Leaves in the Wind - By David Bentley Hart

David Armstrong writes a delightful Substack newsletter called "A Perennial Digression," for which he also recorded several interviews and he has kindly provided me copies of the four interviews he recorded with me.

This is my favorite among the topics we discussed, I have to say.

Episode #8 - "The Armstrong Archives: Otherworlds" with David Bentley Hart

David Armstrong writes a delightful Substack newsletter called "A Perennial Digression," for which he also recorded several interviews. He has kindly provided me copies of the four interviews he recorded with me.

One shameful confession: at one point, where I meant to say Walter de la Mare, I for some reason said John Masefield. I cannot even imagine how that happened, but it took a week in sackcloth and ashes for me to feel pure again.

Episode #7 - A Conversation Between Ed Simon and David Bentley Hart

A dilatory exchange on prose style, hating Strunk & White, religion and literature, the numinous within the arts, atheists new and old, French bulldogs and their elfin origins, Harold Bloom, and so much more...

The (in person) jovial and (in print) mordant Ed Simon and I had a conversation recently, on any number of topics, but at greatest length on literary style and the tyranny of journalistic parsimony in style-manuals. During the first half of the exchange, there were occasional interjections and interruptions by a certain two-and-a-half year-old commentator, and as a result a few awkward cuts are now to be found in the recording. Once that captious critic had retired in disgust for a nap, things became more continuous (if less amusing).

My article on writing English prose, which provides the topic of our conversation for the first half hour or so, can be found online at https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/how-.... Ed's essay on the same topic can be found at the end of his essay collection Binding the Ghost.

Episode #6 - "The Armstrong Archives: Eschatological Horizons" with David Bentley Hart

David Armstrong writes a delightful Substack newsletter called "A Perennial Digression," for which he also recorded several interviews. The Substack is available online, and he has kindly provided me copies of the four interviews he recorded with me.

Episode #5 - A Conversation Between Henry Weinfield and David Bentley Hart

On poetry, translation, art & transcendence, Ronsard, Leopardi, Dante, consciousness, mind & being, the Last Men, universalism...

I recently enjoyed a conversation with the very eminent poet and translator Henry Weinfield. It ranged freely over many topics, most of which are listed above; but there were others as well (Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, for instance, all dropped by). My first acquaintance with Weinfield’s work came by way of his magisterial rendering of the complete poems of Mallarmé nearly thirty years ago and I have been an admirer ever since; but we became friends only in recent years.

Weinfield truly is a writer of extraordinary gifts; he is also a humane and generous soul.

Episode #4 - A Conversation Between Tariq Goddard and David Bentley Hart

On God, art, the novel, consciousness, the experience of the world, prayer, evil, heaven... (more or less what you might expect)...

Tariq Goddard is not only an esteemed novelist and publisher; he is also an extremely amiable man and a delightful interlocutor. The occasion of our conversation was the appearance of his latest book—High John the Conqueror—which is an ingenious amalgam of police procedural, supernatural thriller, metaphysical meditation, and morality tale. The conversation took its own course and the time passed very quickly.

Episode #3 - A Conversation Between Salley Vickers and David Bentley Hart

On (let's see) fairies, dreams, fiction, consciousness, resurrection, children's literature, time, the Higgs boson, nature and supernature, the principium plenitudinis, and assorted related topics...

Salley Vickers is a wonderful novelist, but also a delightful, witty, kind, and (occasionally) sardonic soul. She also has magnificently good taste (I can tell, because her tastes and mine so frequently coincide). She also has a particularly sane vision of reality, which comes out in both her fiction and her conversation.

Excuse the hemming and hawing and broken syntax of her hapless interlocutor. The poor man seems to swing between spells of glib and fluently eloquent persiflage and spells of awkward, plodding, abortive, distracted, and positively semaphoric sentence fragments. Something to do, no doubt, with circadian rhythms, cycles of caffeine ingestion, and periodically insurgent feelings of bashfulness.

Excuse also the occasional respiratory noises picked up by a very sensitive microphone. As has been documented now with tedious regularity, my lungs were permanently affected by the illness that descended on me early in 2014, and in cold weather they still tend to labor a bit. The temperature here sank precipitately the day before our conversation. Next time—and there will be a next time—I shall adjust the equipment accordingly.

#2 - A Conversation Between China Miéville and David Bentley Hart

I had a conversation recently with China Miéville, the celebrated novelist, essayist, political theorist, and generally amiable soul. The proximate occasion, I suppose, was the appearance of his most recent book, A Spectre, Haunting, though our exchange ranged over his books and mine, fiction and non-fiction, and any number of topics that interest us both. And, of course, who can resist a conversation between a heterodox Marxist and a classical Christian socialist on the phenomenology of awe? I know I can’t.

This recording appears also on the Substack site for Leaves in the Wind.

Episode #1 - A Conversation Between Rainn Wilson and David Bentley Hart

Principally about his Bahá'í faith, but also about cinema, the nostalgias of middle-aged men, Emma Peel, Master Po and Master Han, and various other matters...

Rainn Wilson is an actor who has appeared in so many films and television programs that it is unlikely he needs much introduction. His best-known role is almost certainly that of Dwight Schrute in the American version of The Office. He is also, however, a writer and podcaster. And he is a genuinely lovely guy. Here our conversation chiefly concerns not his professional, but rather his spiritual life. Many of you may know—though I suspect a majority do not—that he is a practicing member of the Bahá’í Faith, and was in fact raised in the tradition.

Of course, other topics came up as well, many of them having to do with memories of a vanished and now essentially mythical epoch, the early 1970s. Given that he and I are nearly the same age, and inasmuch as middle-aged men are almost invariably sentimentalists about their childhoods, it was impossible for us wholly to avoid spasms of pathetic nostalgia.

If I seem a tad bibulous and inarticulate here and there, I ask your pardon. I may have been a little giddy during the recording, as I had been liberally dosed with both a muscle-relaxant and a strong pain medication; I had pulled a muscle on the right side of my neck. But I like to think I soldiered through, sustained by the pleasure of good company.