Phillip Lopate joins us to talk about his career as America's pre-eminent personal essayist, his literary influences, his teaching methods, his two new collections, his favorite NY Met, and more!
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 20 - Slipping the Noose of the Topical
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. Now, I've got to tell you, this gig has really done wonders for me. Besides just getting to meet so many interesting people, well, two weekends ago, I visited the small press expo in Bethesda, Maryland, and I got to record interviews with a couple of cartoonists. I've adored for just decades now, and I also got to have conversations with a couple of others that may lead to pod episodes down the line. A few days before that, I had this really great time at a book signing an after party on the Upper West Side in Manhattan where I managed to feel like I wasn't totally out of my weight class, despite being some schlub from New Jersey. I think I might wind up with some good conversations for you guys out of that event too, but what I'm saying is, I'm not sure I had such an easy time talking to people if I hadn't had the experience of meeting and recording with so many writers and artists and such in the past year or so, or maybe it's more like I wouldn't have done such a good job listening to them if I hadn't been doing this thing. Actually, that's probably more like it. Also, I had to give this really big presentation for my day job last week, and there's just no way on earth I could have done that so well without this experience. I mean, it was all pharmaceutical outsourced manufacturing stuff, not literature, essays, comics, et cetera, but I still felt like all my reps in front of the mic kind of prepared me for that too. But enough about me, you guys want to hear a show, and I've got a wonderful conversation for you today. Thanks with Philip Lopate, who is the finest personal essayist writing today. I got to meet Mr. Lopate after recording the episode with David Gates last June up at Bennington. They were both teaching in the low residency MFA program up there, and Gates brought me to lunch at the dining hall at Bennington after our conversation where I started meeting person after person who I think would make for really good episodes, so I'm hoping we'll get four or five more out of that one visit, which will justify the three-hour car ride up and back each way. Now, Philip Lopate's been publishing for around 50 years, and that's essays, novels, poetry, editing other collections, et cetera. Most recently, he published a pair of books, an essay collection called "Portrait Inside My Head," and another collection called "To Show and To Tell," "The Craft of Literary Nonfiction." And they're both with free press, a division of Simon and Schuster. I read both of them before we sat down to do the interview, and they are fantastic. If you want to check a couple of other suggestions, I'll be making those at the end of the episode for where to start with Mr. Lopate's work, but really, you can't go wrong. If you start with any of the essay collections, he's such a wonderful writer. And as a guy who once wrote a three-year series of blog posts about working my way through Montaigne's essays, I'm kind of a sucker for a good essayistic voice. He's really among the best. And now, you'll get the virtual memories show conversation with Philip Lopate. My guest on the virtual memory show today is Philip Lopate, the author of more than a dozen books of personal essays, fiction and poetry, and director of the Graduate Program for Nonfiction at Columbia. Yes. Thank you for coming on the show. Happy to do so. How did you discover the personal essay as a form? I know you've also written poetry and fiction, like we said. How did you settle on the essay as the main genre in which you work? Well, I've already written a novel and a book of poems, and I was on vacation in a house in Wellfleet. Actually, it had been Dwight McDonald's house, and he had a nice library, and I like to read other people's books when I'm on vacation, and I discovered this collection of William Haslett. I was sitting out in a hammock and reading Haslett and thinking, "Wow, this is for me." And Haslett was good friends with Charles Lamb, so I went on to be Charles Lamb, and Haslett had also written about Montaigne, and I discovered Montaigne, and that was just about it. I became a Montaigne. Even though when I had gone to college, Montaigne had been in the humanities list, and I had read him when I was 18 years old and thought, "Why are they making us read this old fart?" So then I myself became more of an old fart, and really could relate to Montaigne, and I've been rereading him ever since. But when I looked back on it, I realized that I had been writing essays for a while, and I had always been attracted to the essayistic move, you might say. So for instance, I had loved Dostoevsky's notes from Underground, which is essentially like an extended rant of an essay with a little bit of plot. And I had always liked "In fiction," those digressions, whether Bosac, or George Eliot, or Tolstoy, where suddenly they started explaining the world. Fielding has a lot of essays in Tom Jones. So essentially I was primed for the essay without knowing it, and I had already written