Brendan Hunt
speaker
297 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 4 May
Brendan Hunt’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, I mean, there's one thing that happened when Polanyo kind of fell on my head, and it was in the form of The Savage Detectives, which is that he frees you, not that he's the first person ever to do this, but there's something about the exuberance with which he writes about writers and writing that was like, oh.
This thing I think about all the time and it's my life, it's not actually a prohibited subject and I can make fun of it and I can fool around with it the way I do with so many other things.
I can exaggerate it and make it surreal and make it silly, but not in the cause of dismissing it, but precisely as a way, as an avenue for pouring my deepest
yearnings and fears and excitement into the subject.
And he does that so brilliantly in Savage Detectives and elsewhere.
He writes about writers constantly.
Well, it's hard for me to talk for everyone, but I mean, I know that I kind of grew up in a world of the arts.
And so often when I would see them depicted in fiction or film, it was always, you know, things that were total home runs, people who won the Nobel Prize or, you know, bands that went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or, you know, the most famous and reclusive, you know,
film director who ever lived.
And I thought, well, what about, you know, all the ones that are like the, the ones that I meet and are, you know, a great deal more likely, which is like half successful things, bands that had a lot of practices and argued about what their name was going to be.
And then, you know, only had one gig or, or, you know, writers who were slumping along through the middle of a long career.
And they're, you know, they're wondering if anyone is out there listening, uh, or, you know, or yeah, like the dad in Fortress of Solitude, who's
painting this endless film that no one is ever gonna see, and meanwhile making his living doing these paperback covers that bring him a certain kind of acclaim that he has total contempt for.
You know, it's a mixed up world when you throw your expressive life into the marketplace, and we all cope with it in different ways.
Well, I mean, the idea of the reclusive artist or the reclusive writer specifically kind of haunts post-war 20th century literature.
And it's a reaction to the desire for purity, of course, of a kind, because everyone feels vaguely soiled when they're
reading interviews or seeing publicity for a writer that they want to take very seriously.
And so the ones who solve that, who crack the code by being famous for refusing to appear, seem very sacred and solemn to us.
Of course, that trick mostly doesn't work.
What we notice are the exceptions, you know, Salinger or Pynchon.
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