Books, books, and more books. For those who never have enough...

As readers of this blog know, I am a lifelong bibliophile. I am sure other bibliophiles will like this post.

Why Real Books Will Never Die

#BlessedAreTheCrazy - Please join in this synchroblog

For TradPadders who blog, please consider this synchroblog which is happening NOW!  Details below >>>

There is a synchroblog coming up. This is the facebook site which references it >>> http://goo.gl/xMzYBH The details below are copied from the site:

To commemorate the launch of Sarah Griffith Lund‘s new book — Blessed Are The Crazy: Breaking the Silence About Mental Illness, Family, and Church — and to participate in National Mental Illness Awareness Week (Oct. 5-11), we invite you to join in a Synchroblog on mental illness, family, and church.

Break the silence by sharing your personal story of how you’ve been impacted by mental illness in your family and/or in your faith community.

NOTE: We are joining with another synchroblog for this event, so the posting date and instructions are a bit different. This is also coming up quickly!

First, publish your post by midnight on MONDAY, October 6th. Post the links in the comment section here as normal. We at the synchroblog will post all your links over at the Facebook event for the other group.

If you want, you may also use the hashtag ‪#‎BlessedAreTheCrazy‬ when you post your links to your blog posts on Facebook, Twitter, etc. Follow the hashtag:https://twitter.com/search?q=%23BlessedAreTheCrazy

Second, we will put up the full link list on Tuesday, October 7th for you to publish at the end on your blog post.

We hope you will participate and break the silence by sharing YOUR story!

Here is the Synchroblog post for this event:

http://synchroblog.wordpress.com/2014/09/25/october-synchroblog-announcement-mental-illness-awareness/

Book launch: "Some shorter than others" - Ballarat Library, Sunday 7 September.

The Ballarat Library, 178 Doveton Street, Ballarat 

is playing host to a book launch next Sunday 7 September, at 2pm.

Neville Hiatt (writer) and Sylvia Hollis (illustrator) 

are launching a collection of short stories for the young and young at heart.

Sylvia's illustrations are currently on display at the library until September 11.

There's a limited edition copy of the book to be won.   

Go to Facebook to check it out. 

The book is also available as an Ebook and an Audio book.

Neville is on Facebook
Sylvia's Portfolio
Sylvia's website

ANZ LitLovers LitBlog - Germinal by Emile Zola - the book and the movie

 

I am a frequent reader of Lisa Hill’s ANZ LitLovers LitBlog. Perhaps you won't keep up by reading every book from every post - but at least you will have a good idea of what you should be reading. You will be in the know. 

I subscribe to the blog and get a missive in my email every day.  To-day's looks magnificent: Germinal by Emile Zola An epic tale. But, Gerard Depardieu fan that I am I think I will hunt down the movie after seeing the trailer below.

World Matters 2011 Writers - Missing Peace @ Montsalvat - 14, 15, 16 October 2011

Diamond Valley Oxfam, Montsalvat, ELTHAMbookshop

Present

The 7^th Annual

World Matters 2010 Writers - Missing Peace

14, 15, 16 October

Venue: The Barn, Montsalvat, Hillcrest Avenue , Eltham   

 The Great Hall, Montsalvat

Session 1 - Friday 14 October 7.00-8.30pm

Superb storyteller Elliot Perlman is known for Three Dollars, The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming, Seven Types of Ambiguity. He discusses his epic new novel The Street Sweeper dealing with memory, love, guilt, heroism, the extremes of racism and unexpected kindness.

Chair: Sally Warhaft, Journalist and Commentator

Session 2 - Saturday 15th October
10.00am: Registration and Morning Tea
10.15am: Welcome: Stephen Lavender, Diamond Valley Oxfam
10. 30am: A Noongar Voice

Miles Franklin, Commonwealth Literature Award and Premier’s Literary Award winning author, Kim Scott, shares his colourful, warm optimistic view of the indigenous heart of our country and the need to honour the languages in which we first learn to speak. Kim will discuss his recent novel, That Deadman Dance, and children’s picture books Noongar Mambara Bakitj and Mamang.

Chair: Morag Fraser
This session is supported by Nillumbik Reconciliation Group

12. 00pm: Lunch Time Launch:
The Boy and the Crocodile

Teaming up with artists from Arte Moris, a not-for-profit art school in Dili, East Timorese children have painted scenes from the Legend of East Timor, a parable about the kindness of strangers narrated in Tetum and English. Proceeds from the sale of the book go to the Familia Hope Orphanage.

 

This session, which includes lunch, will be held in the Great Hall and costs $15.00
Supported by East Timor Women Australia who will run 

a fund raising handicrafts stall at World Matters

Session 3 - Saturday 15 October
1.15pm: Growing Up

Listen to unexpected stories that emerge when cultures clash and the mix of identities that make up a life. Elaine Kennedy’s Waiting for a Wide Horse Sky details the plight of migrant factory workers in South Korea. Tanveer Ahmed’s Exotic Rissole is an irreverent, funny memoir spanning rural Bangladesh through to western Sydney, looking at the complexities of managing tradition with modernity.