a book about my experiences with children called "Being with Children," and essentially "Being with Children" was a collection of essays about teaching and working with kids in the schools, but I didn't think of it that way. So I had written already, let's say, a whole collection of personal essays in spite of myself. But what happened was that when I read Haslett and started experimenting with my own personal essays consciously, I got good response from people, including writer friends, and it was almost like they were saying, "Get off of our property, stop writing fiction and poetry. This is what you should be doing." When I started writing essays, which was in the early 1980s, probably late 1970s, early 1980s, it seemed like not that many people were doing it. I had a clear field, and I think one of the reasons why not that many people were doing it was because there was so little money in it and so little prestige in it. That was my next question. How do you build a career or how do you find a market for that? Or how did you back then? One thing that needs to be said is that the essay is an old and distinguished literary form, it's not anything that is at all a Johnny Come Lately, you might say. It turns out that you can place personal essays if they're lively and amusing. In magazines, you just don't call them essays. They need copy. They need to fill their well, and so I was able to publish these things here and there. Not always, but I put together a collection, my first collection, called "Bachelord." In fact, "Bachelord" was an attempt to combine all my writings, that is, it had poems in it, and it had what I thought of as short stories. For instance, there was a piece about my mother and father called "Willie," which I wrote as though it was a short story, and then when the book was reviewed, the reviews all treated the prose as essays. Again, I felt they were trying to tell me something, you know, and I saw that there was a way in which even those narratives could be construed as autobiographical personal essays, so I said, "Okay, the world wants me to be a personal essayist. I never thought I was going to make a lot of money anyway, but what I tried to do was to develop a distinctive voice and a distinctive style. I had learned from the great essayists, like Montaigne and Hasselt and Lamb, that it wasn't so much a subject matter as it was the voice and the display of consciousness that was intriguing. If you liked an essayist, let's say Joan Didion or James Baldwin or George Orwell, you would read anything that they wrote. Baldwin could write about movies, Orwell could write about literature, and you'd read it in the same spirit that they wrote their more autobiographical pieces, because what was interesting was the essayist's mind. I had really been interested for a long time in first-person writing. I had been attracted in fiction to writers like Atelos Revo and Michelle D. I.C.'s who were essentially ironists, and the display of irony also was a display of rationalization and self-deception. So I played with this idea that one is always rationalizing and always deceiving oneself, and that became part of the persona you might say, the awareness that I was always being subjective in a sense limited. So yeah. Well to that end, do you find, do you encounter people who think they know you based on having read your essays, and do they tend to reveal things to you based on that that you would really rather not know? Well, they may accept on critically my persona, for instance. I play around with a curmudgeonly persona, a contrarian persona, and even somewhat of an antisocial persona at times, whereas in my public life I try to be gregarious and easy to get along with. I may pretend to not like nature, for instance, but yet on Tuesday we're going off to Vermont for a month, and I'm looking forward to it, and I'd rather like going to the country, but this is the difference between me and my persona, you might say. So the odd thing is that I, when I encounter fans, and I do have fans who've read a lot of my stuff, they often don't remember key things about me that I have said over and over again in the essays, such as that I came from working class parents, or that I'm Jewish or I grew up in Brooklyn and any of that, they'll forget that, that they're reading and imbibing the essays and absorbing the manner, which they like, not necessarily the information. That's interesting, because to me I'm always doing that literary detective thing and trying to pick up on those repetitions and clues, I suppose. How do you describe the difference between an essay and memoir? It sounds like from that first childhood piece, or from being a children piece, it borders on memoir, at least in my vagar understandings of it, how do you delineate those? Let's say that a subcategory of the personal essay is the memoir piece, but a memoir is a whole book, and one of the differences that Emily Fox Gordon has totally pointed out in her book of days was that the memoir tends toward the redemptive and the triumphalist, because essentially it's a record of, as the gospel songs, how I got over, how I survived. Even if it's a tale of rampant abuse, trauma, and so on, the fact that you can assemble it into a terrible narrative means that you've triumphs in some sense. The personal