May 2015 Newsletter

From the CommitteeGreat books in the Library talksThe talk last Wednesday about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was enjoyed by all (nearly sixty people in attendance) and there was very lively discussion. The next book in this fascinating discussion series, put on by UNE in conjunction with the library, was going to be This house of grief by Helen Garner. The book gives an account of the trials of Robert Farqurharson, a father of three small boys, accused of driving his car into a dam and leaving his children to drown. Garner presents her close observations of the man on trial, his family and of all of the people who attempt to deliver justice on behalf of the children. This house of grief examines the unravelling of a marriage and the effect of the trials on those involved, but it also asks profound questions of all of us about the meaning of guilt, innocence and truth. The discussion would have been led by Anne Pender, an Associate Professor who lectures in Australian Literature and Theatre Studies at UNE. However, the discussion which was going to take place in the Library between 5.30 and 6.30 on Wednesday 3 June has unfortunately been postponed until October. This means that the July talk – on Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist – will be the next one: more about this event in the June newsletter. Keep the evening of 1 July open for this discussion.

Film night fundraiserThis can be pencilled in to your diaries now...it will be on Thursday 4 June and we are not sure of the exact time, but an email will be

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ LIBRARYNEWSLETTER

sent out to you. The movie will be A testament of youth based on the powerful best selling memoir by Vera Brittain. The tickets will again be $18, and we look forward to seeing you all there.

Thank you to all the knitting ladiesThese amazing women knitted all the red poppies that featured in the Library Anzac display. It was a wonderful display and we heard many compliments given to the Library staff.

Annual general meetingThis will be held on Monday 13 July 2015. You are all very welcome to attend...the room is very warm now with an excellent new heating system.

Council and the new Library***WE NEED YOUR HELP NOW!***Do you all realise that our new library will disappear without our members’ support? THIS IS URGENT...Please contact our Council with your letter or email. The following are some points you might like to consider and include. The deadline is Monday 8 June.***Ours is the only War Memorial Library ***It was a key commitment on the Council's own Strategic Plan for 2018 ***Extensive Community support and consultation ***Money already donated, be quested, bricks bought and pavings ***Development consent for project approved unanimously ***Shortcomings of the existing library ***Plans to be scrapped with no consultation ***Where IS the information in the Budget Report?***How do they explain spending on sporting project?***No support for grant applications***Modern Public Library is essential for the future of our city of education and learning ***Inconsistent; promise to 'act honestly' and encourage open and transparency in decision-making.Below is a list of the email addresses for the Mayor, Councillors and the General Manager. Without written support from the members and the wider community, I fear the council will proceed with their own agenda, to the detriment of our town and community.We thank you in advance for all your support.

Councillorsmayor@armidale.nsw.gov.aulbishop@armidale.nsw.gov.auhbeyersdorf@armidale.nsw.gov.aurrichardson@armidale.nsw.gov.aucgadd@armidale.nsw.gov.aujmaher@armidale.nsw.gov.au

moconnor@armidale.nsw.gov.aUjbailey@armidale.nsw.gov.auchalligan@armidale.nsw.gov.auamurat@armidale.nsw.gov.aupodonohue@armidale.nsw.gov.auGeneral Managergwilcox@armidale.nsw.gov.au <mailto:gwilcox@armidale.nsw.gov.au> Council main email (anything to this is guaranteed to go on the official record)council@armidale.nsw.gov.au <mailto:council@armidale.nsw.gov.au>Letter to the Editor

In the Mayor’s comments on the 2015 Council Budget and Operational plans he states “we have been listening to residents and I hope we’ve understood clearly what you have been saying”.The Friends of Armidale Dumaresq Library question how effective the listening has been.  It appears to us that years of community expectations that a new library will be constructed in 2018 as set out in the Council’s current Strategic Plan have been ignored.The status of the library project in the current planning round is extremely unclear at best.

 The Friends of Armidale Dumaresq Library, and more recently the Armidale Civic Precinct Project, have consistently demonstrated that there is widespread support for this necessary addition to our civic infrastructure.  Many citizens and organisations have contributed to the cost of the new Library building through donations, bequests and fund raising. In the recent Armidale Express Poll, 60.08% voted in favour of a rate rise to fund the project. Considerable rate monies have been spent to create the architectural plans for the proposed new library at the Cinders Lane site.  A Development Application has been granted. Unfortunately because Council has seemingly not included the new Library in its current and future planning, it may well have lost the trust of these supporters and contributors.

 There are grants available and many Councils have taken advantage of them to build new libraries. In spite of the Council’s wish to “reduce the reliance on grants”, Federal or State grants would mean that Council would not have to bear the cost on its own. Without the inclusion of a new Library in the Council’s plans future applications are destined to fail.

