August 2017

From the Committee Movie FundraiserThis will be held on the 7th September at the Belgrave cinema. The movie will be Hampstead and will screen at 6.30pm. Tickets will be $18 which includes a lucky door prize. Please tell your friends and support us by coming to the film.

Six Word CompetitionThe judges have met and decisions have been made! The winner and runners up will be announced on 11th September. First prize is a $50 voucher from Readers Companion and the runners up will receive $30 vouchers. A thank you to Martin Mantel for his excellent help and for giving so generously of his time. He enabled the whole process to run smoothly.

Remembrance DayOur special talk on this occasion will be held in the Library November 9th at 10.30am and the talk will be given by Helen Evans.

Name ChangeAt our meeting on August 14th, the Committee invited members along to vote on the name change from Friends of Dumaresq Library (FOADL) to Friends of Armidale Library (FOAL). This was passed unanimously. Members were also asked to help generate ideas about enhancing/supporting the Library and involving members in FOAL activities.

FRIENDS OF ARMIDALE DUMARESQ LIBRARY

NEWSLETTER

Several members attended our meeting and we all brainstormed some ideas and decided to act upon several suggestions and to investigate some other possibilities.

Enhancing The Appearance Of The Library * Asking NERAM if works from their collections might be given on loan to the Library. FOAL could possibly contribute to the cost of providing hanging fixtures.*. A display pin board for the children's area.*. Soft fabric furniture and soft fabric art could be provided.ACCESS:*. Improving safety in the car park for children, ease of parking, access and signage.*. FOAL has already taken up these issues with the Council. Some of the suggestions which have been made, have to go to the 'Body Corporate'.ACTIVITIES:*. A suggestion box that would be a FOAL initiative (so that it would not impact on staff).*. After school activities.*. A speed book group where people would have five minutes to discuss a book they are currently reading with other members.*. Library book club organised by members.*. A DVD club that would work like a book club. The Library has many excellent DVDs on its shelves.

Book Review

QuietSusan CainSusan Cain begins her psychology book with an attempt to define the characteristics of introverts and extroverts. Using quotes from renowned sources, as well as anecdotal stories, she claims these two groups generally behave differently, with extroverts being more talkative and dominant and introverts being quiet and shy in social situations. Later on, she does explain that the two groups merge in many instances and people may exhibit different characteristics in different settings. However, she asserts that personality traits remain stable over a lifetime.

This book is written principally about American institutions where there is a culture of respect for extroversion. Schools require kids to actively participate, making it difficult for introverted kids to learn. Work places are often open planned, leaving no privacy for workers trying to concentrate. Brainstorming in groups is venerated, whereas Cain feels the new Groupthink stifles creativity.

Cain does have some good suggestions: She brings home the idea that true self esteem comes from competence, and well developed talents or interests boost confidence. Love, she feels, is essential but gregariousness is optional. Extroverts may have dozens of friends with introverts having a few close friends. Here, she talks about quality versus quantity.

The book has interesting insights in various chapters, but otherwise it tends to be dry and repetitive. The quoted references could have been more properly put into footnotes, and I did wonder about the validity of the quoted psychological and biological studies.

Marnie French.

New in the Library

For those who wish for things to be different, Ann and Jeff Vandermeer bring you The time-traveler’s almanac, “the largest and most definitive collection of time travel stories ever assembled”. For the experience of something different, try Experience: culture, cognition, and the common sense, which is designed to stimulate sensory and intellectual exploration (for instance, “A heat-sensitive cover … reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers … are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are … in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed.“). North enables the sights and sounds of New Zealand to flood your home via the magic of DVD technology (“lighthouses to lava flows, kayaks to kiwis, beaches to butterflies”). Down-home blues and righteous indignation mix on the tracks of the Backsliders’ fourteenth album, Heathen songbook.