essay is shorter and less ambitious, and one can sidestep redemption more easily, and sidestep the pieties and the complacencies of redemption. Essentially it's a raid, it's an incursion, a foray, and you go in and you rip off a piece of material or you rip off a piece of consciousness and you play with it. How has your essay style developed or changed over the years? You've been a practitioner for almost 40 years now. It's an embarrassing question, I'd like to think that it must have changed. I think in terms of going back to Montaigne, by the time you get to the third book of the essays, they're swelling and incapable of holding their contents anymore, but he never had editors or hard word counts to deal with. I think they've changed in a number of ways. I think that the spirit was there from the beginning, but I began writing more complex essays, they were more braided, for instance I wrote an essay called Samson and Delilah and the Kids, which combined the story of Samson and the Bible, the movie by Sesame to Mill Samson, Delilah, the opera, Samson, and Delilah, Milton's poem, Samson, Agonistes, and memories of my family with my father, Cass, and the role of Samson, my mother, Delilah. I was really trying to complicate. One of the main ways that they've changed, I think, is that I now tend to use more research in my essays, when I first began writing, there was a magazine editor who was trying to get me an assignment, and he said, "For a pure idea of a perfect assignment is where you never have to leave your house." But I've changed since then, and now I see myself as using the self to fetch the world. So a real turning point, I think for me, was writing the book Waterfront where I had to do a ton of research about the New York City shoreline, and it brought me into many, many subjects, marine biology, politics, engineering, and so on, things I knew very little about. But I still use my Philip Lopez persona to go on these walks and to fetch this information and try to put it in some amusing or entertaining form. When I first began doing research, I was so intimidated by the experts that I didn't know how to do anything more than quote them, and then I realized I had to paraphrase them and I had to run it through a filter, which was my own style you might say. So I think that research has been a real difference. For instance, I wrote a book about Susan Sontag called Notes on Sontag, which is essentially an extended critical essay, a book length essay, and I took a lead from Sontag herself and wrote Notes on Camp, and did it in the form of extended notes on different subjects. So it was essentially a book length essay that was composed of small essays, and it was not a biography. I didn't have to find out who our lovers were or anything. I just had to read her and think about her, and also access my own memories of Thomas when I had been with her. So that was a good example of using research, and also I think there's been more of a fusion in recent years between my personal essays and my critical essays. I almost don't see any difference between them because I'm thinking on the page, and also because an important part of my reading life, so I'm not just acquiring adventures or experiences. I'm also reading a lot, and as you know I'm a movie buff, so I go to the movies all the time, and some movie watching is another part of my experience. And even when I'm not writing about movies, I usually quote movies, you know. So I think that in my last book, my most recent book Portrait Inside My Head, I purposely included personal essays, critical essays about literature, essays about film, urbanistic essays, and you know, threw it all together. And the idea was, this is me, take it or leave it, this is not such a radical thing because in the past, people used to expect that writers would do this kind of book, Mayor McCarthy wrote a book called On the Country, where she threw together essays, and there were some more personal essays, some were about the Kinsey report, or about a book by Simone de Beauvoir. So the idea was that you go to an essay to be entertained by the essayist's mind, and that includes, there isn't this big division between the critical and the personal. But one of the odd things I've noticed reading your collections, is that there are no dates on the essays given, is that a conscious choice on your part? Because again, as a literary detective, I sit there trying to figure out when this must have been composed in a general range. I think it's largely an embarrassment, that is, I don't want readers immediately to realize, for instance, that portrait inside my head has essays that are as old as 15 years ago. But if you read them carefully, you know that sometimes my daughter is one, three or two, four, sometimes he's eight, sometimes he's fifteen, so you get to watch her growing up in some way. Yeah, it was actually that, well obviously the most moving part of your most recent book was the long essay about your daughter's illness, were there difficulties on a personal or privacy level writing about that for you, or are there other subjects you sort of have regretted tackling or details you've regretted revealing at any point? Well, the answer to that is yes, to be honest, my wife and my daughter were not happy with my including that, and