Where are you happiest?
Hiking the bush track around Berry Island in Wollstonecraft and listening to pop hits.

What’s your idea of hell?
Being trapped in a state of permanent distraction.

Ceridwen Dovey (photograph by Shannon Smith)

What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Moderation – in anything in life. I like excess!

What is your favourite film?
Dirty Dancing (1987), directed by Emile Ardolino.

And your favourite book?
At the moment, one of my favourites is All Joy and No Fun: The paradox of modern parenthood, by Jennifer Senior.

In his long poem The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane balances the breadth of his epic vision against a compressive energy, a ballistic sort of expression: ‘So the 20th Century – so / whizzed the Limited – roared by and left.’ Since Crane worked in an American tradition of poet–prophets that includes Walt Whitman and the undersung H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), it is tempting to grant him that. The twentieth century did roar by and go. And the 20th Century Limited, the luxurious passenger train connecting New York to Chicago, furnished it (and him) with an expression of the century’s quarrelsome momentum, its loud, emblematic modernity. That iconic, bullet-shaped train also provides the title and setting for one of Ben Hecht’s most successful comedies, Twentieth Century (1934). A buzzing farce directed by Howard Hawks, it was adapted from a Broadway show of the same name, which Hecht wrote alongside his utmost scrivener-in-arms, Charles MacArthur. For those interested in the screwy art of the insult, get aboard. A delirious tour de force awaits, in which John Barrymore, playing the pompous theatre director Oscar Jaffe, gets to call his stage manager an amoeba!

Sing This at My Funeral is not your conventional ghost story. Invoking Franz Kafka’s words, ‘Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters’, this moving memoir by David Slucki gives shape to the ghost of Zaida Jakub, the grandfather he never knew. Following his beloved father Sluggo’s death in 2015, the author, a Melbourne-born professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, discovered a series of letters written by Zaida Jakub to his brother Mendel in Los Angeles over three decades. Weaving together excerpts of these letters and incorporating family photographs, the memoir reconstructs the story of Zaida Jakub’s profound personal loss during the Holocaust and examines its effects on subsequent generations. In Slucki’s own words, this book is about ‘how the difficult memories of the past shaped the relationships between fathers and their sons, how the ghosts kept multiplying, never far from the surface’.

Heide is the final instalment of an epic trilogy that began with 24 Hours (1996) and was followed by Fitzroy: A biography (2015). It also marks a departure for Π.O. In this third volume (the only one in the trilogy not to be self-published), the unofficial poet laureate of Fitzroy turns his attention away from the migrant and working-class characters of his beloved suburb toward the names that line the bookshelves and gallery walls of the nation’s most august institutions. In more than 500 pages of verse, Heide plots the history, and colonial prehistory, of the artistic milieu that gathered at Sunday and John Reed’s property in Heidelberg. The book’s concern with institutional memory aligns it with Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), a film famous for its unblinking gaze down the corridors of the Winter Palace in the Hermitage Museum. Both works share an architecture of historical imagination in which the museum becomes a memory palace where the artist’s acts of listening and recording conserve without being conservative.