Variety and confusion continue in Joy Morgan’s exploration of Martin Sharp: his life and times. AA Gill is also gone but not forgotten: hot on the heels of his autobiography (Pour me) and his death comes the lightly opinionated Lines in the sand: collected journalism. If that is too much to stomach, try Hannah Crum’s The big book of kombucha: brewing, flavouring and enjoying the health benefits of fermented tea. And if too much ferment is never enough, try digesting Greg Iles’ final volume in the Natchez burning trilogy,

Mississippi blood (family grief, local politics, white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan).

If the world is too much with you in this barrage of contemporaneity, don’t despair, as we also offer old new titles this month as well. Prashad cooking with Indian masters is available in its thirty-fifth reprint edition. Howard Spring’s famous 1938 novel of multigenerational tragedy, My son, my son is newly available in a beautiful Apollo paperback. Murray Perahia performs The French suites of Johann Sebastian Bach with his customary warmth and balance. We also have an eight-disc set of Frank Capra documentaries, Why we fight, composed at the start of World War II at the request of the US War Department.

Just in time, we have Mark Forsyth’s A Christmas cornucopia: the hidden stories behind our yuletide traditions. Roger Housden’s advice might also be timely, as he urges Dropping the struggle: seven ways to love the life you have. Relax on Chairs by architects (Agata Toromanoff) and listen to the largely acoustic tenth album by Chicago’s Wilco, Schmilco.

There are inspiring graphic novels by Sarah Lippett (Stan and nan) Marcelino Truong (Such a lovely little war: Saigon, 1961-63) and Steffen Kverneland (Munch). The short stories in Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The refugees explore questions of immigration, identity, love and family, and follow up his novel The sympathizer (winner not only of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but also the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the ALA Carnegie Medal for Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction).

An earlier America is recalled in Charles Neider’s 1956 novel, The authentic death of Hendry Jones; an earlier USSR by Christa Wolf in her Accident: a day’s news, fictionally recalling the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident; an earlier Europe in Franz Kafka’s posthumously published short fiction, newly translated by Michael Hofmann and collected by Penguin under the tile of The burrow; and an earlier mysterious universe of the fifteenth century when The Voynich manuscript, the world's most mysterious book - written in an unknown script by an unknown author, was composed.

Other illuminations appear in Persian painting: the arts of the book and portraiture (Adel Adamova), Islamic civilization in thirty lives: the first 1,000 years (Chase Robinson), Abstract expressionism (David Anfam) and The Russian vision: the art of Ilya Repin (David Jackson).

Further Russian insights, abundant in this centenary year of the revolution, are found in Revolution: Russian art 1917-1932 (from a Royal Academy exhibition), Arsenal (Alexander Dovzhenko’s 1929 classic silent film of the Ukrainian Civil War) and in a series of DVDs compiled by the British Film Institute under the series title of Early Russian cinema. Also of note from these northern latitudes is a richly-illustrated account of polar bears called Ice bear: the cultural history of an Arctic icon.

There are cold-climate comfort items in the Library as well in this blustery August. Aeneas Macdonald waxes lyrical about Whisky; Gail Harland evokes all the romance of Snowdrop flowers (and distinguishes them from the snowflakes in my front garden); the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir help perform Arvo Part’s Adam’s passion on DVD; and David Lang’s haunting instrumental chamber music on Child is just the ticket for quietness in front of the fire.

A whirlwind global finish to our monthly summary should include mention of new Bradt travel guides to the lesser-visited Ghana, Lebanon and Iran; a meal in Iran from Najmieh Batmanglij’s Joon: Persian cooking made simple; Paulo Horta’s investigation of Marvellous thieves: secret authors of the Arabian nights; and Richard Heller’s poetic essays of White on green: celebrating the drama of Pakistan cricket.

Armidale International Film Festival

Now that this year’s successful Festival has passed, we can reveal that the Library has eight of the thirteen AIFF films in the Library at this stage (Eagle huntress, Fencer, Land of mine, Salesman, Coming home, Elle, Victoria, and Our little sister). Two others are on order (A man called Ove, Where am I going?), and we will be pursuing copies of Unknown girl, Julieta and Graduation as the days go by.