they went over with a fine tooth comb and maybe made certain changes, but they still, I think, would have preferred that I not included, and I made the selfish, writerly decision that it was an important piece, and I felt the book needed it. I felt that I didn't want just to appear to be equitable and have everything roll off my back. There are experiences in anybody's life of suffering, of illness, of grief that have to be dealt with or gotten over, and this was one of the most important experiences of my life, so I had to write something about it, and I guess this was my way of saying, I'll write a personal essay, but I won't write a whole book about it. But in general, I would say that I'm always trying to figure out how much I can get away with. I'm always holding back some things, telling some things, not telling others, trying to figure out what the traffic will bear. I certainly don't blurt out everything. Sure. And you talk about in your essays on teaching, on teaching college and graduate level, some of the difficulties in the victimhood memoirs and things of that ilk, you know, do you at all use your own work as an example for some of the students to show them that yes, you can reveal how bad life gets without reveling? Well, you're referring to my other new book to show and to tell, and it really grew out of my teaching experiences, I kind of hope that my students will read me if only to armor themselves against my approach and to understand if you're studying with a writer, it seems silly not to read something with a writer, you know, and a lot of my students have read something of mine, but I don't actually assign them my own books. So occasionally I'll give them pieces like, for instance, there's an essay to show and to tell called Retrospection and Reflection, which I think is very important for getting them to be willing to reflect in retrospect about the meaning of their experience instead of just writing as though they're walking down the dark tunnel and trying to recreate what it felt like when it was happening to them. So yeah, that's the kind of thing that I may give them more, I may give them another piece on that book about how to turn themselves into a character. Yeah, I found it very useful in fact that the retrospect piece in terms of trying to balance that idea of representing the experience and also the, you know, considering what do you make of the process and get afterwards. What have you learned from your students over the years and do you find that you've learned more in a sense from the children you were teaching or the college and graduate level? Well the experience of teaching children was one of the great experiences of my life. I would say it's the only time when I was a hero of my life. It was a chance to work with kids in the inner city and to experiment a lot, to have them make movies, theater, comic books, radio programs, you name it as well as poetry and fiction, some of them are writing novels even though they're in the sixth grade. I did it, you know, the suburbs but still. Right, so it really was the most wonderful and unusual experience. It was also an ultimate and exhausting one and I was so poorly paid that I realized that I would need to go into university teaching if I wanted to get a better balance between my writing life and my teaching life. And I get a lot from my students in the university, I'm now teaching only in the graduate program at Columbia. I think really what I'm learning is not so much about style but it's about psychology. That is, you know, I tend to think that students want answers about technique but in most cases what would really help their pieces if they were more honest, let's say, less guarded, less frightened, so it doesn't come down to syntax so much as it comes down to character. And for me, I think there's a lot of similarity in a way between teaching and psychotherapy. And I don't want to sound arrogant or get confusing about it because I don't think of myself as a therapist. But I do think that there's a lot of transference that goes on in the writing workshop where students can fall in love with you or conversely take Umbridge and there can be a lot of unconscious resistance, you know, a lot of times I encounter students who smile, who nod, but they ain't going to do it, you know, or they're resisting their own expression. So I find it fascinating on that purely human level, that's what I'm mostly learning, there's the individual level and then there's the group level, sometimes it takes a while for the class to cohere as a group and to begin to relax and to bond with each other, it isn't just about bonding with me, it's about the group dynamics, you know. So I'm fascinated with, you might say in general, with resistance, and I've often written about resistance in my own writing, and I'm fascinated with these questions of how to get this smooth flow going and how to get something productive going. So you might say that I really am learning them as human beings, as individuals, and I become quite attached to them, and sometimes by the end of the term, it seems like they're writing so much better, and I don't really know if they're writing much better, or if I just kind of come to like them so much as individuals or to understand them and to forgive their inadequacies, it