Bonus Episode 8b
May 6, 2019

Anthony Oliveira on Paradise Lost

Hosted by Chris Piuma and Suzanne Conklin Akbari with Anthony Oliveira

I’m sort of obsessed with Adam as a character, he’s like a wonderful golden retriever of a man, so besotted by Eve and so perplexed by his own love of her. But he turns to Raphael and is like, “Is that what it’s like in Heaven?” And Raphael has this moment where he blushes, and then describes the extreme gay orgy that is the permanent Heaven experience.

A bonus to our episode on Paradise Lost! We are joined by Anthony Oliveira, a writer, film curator, and cultural critic who received his PhD in English from the University of Toronto. He is also the host of The Devil’s Party, a podcast that has been slowly and lovingly working its way through Paradise Lost, a hundred or so lines each week. Anthony joins us to talk about queer and trans readings of Paradise Lost, the nitty gritty about Milton’s theology, and making Paradise Lost accessible to readers that often have been excluded.

Show Notes.

Anthony Oliveira on Twitter (a must-follow) and on the web.

Anthony has a beautiful new memoir on Hazlitt.

A quick primer on monism.

William Empson: Milton’s God.

C.S. Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet.

Isaac Asimov’s Annotated Paradise Lost.

John Milton: “Methought I saw my late espoused saint”.

Philip Pullman: The Amber Spyglass, etc.

(We all make mistakes: “arma” is the first word of Aeneid, not the Iliad.)