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If despair and desolation can be said to have had a high point in poetry in English during the modern era, it is in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly ‘The Hollow Men’. While reading Martin Langford’s remarkable The Human Project: New & Selected Poems, I was reminded of other poets whose reputations depend upon the discomforting poems they have written. The until recently neglected American poet Weldon Kees, who may or may not have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge in 1955, wrote about the underside of the American dream, its sterility, in a tone of unwavering bitterness, but his noirish imagination and technical brilliance make the poems compelling. Something similar could be said of the English poet Peter Reading, whose expression of undiminished anger is a result of his disgust with humanity, and its condition terminal, though his pervasive self-righteousness can be wearing.

The press release for David Owen’s latest book describes it as a ‘thoroughly researched’ work by a shark ‘outsider’ that aims to ‘comprehensively overturn our negative and damaging perceptions of sharks’. I cannot claim expert knowledge of sharks, but personal experience makes me a suitable subject on which to measure the author’s effectiveness. When I was a child, one of my sisters was bitten in shallow water by a shark that had breached a netted beach in North Queensland. Although her injuries were not life-threatening, the resulting panic had a lasting effect: I rarely swim in the ocean, and have a healthy respect for sharks.

In the mid twentieth century, American television was dominated by two talking horses called Mr Ed. The first, the equine hero of a sitcom also called Mr Ed (catchier than his real name, Bamboo Harvester), twisted his mouth more or less in sync with a dubbed basso profondo voice. He had lots to say, mostly preceded by an often disdainful reference to his hapless owner, Wilbur, the only person Mr Ed talked to, whose name came out as ‘Will-BURRRRRRR!’. This mildly popular series ran for six seasons.

At the outset of Mothers and Others, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy poses a thought experiment. Each year 1.6 billion passengers fly around the world. We do so with remarkable ease. Just imagine, Hrdy asks, if our fellow human passengers suddenly morphed into another species of ape. We would be lucky to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, or with any babies on board still alive. Bloody appendages would litter the aisles. It would be mayhem.

I approached this readable and well-informed study expecting a middling book on a middling filmmaker. Michael Winterbottom is obviously a talented man by the standards of modern British commercial cinema, but I have always associated his work with a routine blend of fashionable technique and pious liberal sentiment. Nor did Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams raise my hopes with their introduction, in which they praise Winterbottom’s business sense and his avoidance of ‘high-flown accounts of what he is up to’. Above all, they seem impressed by the sheer industry of a director who has averaged one feature a year for the past decade and a half; however you judge him, ‘he does keep getting his films made’.

‘My problem is that because of my anxiety disorder, publicity is close to torture,’ Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek tells Ben Naparstek, explaining why she informed a newspaper in 2004 that she hoped she wouldn’t be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (she was). With or without anxiety disorders, writers face a conundrum. They communicate through the written word, but increasingly they also talk aloud in public and in the media. When writers are interviewed, they often traverse an awkward middle ground between adopting a public persona and revealing the inner sources of their inspiration. There is a tension – frequently evident in the pages of In Conversation – between a writer’s need to publicise, explain or defend his or her works and beliefs, and a desire to allow the writing to speak for itself. For many writers, there is also the challenge of making their verbal communication as erudite as their writing. As Norwegian novelist Per Petterson tells Naparstek, ‘Talk is entirely overvalued, I think.’

As with most literary journals, Heat 21 is a curate’s egg. Notably, Without A Paddle shines when in analytical-critical, essayistic mode. The poetry and fiction are rather more prosaic, with a few exceptions: Ken Bolton in fine form; Michael Hofmann’s beautifully spare poetry. Hofmann’s poem prefaces an extended interview with the poet and German-English translator; his responses are humble, full of sly humour.

Academic historians only took to urban history in any systematic way during the 1970s, but Melbourne, regardless of what historians might have had to say about it, has always had a strong sense of its own identity and culture. In the heyday of 1880s ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, journalist Richard Twopeny saw the city as representing ‘the fullest development of Australian civilisation, whether in commerce or education, in wealth or intellect, in manners and customs – in short, in every department of life’. English historian J.A. Froude, staying in style as a guest at Government House, saw Melbourne people as having ‘boundless wealth, and as bound-less ambition and self-confidence’; they were ‘proud of themselves and of what they have done’.

Why do otherwise sane human beings decide to become music critics? It’s often to jump on the PR treadmill of free passes to gigs and free records for review. There’s the writer who wants to be closer to his idol, the careerist who sees it as one more step to editorial power, or the music junkie who’s compelled to make the leap from mute fanaticism to the written word.