seems to me that they've really improved. When you talk about that idea of, I say, cultivating character or honesty somehow, is that, do you find that the most important thing for you as a teacher? I mean, I guess the question is, what are you really trying to teach teaching? I mean, obviously the syntax and the structural notions you bring up, but is there a sense of that? I mean, I guess it goes back to Plato, that question of whether this sort of virtue is something that can be taught or something that... You can model it. You can model it as a teacher. Sometimes I take chances in the classroom and I say something that, in the back of my mind, I think, "Well, should I really be saying this?" But then I say, "Oh, what the heck? Well, let's try it." And what I'm really trying to do is to show them to be less afraid and less indirect, more direct. I would say that that's a huge tendency on the part of writing students in graduate programs, and these are gifted students. They tend to be very indirect, as though it'll make it more mysterious and more aesthetic if they don't pull it out. But they also fear that their ideas are banalities, and so they disguise what it is they're really saying, make it sound more oblique or complicated than it really is. And I'm trying to get them to make the attempt to be direct. Just try it out. Just say what you mean. It's an essay. It's an attempt. It's an essay. So I do that both by my demeanor in the class, and I do it by encouraging them and trying to push them to get to the heart of things. Essentially, there are only four or five ideas anyway, and maybe four or five emotions, and so you can't hope for a total originality. What you hope for is a kind of trustworthy voice on the page that knows when it's being banal, when it's being perhaps a little surprising, and that requires a lot of reading. So that's really important, I think, is I'm a really firm believer in writing out of the absorption of what you read. I know that sounds like every writer would say that, but I guess I feel more attached to a tradition. One of my most important books was the art of the personal essay, the anthology I did, which is certainly my best-selling book. And I tried to put between covers a canon, a sense of a tradition for the personal essay. The way that book came about was that I kept photocopying tons of material and getting students to buy 15 books, and I said there needs to be a book, and I couldn't find this book. So I realized I had to put it together myself. But on a deeper level, I was really saying, don't just be obsessed with writing of the contemporary moment, let's go back to Seneca and Plutora, let's go back to Montaigne, and let's realize we don't have to reinvent the wheel all the time. The shadows, I've read, for instance, Lamb so many times, and I know that sometimes I'll do something that's a kind of Lamb-like move, you know. Another writer I like is Max Beabomb, and so I'll think, oh, this is rather Beabombian, you know, what I'm doing now, you know. They give me permission to do these things. So I really feel that my own writing style has been so shaped by my reading, and I'll delight in certain senses and certain moves, you know. What do you feel your students' influences are, generally? You mentioned how you'd hope they read some of your work, but do you find a certain type of author or anything for incoming students over the last, I don't know, ten or ten years? Well, sure, I mean, my students are much more involved with David Sedaris and Joanne Beard, and John DeGotta and the lyrical essay is like Ulibis, and you know, they'll be crazy about a book like The Year of Magical Thinking by John Didion, which I actually don't like very much, you know. And I have mixed feelings about Sedaris and so on. They're probably the biggest influence on them is David Foster Wallace, you know. So for me, you know, I'm thinking, okay, consciousness, David Foster Wallace, you know. Let's go back, you know, to Diderot, to Lawrence Dern, you know. I'm always reading a lot in previous centuries, which brings me to a lot of dead white males. Last time I was reading Waskin a lot, this time I'm reading Carl Isla, I'm reading this wonderful biography by James Anthony Froud, The Life of Carl Isla. So for me, I want to slip the noose of the topical, and I also want to tell my students don't become the master of the year 2013, 2014 style, because by the time you've mastered it, it'll be passé, you know. So really, go back. What do you think of blogs and online essay style, basically, I've been doing one for ten years on and off, but what impact is that on writing as you've seen it, or essayistic writing? Well, it certainly had an impact, and it's a great opportunity in a way. It's teaching a whole generation to follow their thoughts, you know. So in the Montane sense, blogs are like the modern pillow book, let's say, of Say Shonnigan. And I think that they're very variable, that is, they're well written blogs, badly written blogs. I don't think that the form itself requires you to dumb down, and I don't think that it means that the writing need be sloppy, you know. I've seen the same thing with a lot of film criticism on the internet, you know. Some of it is very elegant, and some of it is very kind of unshaked, you know. Like, well, let's