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Happenings
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2005
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Monday
March 7th , 8:00pm
Thomas
Keneally – talks and reads at The Bookworm
One
of the most successful modern Australian writers,
Keneally has been short-listed for the Booker
Prize on 4 occasions: in 1972 for The
Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip
from the Forest in 1975, and Confederates
in 1979, before winning the prize in 1982 with Schindler’s
Ark. This last novel caused something of a controversy
at the time as it was considered by some to be more
a work of journalistic reporting than a novel of fiction,
which isn’t supposed to be in the spirit of things.
In any event, by the time Stephen Spielberg filmed
his version of the book under the title Schindler’s
List in 1993, the controversy was forgotten.
On
the Australian front, Keneally has won the Miles
Franklin Award twice with Bring
Larks and Heroes and Three
Cheers for the Paraclete. It might be considered
strange that he hasn’t won the major Australian Literary
Award more often, but it must be remembered that the
Miles Franklin is awarded for literary works depicting
Australian life and settings. A number of Keneally’s
later works have reflected his wider range of interests
and deal with subjects which are not confined to a
specific Australian context. In addition, there appears
to have been a move away from older, more established
writers such as Keneally by the Miles Franklin judges.
In
The Age newspaper of Saturday 7th November 1998 there
is the announcement of Keneally’s new book The
Great Shame. In an article in that paper, Keneally
writes: "Some years ago an editor suggested that
having written on the Holocaust I should write something
on the great Irish catastrophe of the 19th century…We
agreed that the 19th-century calamity, particularly
the famine, was compelling. But it had been splendidly
written about by a number of writers. And it was not
comparable to the Holocaust…In any case, I told
the editor that if ever I was silly enough to buy
into the tendentious question of Irish history I would
want to tell the story not frontally from the point
of view of convicts transported to Australia for particular
crimes, not those aimed directly at person or property
but those designed as social or political protest."
The result was his new book. The research and writing
took three years – the longest gap between any successive
books in Keneally’s writing history.
Back to Top
Tuesday
March 15th , 7:30pm
The Great Maggot Detective – An Illustrated Talk By
Mark Benecke
Dr
Mark Benecke is the world’s only freelance full-time
forensic entomologist. He has resuscitated the ancient
science of forensic entomology, which had been used
in homicide cases for the best part of 700 years but
had fallen out of criminological fashion after the
Second World War. According to Benecke, the earliest
known forensic entomology case was reported by the
scholar Sung T’Zu in 13th century China, when a body
was found in a paddy field and the murderer was identified
by the flies that were drawn to the invisible traces
of blood on his sickle. By the late 19th century forensic
entomology had developed into a formal discipline,
with maggots being used primarily to determine the
post-mortem interval – the length of time a body has
been dead. From 1855 the French pioneers Bergeret
d’Arbois and Paul Brouardel began using insects to
determine the times and locations of murders, the
presence of poison and other toxins in badly decomposed
corpses, and the identification of suspects and crime
weapons through bites and insect traces. Now Dr Benecke
has expanded the field and travels across the world
to work on cases, getting intimately acquainted with
the kind of squirming larvae from which myriad phobias
have grown.
Back to Top
Tuesday
March 22nd , 7:30pm
Rhapsody in Red, How Western Classical Music Became
Chinese – A Talk by Sheila Melvin and Jindong Cai
Western
classical music has become as Chinese as Peking Opera.
Rhapsody in Red is a lucidly written account of classical
music in China, showing how Western classical music
entered China, and how is became Chinese, tracing
the biographies of the bold visionaries who carried
out the musical merger. Sheila
Melvin is a frequent contributor to the Asian Wall
Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal, The International
Herald Tribune, and the New York Times. She often
writes on music related subjects, including western
classical music and Chinese opera. Jindong
Cai was born in Beijing, and began his conducting
career during the Cultural Revolution. He has first
hand knowledge of many of the movements and events
described in Rhapsody. Prof. Cai is now the Director
of Orchestral Studies at Stanford University.
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The
Bookworm
Building 4, Nan Sanlitun Road,
Chao Yang District, Beijing
100000, P.R. China
Tel: (010) 6586 9507
Email: [email protected]
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