 The need for a new Library is glaringly obvious; it has been the subject of considerable community input and planning and has also been accepted as part of its future planning by Council.  The inability of Council to be consistent in its support for a new Library,

its unwillingness to look for varied sources of funding and its lack of consensus on this issue must leave the community with little confidence in its Council’s ability to develop this vital resource for our city.

The Friends of Armidale Dumaresq Library have written to all Councillors to ask the Council to retain the new library in its Budget and Operational Plans. We want every Councilor to take steps to unite the Community behind them and build on what has already been achieved, by initiating a transparent planning process around the new Library project.

We hope that by these means community trust and confidence can be restored and the new Library can be constructed on the Cinders Lane site as stipulated in the Strategic Plan. Book review

Gutenberg’s Apprentice Alix Christie

Johann Gutenberg’s name has been long associated with the invention of the first printing press, and this novel is a fictionalized account of how this came about. The setting is the town of Mainz in Germany in the middle of the 15th century, when the Catholic Church was the most powerful institution in society.

The story is told through the eyes of Gutenberg’s apprentice, Peter Schoeffer, who was a scribe in Paris. Called back to Mainz by the man who adopted him, Johann Fust, Peter is set to work with Gutenberg and his new invention. Johann Fust has been persuaded to finance the venture and between these three main characters and additional craftsmen, 180 copies of the Bible were eventually printed.

Gutenberg is portrayed as a ruthless, ambitious man, eventually betraying his partner Fust and his workers. Peter Schoeffer plays an integral part in the casting and carving of metal letters and the composition of the inks required to produce lasting reproducible type. Johann Fust becomes progressively disillusioned by the long

slow process, and the necessity of providing increasing amounts of capital.

Secrecy surrounding the development of the press was essential to prevent persecution and reprisals by the Catholic Church. Production of a text by any means other than a dedicated scribe was regarded by many as blasphemous. In this respect, Christie maintains an atmosphere of tension as time goes on. She has obviously researched the politics and culture of the time, as well as the technical advances that made the invention of the printing press possible.

At times, I felt the detail of the Guilds, the Elders of Mainz, the Church and the political machinations of the time overwhelmed the story, causing it to flag in parts. Nevertheless, the book is very well written and worth reading. I couldn’t help thinking that the invention of the Internet in our own age mirrors the invention of the printing press centuries ago. The printing press irrevocably changed the course of history, and I think we are yet to see more of the possibilities of the Internet and its effect on society.

Marnie French

Gutenberg's ApprenticeAlix Christie

This novel is based on real people and events. It begins in Paris in 1450 where a young man, Peter Schoeffer, was working as a scribe producing, by hand, copies of religious and philosophical books. This method of production meant that books were expensive and rare and thus were only available to the very wealthy and powerful. These were turbulent and dangerous times to live in, with battles for wealth and power being fought at all levels of society – both civil and religious.

Whilst working in Paris, Peter receives an urgent summons from his foster father, Johann Fust, to return to his home town of Mainz. Peter is reluctant to go as he is happy in his work and has just received an important promotion, but feels indebted to Fust for taking him in as an orphan and bringing him up as his son.

Fust shows Peter some parchment sheets with lettering and indentations that are different from anything Peter has seen before and tells him that he has met a man called Gutenberg who '….has found a way to make the letters out of metal. He lays the ink upon each one, then stamps them in the page.' Peter is scandalised at first, as he believes such work will be regarded by laity and clergy alike as blasphemy. Fust, however, is so impressed by Gutenberg and his ideas that he has invested a large sum of money in the venture and has promised Peter as apprentice to Gutenberg. Reluctantly, Peter accepts out of his sense of duty. Gutenberg proves to be a difficult and unreasonable man with a violent temper and there are many serious problems to surmount before the first printed edition of Gutenberg's Bible is finally completed.

I found this book very interesting and would recommend it as a good read.