see where I'm going with this, blah, blah, blah. So for me, a part of the problem with blogs is just a too casual tone, whether it isn't enough gravitas in the prose or enough starch, and where the syntax tends to be rambling rather than elegantly formed. But that isn't necessary, you know, there are people who run blogs who write very economically and concentratedly. So my confession is that I often don't read blogs for the simple reason that I'm staring at the computer for all these hours when I'm writing, and the last thing I want to do is to surf the internet when I am finished with my writing day, you know. What's your writing process like? Do you have a specific times of day or rituals or anything like that? You know, I've written for so long, and I've written so many kinds of writing, that I trust myself at this point. I don't feel like I have to write every day. Obviously, if a deadline is looming, I start writing much more seriously. I write during the day, I'm not on a night owl. I tend to write between 9 and 3, let's say, and I'll stop if I feel like I've gotten to a good point. Let's say, after 3 hours or something like that, I may stop or I may go on, you know. It depends a lot on where I left off or where I will leave off. I tend to be stupid during the first hour, and my brain isn't sharp, and so I have to sometimes perfect the sentence in order to get it sharper. And of course, there are these techniques like stopping at the day before at a point where you can then move a little forward. Basically, I trust myself, I don't feel like I have to write every day, I just try to keep it going. When I'm writing novels, it's a very different process from when I'm writing an essay because when I'm writing novels, it's more emotional and I'm more drawn away from daily life and living in two worlds. When I'm writing essays, I feel like I'm tapping into a more rational part of my brain. And a calmer part of my brain, I don't have to be feverish in any sense, you know. Do you still have time for fiction? Are you working on a... You know, I've written a few novels, and the last book I did in fiction was Two Marriages, which was Two Novellas. I still love fiction, that is, I love to read it, and I don't have any of that problem David Shields has with fiction. Oh, God. Sorry. But my sense is that every ten years I'll write some fiction, but the rest of the time I'll write nonfiction. In the middle of one now at all, or are we not in the ten years, because I have the 17-year cycle with the cicadas back out of New Jersey, so I don't know if you're falling into that rhythm or not. Yeah. No, I do want to write one more novel, and I'd like to write a memoir at some point because in a way I've been avoiding the memoir by writing personal essays, but it'd be interesting to try to make something more continuous, you know? Not in the sense that there's enough of a through-line in the essays you've done, or do you feel that's more of a persona that's not exactly... It's a different problem to look at a life, you know, and maybe a few more people have to die, you know? Well, I didn't want to ask why you changed the names of your siblings in your early essays and then sort of... Went back to... Yeah, real names. The first thing, when I first began writing personal essays, I changed my sibling things because they were in the midst of the struggle of life, and I didn't want to bother them in any way. But I used my parents' names, which it seemed very hard, and then for a while it seemed like they were my own characters, and I called my brother Lenny Howe, and I called my sister Benny and Molly, and then more recently I thought, what the heck just, you know... They are who they are? They are who they are, you know, exactly, so, you know, this shows a kind of halting progression that one enters into in terms of using real-life materials, you know? I think, at the beginning, I felt I needed that separation in order to write about them and then later on I thought, no, no, you know, those who were going to be pissed off at me are going to continue to be pissed off, and no matter what I call them, you know, and the others will not, you know. And what's your take on stretched memoirs, not the James Fry type, but more the Clive James kind of, this is mostly real, it's true, if not factual, how does that... I mean, I am drawn to the real, and I have that essay in to show it until facts have implications where I say for me, I would much rather what would actually happen. That's not to say I don't occasionally combine for the sake of economy, several incidents into one, let's say, but I'm not going to write something that's half non-fiction and half-fiction, and I think one of the reasons why is that I have written fiction. So I know I can write fiction, and I don't need to do what I'm writing non-fiction, and I have come around to feeling that there is indeed such a thing as non-fiction, and it's not true that all non-fiction is really fiction, you know, and so there are rewards to non-fiction, you know, the trust that the reader has, such a shaping, real experience, such as not mixing up invented things with real things, we all know that memory is unreliable, and that, you know, it's, you know, at best a patchy thing, but you can still make a best case effort to remember