Chair: Jane Sullivan, Literary columnist, The Age.

Session 4 - Saturday 15 October

2.30pm: Futility of war

‘The war’, wrote one of its fiercest opponents and 19th century diarist Charles Gerville, ‘was founded in delusion and error.’ Chief political correspondent for SBS, Karen Middleton, An Unwinnable War, philosopher-historian Ian Bickerton, An Illusion of Victory, academics Fay Anderson and Richard Trembath, Witnesses to War, present their views and research on the mythmaking, propaganda and the tensions between political and military decision .

Chair: Carole Wigg, Medical Association for Prevention of War

3.45pm: Afternoon TeaSession 5  - Saturday 15 October

4. 00pm: Family Disturbances

Novelists Tony Birch, Blood, and Francesca Rendle-Short, Bite Your Tongue, discuss the worlds without sanctuary where characters find the strength of innocence amidst violence and genuine evil. Presented within a world of obsession and trauma the writers ask whether any of us is immune to the forces of destruction.

Chair: Morag Fraser

 Session 6  - Saturday 15 October

5.15pm: Poetry for Humanity

This perennial and highly popular session at all World Matters presented by Adelaide based Friendly Street Poets Elaine Barker, Ros Schulz and Serbian born Jelena Dinic. These empathetic poets couple their concerns for humanity with great poetic skill and strong personal voices in their profoundly moving, sometimes dark, writing that quietly and at a deep level open up their subjects for reflection and contemplation.

Participating chair: Elaine Barker

6.15pm:Twilight refreshments

Session 7  - Saturday 15 October

6.30-7.30pm: Singing History

John Lander, former Australian Ambassador to Iran and Permanent Delegate to UNESCO, sings songs
that are personal musical reflections in situations of conflict and disaster including the Song of the Children of Chernobyl which world premiered in Minsk. John will be accompanied by one of Australia’s finest pianists
Matthew Field.

Session 8  - Sunday 16 October

6.15pm: Morning tea and Registrations

10.15am: Welcome

Stephen Lavender, Oxfam and Helen Coleman, Mayor, Shire of Nillumbik

10.30am: The Voice of Reason

Professor Ian Lowe, The Big Fix, Living in the Hothouse, pre-eminent scientist, environmentalist, cultural commentator and president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, thinks we have a chance, but we have to act now. Ian’s new book is an environmental and community call to arms – through logic rather than fear-mongering.

Chair:Morag Fraser
Supported by the Victorian Climate Action Calendar

Session 9  - Sunday 16 October

11.45am: Missing Peace-Spotlight on Sri Lanka

“We all have to take positions when the temple bells ring.”

A child soldier with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, Niromi De Soyza, Tamil Tigress, activist Jeremy Liyanage and photographer Michael Baranovic share their insights and the compelling need for freedom amidst oppression.

Chair: David Feith , Teacher,Globalisation, Monash University

1.00pm:Lunch $15.00

Session 10  - Sunday 16 October
1.45pm: Singing For All He’s Worth

Essayists Raimond Gaita, Arnold Zable and Morag Fraser pay warm and thoughtful homage to an extraordinary life and a late-blooming creativity that was as heroic as it was humble. Melbourne citizen Jacob Rosenberg, liberated from the Lodz ghetto lived to become a unique poet and writer of novels and memoir.

Session 11  - Sunday 16 October

3.00pm: Our World in Poetry

A good poem is one that the world can’t forget or is delighted to rediscover. Australian Poetry from 1788, is a landmark anthology of Australian poetry with over 1000 poems from 170 Australian poets, including translations of Aboriginal song poems, as well as short critical biographies. This afternoon we hear poets Geoffrey Lehmann, Ian McBryde, Emma Lew and Craig Sherborne.

4.00pm: Afternoon Tea

Session 12  - Sunday 16 October

4.15pm: Digging up a Past

Whereas it was once assumed that Australia was settled by humans only in the past few thousand or even hundred years, research dramatically proclaimed that in fact Aborigines had been living here before the human race inhabited the Americas. Among the individuals who proved that Australia did have an ancient history, Emeritus Professor John Mulvaney, AO, CMG has been the most persistent and successful. Digging up a Past is a lucid engaging story of Australian history coming of age.

Session 13  - Sunday 16 October

5.20pm: Banning Islamic Books

In 2005, a few days after al-Qaeda terrorists killed many people in the London tube, newspapers in Sydney began a campaign against what they said were terrorist books on sale in a bookshop in Lakemba. Shortly afterwards Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, attempted to get eight books banned by the Film and Literature Classification board. Richard Pennell, Pam Pryde and Emmett Stinson discuss the dire consequences of knee jerk reactions and laws that attempt to muffle dissonant voices.

6.00pm:Twilight refreshments

6.15-7.15pm: Raga Dolls Cost: $15.00
“ it’s good to be reminded of a mythical world of honour,beauty, optimism and even a little wit.”