Jean Jackson

New in the Library

Let’s start this month with the tragic tale of a Chinese warlord's unrequited love for an American missionary. Frank Capra’s 1932 masterpiece, The bitter tea of General Yen, stars Barbara Stanwyck: “an actress it was always difficult to look away from (here she has seldom seemed so innocently beautiful)” says Derek Malcolm in listing it as one his personal best in A century of films. Our filters of the fabled East are reduced a little more by Kon Ichikawa in The Makioka sisters. This is a 1983 film of a serialized novel written by Junichiro Tanizaki between 1943 and 1948, depicting the decline of a family's upper-middle-class suburban lifestyle and the yearning for another time. And Wang Bing brings us the real thing in his nine-hour documentary West of the tracks. Filmed between 1999 and 2001, it details what was then the slow decline of Shenyang's industrial Tiexi district, an area that was once a vibrant example of China's socialist economy. “Nine hours long with not a minute wasted, this portrait of a dying industrial district is a towering, epoch-defining masterpiece”, said London’s Telegraph in a piece on The films that defined the noughties. This is, in passing, one of the top ten longest cinematic films ever released: it is number 6, and we also have number 5 – Shoah (Claude Lanzmann’s holocaust documentary).

A different kind of sublimity is available from 1950s America. Try The complete Gidget collection (Gidget 1959, Gidget goes Hawaiian 1961 and Gidget goes to Rome 1963) and then for surfeit the complete television series of Gidget (1965-66). If you enjoyed this freshness, then The Ernie Kovacs collection will add to your

enjoyment: in the US, he was television's original genius. “In the infancy of any medium, there will be someone who realise its potential well before anyone else. Ernie Kovacs was such a visionary, and between 1951 and 1962 he broke rules that hadn't even been made yet, creating a television "language" that is now taken for granted”.

American television made David Duchovny famous and fame has convinced him to write a novel. Holy cow is Elsie Bovary, who, one night, sees through the farmhouse window the farmer's family gathered around a bright Box God - and what the Box God reveals about something called an 'industrial meat farm' shakes Elsie's understanding of her world to its core. Miranda July, too, has achieved fame through film (Me and you and everyone we know) and performance art: now she brings this quirky aesthetic to the novel The first bad man. There’s no lack of bad men in other mainstream American fiction: one wants Nicole Frank dead in Lisa Gardner’s Crash & burn, another is killing big-game hunters without any sense of irony in Tess Gerritsen’s Rizzoli & Isles: die again and a third has tried to add Dana Nolan to his serial body count in Tami Hoag’s Cold cold heart.

Scandinavian writing may be just as cold, but there are often extenuating circumstances. Jussi Adler-Olsen’s The alphabet house is set in a mental hospital in Nazi Germany. Karl Ove Knausgaard has the excuse that his fiction recreates his own life: Dancing in the dark, volume 4 of My Struggle, sets out his moves as an 18-year-old fresh out of high school, when he was posted to a tiny fisherman's village far north of the polar circle to work as a school teacher. Leif

Persson, in Free falling, as if in a dream, re-examines the mystery of Olof Palme’s 1986 assassination through a fictional cold case investigation.

But the Library always wants to represent to you the best and most diverse range of points of view, even in fiction, so that as a community we increase our understanding of other points of view, and thus grow in wisdom and awareness. So, also from America, we present Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in paradise, which combines a Caribbean honeymoon with black humour. Jonathan Lethem combines the uncanny with the mundane in Lucky Alan and other stories. Charles Baxter’s stories also ensnare the reader in his request: There’s something I want you to do.

Other US fiction portrays leakage around the edges of fortress America. Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the next life tells of a Chinese Muslim of the Uighur tribe who enters the US via Mexico, makes her way to New York where, keeping a low profile and employed in a restaurant, she meets a veteran of the Iraqi war who's afflicted with PTSD. Cristina Henriquez tells beautiful tales of Latino waves crashing onto the shores in The book of unknown Americans. Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee members works in a smaller compass with a plot which may resonate in Armidale: the hero “is a beleaguered professor of creative writing and literature in a small and not very distinguished liberal arts college in the Midwest. His department is facing draconian cuts and squalid quarters, while one

floor above them the Economics Department is getting lavishly remodelled offices. His once-promising writing career is in the doldrums, as is his romantic life, in part as the result of his unwise use of his private affairs for his novels. In short, his life is a tale of woe, and the vehicle this droll and inventive novel uses to tell that tale is a series of hilarious letters of recommendation that he is endlessly called upon by his students and colleagues to produce, each one of which is a small masterpiece of high dudgeon, low spirits, and passive-aggressive strategies”. 

We have novels from Libya before Gaddafi (Kamal ben Hameda’s gentle Under the Tripoli sky), Gaddafi’s Libya (the dark satire of Mansour Bushnaf’s Chewing gum), the new and very different South Africa (Wolf, wolf by Eben Venter) and Korea (Sun-mi Hwang’s The hen who dreamed she could fly, a story of such charm and familiarity – “no longer content to lay eggs on command only to have them carted off to the market, a hen glimpses her future every morning through the barn doors, where the other animals roam free, and comes up with a plan to escape into the wild and to hatch an egg of her own” - it has been made into a movie).