clearly, you know, so I'm much more interested in the analytical mind reflecting on experience rather than trying to turn it into a non-fiction novel. I think, if you want to write a novel, write a novel, you know, and what do you consider a success? You mean it? From myself? Yeah. That's an interesting question, I mean, I think sometimes I've already gone further than I ever thought I would as a kid, I didn't, you know, when you start out writing you think, well maybe I'll become one of the great writers, Dostoyevsky, Gerta, and Tolstoy, and so on, and then you quickly realize, no, no, that's not in your head, you know, that's not going to happen. Writing now for really close to 50 years, and I've never really had writer's block, I always find something to write about, and for me I think success has been a steam in this particular world of the essay, non-fiction, and so on, and when I go to the Association of Writing Programs, Conferences, you know, I'm treated like a demi-god, but then of course, you know, when I'm in the real world, I'm anonymous, you know, so... Or mistaken for your brother. Or mistaken for my brother, which sometimes happens too. He claims he is sometimes mistaken for me, so it works both ways. But certainly I can get my books of essays published. That's success. Of what essay are you proudest of, what's your favorite of your work? Oh, I don't know that I have a favorite, really. I think my work is a cumulative and additive, I've always been interested in writers like Montaigne and Whitman and Prus to kept adding onto one book, you know, so in a way I think of all these things as one book. I am very fond of this book, you know, it's on Sound Tag, because I felt it was very free in the way I was thinking, it was an honest intellectual endeavor. I wrote a book about the photographer, Rudy Burkhardt, that again I was trying to look at something other than myself, you know. I'm proud of Waterfront, I'm proud of being with children, you know, so I like my work, you know, I don't think I'm a genius, I don't think I'm a great writer, but I think it's good enough. This was the notion that D.W. Winikot had the good enough mother, you know, so I will work at an essay let's say, and then I'll say, well, okay, maybe this is as good as I can make it. The problem is not, can I make every sentence more lustrous, but that I'm not any wiser than this piece reflects, you know, if I'm going to get wise it's going to happen to happen in the future, it's not happening now. I have two questions left, one's literary and one's sports. I do a side segment called Second Hand Loves that everybody thinks sounds like a great idea but no one can actually come through on. Book or author whom he once hated, but now a door, not something you were assigned in school. Is there someone you've grown to, montane for example, that you've grown to? Well certainly, Thomas Hardy who I was assigned in high school, met nothing to me and then over the years it's met more and more to me and I do adore Thomas Hardy and I wrote an essay about the mayor of Casterbridge for a recent edition and I don't know there's something very deep about him that I love. So author who met absolutely nothing to me when I was younger, Anthony Trollope, I now take on vacation and I always read him and he's not Hardy, he's not as deep as Hardy but he's so wonderfully fluent, you know, and worldly that I really like him, you know. That's interesting which writers, you know, they were writers who I've battled for years, you know. There was a period when I really didn't like Philip Roth and then Roth changed and so did my opinion of Roth, you know. How do you think he changed? Well, I mean I think that... I think he did also but I'm wondering what you're expecting about that. I think he became more expansive, there was less of a kind of self-protection of the, you know, the young gifted man, certainly a book like Savage Theatre is a cosmos and then the books that follow the American pastoral and the human stain, the American Communist, they were all fascinating to me. So I just thought, okay, he's the best we have and, you know, stop fighting, lie down and surrender, I have surrendered to Philip Roth, I think he's a great writer. And I'm a Yankee fan and we're having an awful, awful season, you're a Met fan, do you have any solace to offer since we're now looking at our first year out of the playoffs in a while? The thing I would say is I am not a Yankee here. Since I'm really a great love of New York City, I always think that when the Yankees get into the playoffs, it's good for the taxi drivers, it's good for the hotels and I always, and when I'm watching the Met's game, you know, during the commercials I turn to the Yankees game, you know. And, you know, I don't think that this represents a downfall of hubris the season they're having. I mean, they've lost the four major run producers, you know, and that's major. You can't replace all those bats, like, you know. Tashira, Anderson, Anderson. You know, I've always been amused at vanity and show off in this arrogance. You know, arrogance has never seemed to me the worst human trait. I sometimes try to get my students to be a little more arrogant. It seems in the U.S.A. It's that balance of arrogance and self-effacement, or somehow managed to tread that