The Raga Dolls Quartet, co-founded in 2000 by composer and violinist David Osborne and piano
accordionist George Butrumlis, has long championed such a world. Come and listen to their vibrant original new Australian music and retrospective reflections on an age where domestic music-making and small scale ensembles abounded.

Festival Pass: 

$60 includes 13 sessions, morning and
afternoon tea and twilight refreshments

 
Daily Pass: 

15th, 16th October: $30.00
Each Session: $7 unless otherwise stated
 

Students: 

$40 Festival Pass; $5.00 per session.
Lunch $15
Prepaid, early bookings are essential:
ELTHAMbookshop@bigpond.com
970 Main Road, Eltham 9439 8700

PLEASE NOTE:

Meera of the Eltham Bookshop has written to me saying: 

Please let fans of your site know 

that if anyone quotes your blog the cost for each session will be $5.00.

With regards,

Meera

Miss Eagle says:

Don't stand upon the order of thy booking

but get thee to thy booking now.

This program is tremendous.

If you don't believe me,

then you haven't delved into the links I've provided! 

elthambookshop@bigpond.com

970 Main Road Eltham

9439 8700

World Book Day : John le Carre : the Bodleian Libraries : Dr Zhivago #worldbookday #bodleian #lecarre

To-day is World Book Day.  Find out all about it here.  

What is fascinating this year - if you are a John le Carre fan and a fan of his most famous character, George Smiley - is that he has presented his literary archive to the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford in England. The intention is that the Bodleian will become the permanent home of the archive.

You can see images of some of the manuscript for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy here.

You can see images of some of the manuscript for The Russia House here.

I recall the movie of The Russia House quite fondly.  You see, I have been in love with Boris Pasternak since I read Dr Zhivago at the age of seventeen.  I have always kept a copy of the book on my shelves – and, in fact, have two at the moment.  You see, I don’t want to be without Dr Zhivago’s poems which are at the back of the novel.

I am not much of a traveller in foreign climes and have never visited Russia.  I always promised myself, that if ever I did visit Russia, I would visit Pasternak’s grave at Peredelkino.  In The Russia House is a scene in which Sean Connery’s character, Barley Blair, spends a Sunday at a lunch with the literary lights of Moscow at Peredelkino.  After lunch, he visits Pasternak’s grave.

So, in a sense, courtesy of John le Carre and Australian director Fred Schepisi (whose family used to own a pub at the old gold mining town of Ravenswood near Charters Towers in North Queensland), I feel like I have been to the grave.  I have paid my homage.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

The Collected George Smiley Radio Dramas: 

Eight BBC Full-Cast Productions Starring Simon Russell Beale (BBC Radio 4 Dramatisations)

3 Titles By John Le Carre: 

"The Russia House," "A Perfect Spy," "The Honourable School Boy"

Doctor Zhivago

The Poems of Doctor Zhivago

Art Blart and Anselm Kiefer and The Norns

Tweet

 

Urd Werdande Skuld (The Norns)  1983

Oil, shellac, emulsion and fibre on canvas
support: 4205 x 2805 x 60 mm
painting

ARTIST ROOMS Acquired jointly with the National Galleries of Scotland through The d'Offay Donation with assistance from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund 2008

AR00036

Between 1980 and 1983, Kiefer made paintings that revisited images of Hitler’s monumental architecture. Using old photographs and architectural plans, Kiefer transformed symbols of Nazi authority into derelict building-sites. In this work, the vaulted structure contains the unseen presence of the Norns, the three figures of fate in Germanic mythology, named Past, Present and Future. Their names are scratched into the ceiling, while below a glowing fire points to salvation and regeneration. Drawing on the artist’s fascination with Norse folklore and Wagnerian motifs, the work reflects his attempts to reconcile his country’s recent history through the myths of Germanic legend.

 (From the online caption April 2009)

Description from here 

I subscribe to a blog entitled Art Blart. That is where this image of The Norns has come from - and there are other images there, too, by the same painted. The artist is Anselm Kiefer.  I find his work striking and meditative.  More images of his work can be found here, and here.

  

Anselm Kiefer: Heaven And Earth 

 

Anselm Kiefer 

 

Anselm Kiefer/Paul Celan: Myth, Mourning and Memory 

 

Anselm Kiefer: Maria Walks amid the Thorn 

 

Anselm Kiefer: Sculpture & Painting 

From a Funny Picture Book to Chasing the Rainbow and Utopian Man

 

Do you remember this, Trad Padders?

So many Australians recall this book as part of their childhood.

Herself (born 1964) remembers all the funny or peculiar people.

Edward William Cole penetrated our lives and our leisure.

And so Lisa Lang wrote a biography.

Now she has taken all the material she acquired for this non-fiction work

and turned to a fiction work...

Utopian Man

Angela Meyer has reviewed the book here

and she launched the book last night at the

Melbourne City Library.

As Meyer says:

It must have been a leap to take all that research and construct a narrative out of it – to get inside Cole’s headspace, to capture the emotional dimensions of real life – of his family and friends. But [Lisa Lang] is very successful in doing so. 

Utopian ManLisa Lang
Allen & Unwin
9781742373348
2010 (Australia)