ethical explanations, we can turn to philosophers like Stewart
Sutherland (Greed: from Gordon Gekko to David Hume), anarchist anthropologists
like David Graeber (The utopia of rules: on technology, stupidity and the secret joys of
bureaucracy) and even cultural critics like David Bromwich (Moral imagination:
essays).
More concrete concerns are addressed in A singular vision: Harry Seidler (Helen
O’Neill), a work on nineteenth-century British architect Richard Norman Shaw
(Andrew Saint) and a book by Simon Swynfen Jervis and Dudley Dodd about a
sixteenth-century cupboard: Roman splendor English arcadia: the English taste for
pietre dure and the Sixtus cabinet at Stourhead.
Organic concerns are represented by The ash tree (Oliver Rackham), Trees, woods
and forests: a social and cultural history (Charles Watkins) and While wandering: a
walking companion. Then the sciences get guernseys with Thomas Curtright’s A
concise treatise on quantum mechanics in phase space and Steven Weinberg’s To explain
the world: the discovery of modern science.
Pictures of the past include Twelve voices from Greece and Rome: ancient ideas for
modern times (Christopher Pelling), Love songs: the hidden history (Ted Gioia), The
Oxford handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean, Before orientalism: Asian peoples and cultures
in European travel writing 1245-1510 (Kim Phillips), and Phantom terror: political
paranoia and the creation of the modern state 1789-1848 (Adam Zamoyski).
Chris Bryant brings us a second volume of Britain’s Parliament: the biography;
Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds paints a picture of one of that Parliament’s chief
twentieth-century actors and the father of the National Health Service in Nye: the
political life of Aneurin Bevan; and Walter Runciman opines that things are Very
different, but much the same: the evolution of English society since 1714.
To these we can add, in apparently random order, Maira Kalman’s My favorite
things (from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum collections); an issue of Granta
Magazine devoted to India: another way of seeing; John Hooper on The Italians
through time and space; Sofka Zinovieff exploring British eccentricity at its most,
in The mad boy, Lord Berners, my grandmother and me; the poetry of John Burnside
(All one breath); Averil Cameron’s reflections on ancient Byzantine matters; Anna
Nyburg’s study of how exile and displacement can unexpectedly lead to
everyone’s cultural enrichment in Émigrés: the transformation of art publishing in
Britain; and a glorious reprint of John Berger’s 1967 work A fortunate man: the story
of a country doctor in the Forest of Dean who lived selflessly among the community
he served.
Now for a musical interlude before some notable new fiction books are
introduced. Branford Marsalis takes his saxophone to San Francisco for the solo
recording of In my solitude: live at Grace Cathedral. Mark Knopfler’s been around a
while, too: his Tracker tracks are all self-composed. You may have heard Mario
Biondi’s rich voice in the closing credits song from the Roman years of Inspector
Rex:
If I see problems I look in your eyes
Who likes to know that I'm on your side
Villains and thieves they better beware
Into the plans I'll throw a big scare
My name is Rex
I'm best friends with the people
Rex, I'm going out on a struggle
Give the command, I'm off to the chase
Ram, jam, solve the case
My name is Rex
I come from Vienna
I transferred to Rome
Eternal city and now I'm at home
Climate is different, problem the same
Catching the bad guys, a part of my fame
Rex, I'm best friends with the people
Rex, I'm going out on a struggle
Give the command, I'm off to the chase
Ram, jam, solve the case
My name is Rex
My name is Rex
My name is... Rex
Now we have two CDs of his vocal stylings for your pleasure: Due and Sun.
Alabama Shakes, fronted by the dynamo that is Brittany Howard, have released
their new Sound and color. Kelis has tantalisingly moved on from Milkshake to
Food. Courtney Barnett records on Surry Hills’ Milk Records, but she’s laid-back
enough to confess that Sometimes I sit and think, and sometimes I just sit. Other
Australian performers with new issues include Darren Hanlon (the folk-rock of
Where did you come from?), Katie Noonan (performing Songs that made me with
other great voices, like Deborah Conway on Court and spark, and Renee Geyer
doing It’s a man’s man’s man’s world) and the Preatures (with Izzi Manfredi making
pop noises on the LP completed in the Doldrum Studios - again in Surry Hills Blue Planet Eyes).
Forgive me if you’ve read these stories already, but we’ve just noticed a new
French detective on the shelves: Bruno, chief of police in St Denis, a small town in
the Perigord region, is a creation of Martin Walker. Not only is Walker a
successful senior director of the Global Business Policy Council, but his fictional
hero is also a paragon of all virtues (“Bruno cooks, he hunts, he builds his own
house and grows his own food. He organizes the parades and festivities and
fireworks displays and keeps order in his fictional home town of St Denis. A
pillar of the local tennis and rugby clubs, he teaches sports to the local
schoolchildren. Bruno finds lost dogs, fights fires, registers births and deaths, and
enforces the parking regulations. But he maintains a sophisticated intelligence
network to outwit the interfering bureaucrats of the European Union in far-off
Brussels”.
Andy McNab, too, exhibits the same personal and fictional British heroics, albeit
in the military sphere: Fortress is the second in his Tom Buckingham series.
Elizabeth Taylor (no, not the actress) was a British novelist and short story writer
who died in 1975. Wikipedia tells us that “Kingsley Amis described her as "one
of the best English novelists born in this century," Antonia Fraser called her "one
of the most underrated writers of the 20th century," and Hilary Mantel said she
was "deft, accomplished and somewhat underrated".” New York Review Books
have now published, in their Classics series, You'll enjoy it when you get there: the
selected stories of Elizabeth Taylor. Caryl Phillips, in The lost child, combines the
narrative voice of a young Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights with a similarly
outcast-on-the-moors Monica Johnson from 1960s Britain.
Anne Enright uses her beautiful writing to great effect in rural Ireland’s The green
road, which brings four adult children back together: there “each confronts the
terrible weight of family ties and the journey that brought them home”. Cesar
Aira is a madly experimental and wildly prolific Argentinian writer whose latest
work in translation is The musical brain and other stories. Yan Lianke revisits the
worst of Chinese Communist excess in The four books. In contrast, Jack Livings’
The dog: stories illuminates the tensions, ironies, and possibilities of life in modern
China.
Fierce, dark, confrontational and funny, Eliza Albert’s After birth is written as
fiction, but how real can it be? Its dust jacket calls it “a wake-up call to a culture
that turns its new mothers into exiles”. And Laila Lalami conveys in The moor’s
account the imagined memoirs of a Moroccan slave who accompanied Spanish
conquistadores across sixteenth-century North America.
New DVDs include a series of documentaries by Frederick Wiseman, whose
work over 47 years has culminated in a most wonderfully calm and reverent
treatment of Britain’s National Gallery. We also have Boxing gym (Austin, Texas),
Law and order (Kansas City), Zoo (Miami, Florida), Aspen and his first, famous
study of a mental institution, Titicut follies (Bridgewater, Massachusetts). Fred
Schepisi’s new romantic comedy, Words and pictures, stars Clive Owen and
Juliette Binoche. The first season of The Americans introduces us to two KGB
spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington, DC in the early 1980s. Set
during the Reagan presidency, complexity is added by the couple having two
children who know nothing about their parents’ true identity. Now read on….