line. Right. If you want to be a writer, you do need a little bit of arrogance, you know. So, you know, I really like C.C. Sebastian. I think it really is unfortunate that he was a power pitcher and he can't now figure out how to be a finesse pitcher, you know. He's got five more years under contract to figure it out. Yeah, it's five more years to figure it out. But he's a very likable guy, you know, and of course Mariano Rivera could run for president tomorrow. Yeah. He's a saint. Was your favorite Met over the years? Well, you know, I mean, sad to say, because he doesn't play with us, you know, I love Carlos Beltran, a very elegant player, self-contained, very graceful. And I think that Met's a fun to watch now. They've become an interesting team, they're not going to get into the playoffs, but they have a lot of young players, so obviously some good starting pitching. And not enough hitting, but, you know, they scrap and the other day I went out to City Field, I saw them win and it was exciting, you know, so they went from being completely hopeless to, you know, rebuilding, you could say. But actually, they really do seem to be rebuilding. And I think the Yankees will be billed also, they have to look at every single position, you know. They're an aging team, I mean, the same thing happened to the Phillies, you know, these are aging teams and they were great and then, you know, the back slows down and injuries happen. In my 40s now, seeing generations of athletes go by, it's one of those things where I feel a little bit more, it was sort of like 10 years ago when, or a little bit longer ago, when David Cohen and Patrick Ewing first fell apart and the sports writers who were covering them in New York, you could almost feel their sense of mortality in their columns watching these guys. At first they get very petulant, because sports writers are essentially overgrown boys. And it's like, why are you dogging it, you know, and they don't realize that the body, you know, slows down bit by bit. And of course, once injuries happen to the knees, let's say, you know, or torn meniscus or any of these things, they tend to repeat, you know. So I only play one sport, I play tennis, you know. But I really like sports, as you know, I wrote that essay about why I remained a baseball fan. And I like the narrative of baseball. Something about 162 games that just, you are who you are by the end of a season. Well, it's a novel, it's like, you know, there's this thing that's happened to TV where you now have all these wonderful, long series, you know, like the Sopranos in the Wire and Friday Night Lights and the Killing and so on. And so the baseball season is more like one of those long narratives that's stretched out, you know. And any temptation to go Hollywood in your career, would that ever-- I wrote a few screenplays that were paid for but weren't made. And I discovered that I was not as good as screenwriters, I was a novelist or an essay as to our poet, I couldn't control the field of the page as much. And I think that at a certain point, you know, it chose to be a writer instead of a filmmaker. If, you know, if I had 70 more years, I would definitely try-- maybe next time we'll come back as a film director. Philip LoPaid, thank you so much for your time. My pleasure. Sometimes the truth is all you get. Sometimes the truth is all you get. And that was Philip LoPaid, his two most recent books, "Portrait Inside My Head" and "To Show and To Tell" are both from Free Press, Division of Simon and Schuster. They're both really amazing books, you can find them on Amazon and in bookstores. You could start out with Philip's essays by picking up getting personal, a 400 page reader of his work. That comes from basic books. And you should also check out the art of the personal essay, the mega anthology he edited. From there, I'm sure you're gonna get started on other books, both of his and of the great essayists of the past and present. You can find his website at philiploPaid.com. And that's Philip with two L's. So, p-h-i-l-l-i-p-l-o-p-a-t-e.com. The virtual memories show will be back in two weeks, if I have anything to say about it. I haven't quite decided who's gonna be in the next one. I have a bunch of options and I don't think any of them will disappoint you. You can subscribe to the virtual memories show on iTunes by searching for virtual memories and clicking through to the show's page. If you check out the show on iTunes, post a rating and review of the show, if you don't mind, so that way I can find out what you think about it and Apple think better of me. The full archives of the virtual memories show are available on iTunes as well as our website, chimeraobscura.com/vm. If you visit the site, you can get yourself added to our e-list and also make a donation to the show via PayPal, if you like. That'll help offset my web hosting and travel costs and other miscellaneous expenses accrue to the show. And if you do that, I will make sure you get a shout out on the next show and I will send you a copy of a short story I wrote. The show is also on Twitter @VMSPod on Facebook at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and Tumblr at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. Until next time, I'm Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]