China, France and Germany are also represented: Mo Yan’s first new novel since he won the Nobel prize in 2012, Frog, has jumped into being, depicting a world of desperate families, illegal surrogates, forced abortions, and the guilt of those who must enforce the one child policy; Yu Hua’s The seventh day tries to understand life in

modern China with this echoing plot line – “Yang Fei was born on a moving train. Lost by his mother, adopted by a young switchman, raised with simplicity and love, he is utterly unprepared for the tempestuous changes that await him and his country. As a young man, he searches for a place to belong in a nation that is ceaselessly reinventing itself, but he remains on the edges of society. At age forty-one, he meets an accidental and unceremonious death. Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest. Over the course of seven days, he encounters the souls of the people he's lost”.

France has Mathias Enard following up the amazing Zone with a Moroccan Street of thieves; Agota Kristof telling her history as a displaced Hungarian come to Paris in The illiterate; Karim Miske playing Arab jazz between Paris and New York; a New York Review reprint of the Victor Segalen classic Rene Leys (set in China, written there in 1913-1914); and, even more cross-culturally, Murder on the Ile Sordou is written by an American, ML Longworth, who lives in Aix, teaches in Paris and writes the Verlaque and Bonnet Provencal mystery series in English, hoping to “enchant mystery lovers with a taste for good food and gorgeous landscapes”.

Jorg Fauser leads the German team from the past with a fictionalised account of his own Raw material of drug-addled commune-living times in Europe in the sixties and seventies. Alois Hotschnig reveals the claustrophobic effect of Nazi prison camp involvement on Ludwig’s room and the whole village in which it is

found. Ferdiand von Schirach turns his sharp legal mind to The girl who wasn’t there in a dark Berlin thriller.

Australian fiction can, at a stretch, include Michel Faber, whose new novel, The book of strange new things, speaks of faith and relationships and galaxies between. Michel was born in the Netherlands and lives now in Scotland but grew up in Australia between 1967 and 1993. Bob Blunt could hardly sound more Australian until you hear his novel’s title: The year my hair fell out – and then you find out that it all loosely happened in South Korea on the first of his eleven years living abroad in different parts of Asia. Peter Corris’ Cliff Hardy makes his 40th appearance in Gun control, looking about Camden and the Blue Mountains amongst crooked cops and bikie gangs.

Former High Court judge, Ian Callinan, too, has proved he is a dab hand at the murder mystery, returning with The only case. Robert Gott says no – remember The Port Fairy murders in 1943? “It seems straightforward, they have a signed confession - but it soon becomes apparent that nothing is straightforward about the incident. The novel examines the tensions that simmer in a small town, riven by class and religious divides, and under economic stress from the shrinking of its fishing industry, and the exploitation of fishermen by Melbourne's markets.” Does this country offer more than murderous fiction, you ask? The poetry of John Kinsella (Sack his latest) just keeps coming out of Western Australia and New York and Amsterdam and wherever else his growing reputation takes

him. Judith Beveridge also has a fine new volume of poetry out now, Devadatta’s poems taking the voice of Buddha’s cousin.

We also have a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s Love poems, a little poetry pamphlet from Anne Carson, The Albertine workout, and The poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013, a comprehensive overview of the Saint Lucian Nobel Prizewinner’s work.

And here we would segue into an outline of the best new non-fiction on the Library shelves, but the newsletter size precludes more than just a passing reference to, for example, Chris Hadfield’s You are here: around the world in 92 minutes (photographs from the International Space Station); Katherine Courage’s Octopus! The most mysterious creature in the sea; and Sebastiao Salgado’s staggering evolution as a photographer of Genesis on earth.

He have works on Goya: order and disorder, the ongoing effects of the GFC (House of debt: how they (and you) caused the great recession, and how we can prevent it from happening again), James Lovelock still imagining that our relationship with Gaia presents A

rough ride to the future, and A theory of the drone by Gregoire Chamayou in which he observes that “For the first time in history, a state has claimed the right to wage war across a mobile battlefield that potentially spans the globe. Remote-control flying weapons, he argues, take us well beyond even George W. Bush's justification for the war on terror. What we are seeing is a fundamental transformation of the laws of war that have defined military conflict as between combatants”.

Finally, there are The sacred plants of India, the beautifully-coloured Cowardice: a brief history, Rob Delaney reflecting on his life as: mother, wife, sister, human, warrior, falcon, yardstick, turban, cabbage and the CSIRO story of The plastic banknote: from concept to reality – which reminds us of how our dollar could have been called austral, ming, kwid or royal before we lost our collective nerve.