Phillip Lopate, Writer, Poet, Film Critic

PHILLIP LOPATE, WRITER, POET, FILM CRITIC

“Lopate is a fantastic writer—humane, wry, and always astonishingly willing to take on the ineffable, attuned to the complexities of symbiotic relationships we only intuited before his dazzling collage was created.” —Ann Beattie

“Phillip Lopate is one of our few essential essayists. He registers with accuracy and tact the voice of a man of deep human impulse living in a civilization on the wane. His fearlessness is tonic, his candor is straight gin.” —Sven Birkerts

Widely considered one of the foremost American essayists and a central figure in the recent revival of interest in memoir writing, Phillip Lopate is best known for his supple and surprising essays, which have been collected most recently in Getting Personal: Selected Writings (Basic Books, 2003). Lopate is the author of three essay collections, Bachelorhood (Little, Brown & Co., 1981), Against Joie de Vivre (Simon & Schuster, 1989), and Portrait of My Body (Doubleday-Anchor, 1996). He has also published two novels, Confessions of Summer (Doubleday, 1979) and The Rug Merchant (Viking, 1987); two poetry collections, The Eyes Don't Always Want to Stay Open (Sun Press, 1972) and The Daily Round (Sun Press, 1976); and a memoir of his teaching experiences, Being With Children (Doubleday, 1975). He has also edited the anthologies The Art of the Personal Essay, Writing New York (The Library of America, 1998), Journal of a Living Experiment (Teachers & Writers Press, 1979), and a series collecting the best essays of the year, The Anchor Essay Annual (Anchor, 1997-9). Lopate’s work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Pushcart Prize series. His most recent book of nonfiction prose is the urbanistic meditation Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan, of which Conde-Nast Traveler wrote, “The celebrated essayist takes a tour of the city’s ever-changing perimeter, sharing his knowledge of New York’s history, mythology, and plans for the future. Poring over his informed, readable prose is like taking a stroll with a favorite professor: he is opinionated, casual, and erudite in equal measure.”

Also a film critic, Lopate has written about movies for The New York Times, Vogue, Esquire, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, Cinemabook, Tikkun, American Film, and the anthology The Movie That Changed My Life, among others. A volume of his selected movie criticism, Totally Tenderly Tragically, was published by Doubleday-Anchor in 1998. His most recent anthology is American Movie Criticism: From the Silent Era to the Present (The Library of America, 2006). His writings about architecture and urbanism have appeared in Metropolis, The New York Times, Double Take, Preservation, Cite and 7 Days, where he wrote a bimonthly architectural column. He was also a recipient of a Revson Fellowship in Urban Studies at Columbia, and served as a committee-member for the Municipal Art Society and as a consultant for Ric Burns' PBS documentary on the history of New York City. He has written on travel for the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler, Conde Nast Traveler, European Travel and Life, Sidestreets of the World, and American Airlines Magazine.

Lopate’s many awards include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, and two New York Foundation for the Arts grants. He also received a Christopher medal for Being With Children, the Texas Institute of Letters award for best non-fiction book of the year (Bachelorhood), and was a finalist for the PEN Diamondston-Spielvogel Award for best essay book of the year (Portrait of My Body). His anthology Writing New York received an honorable mention from the Municipal Art Society's Brendan Gill Award, and a citation from the New York Society Library.

Phillip Lopate was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1943, and received a bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1964, and a doctorate at Union Graduate School in 1979. He currently holds the Adams Chair at Hofstra University, where he is a Professor of English.

ABOUT BEING WITH CHILDREN (1975)
A High-Spirited Personal Account of Teaching Writing, Theater, and Videotape. In the 1960s, prizewinning writer Philip Lopate went into an urban school to teach poetry and became a part of the school community. Being with Children, first published in 1975 but out of print for many years, is Lopate’s classic account of his relationship to his craft and to his young students. Hailed by the New York Times as “a wise and tender portrait of a small society,” Lopate’s book explores the horrible and beautiful aspects of being with young people five hours a day, and explains why teachers persist in staying with the public schools and trying to make them into places where young people can flower.

ABOUT TWO MARRIAGES (2008)
Elegant, concise, and comically devastating, Two Marriages illuminates the ways in which love is inseparable from deceit. The Stoic’s Marriage chronicles the life of newlyweds Gordon and Rita. Well-off, idle Gordon, a lifelong student of philosophy who has always had “a stunted capacity for happiness,” first meets the enchanting Rita when she comes to his home as a nurse’s aid sent to care for his dying mother. The attraction is instant and a marriage proposal ensues. Gordon turns to his diary to record his uxoriousness and to expound on the merits of Stoicism, the philosophy he’s adopted as his “substitut religion.” When Rita’s cousin from the Philippines arrives one Christmas, setting in motion an outrageous and hilarious sequence of events, both Gordon’s stoicism and marriage vows are put to the test. Eleanor, or, The Second Marriage recounts one seemingly golden weekend in the lives of Eleanor and Frank, whose Brooklyn townhouse is a gathering place for their circle of cultured, cosmopolitan friends. It is Saturday morning, and Frank and Eleanor are planning the dinner they will host to celebrate the visit of a famous actor friend. These preparations are interrupted by the arrival of Frank’s son, a young man deeply troubled by his own aimlessness. Other guests arrive, and in the midst of great conviviality, simmering tensions erupt into raucous emotional dramas.

Phillip Lopate, Writer, Poet, Film Critic

Downloadable images are in the Photo Gallery

In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one's current self. This second perspective, the author's retrospective employment of a more mature intelligence to interpret the past, is not merely an obligation but a privilege, an opportunity. In any autobiographical narrative, whether memoir or personal essay, the heart of the matter often shines through those passages where the writer analyzes the meaning of his or her experience. The quality of thinking, the depth of insight and the willingness to wrest as much understanding as the writer is humanly capable of arriving at—these are guarantees to the reader that a particular author's sensibility is trustworthy and simpatico. With me, it goes further: I have always been deeply attracted to just those passages where the writing takes an analytical, interpretative turn, and which seem to me the dessert, the reward of prose.

—From “Reflection and Retrospection: A Pedagogic Mystery Story”

Most urbanists have an environmentalist side; it's part of the liberal package, and if you love your city enough, you don't want to see it destroyed or degraded by pollution. Many environmentalists, however, are not similarly predisposed toward the urban; their idea of heaven is not New York City but the wilderness. Now, it would seem to me that the hope of the world is for urbanists and environmentalists to join hands, realizing that their common enemy is suburban sprawl, which removes thousands of natural acres every week, and which drains the fiscal and civic energies of big cities. Given that the most energy-conserving environment in America is probably a Manhattan street, a truly progressive environmental activist might lobby for greater density in cities, as well as against office parks and shopping malls in the hinterlands. But I do not see Environmental Liberation Front radicals spray-painting graffitti in support of infill; congestion goes against their whole moral sensibility.

—From “Waterfront”

Perhaps more than any other giant of world cinema, Luchino Visconti occupies an uneasy critical niche. He does not fit tidily into the pat formal lineages by which cinema history gets divided. He is usually credited as one of the founders of Italian neo-realism (along with Rossellini and DeSica), but his love of melodrama, of grand passions spilling from overflowing canvases, turned him into a walking oxymoron of operatic realism, bisexuality, extravagant restraint. Politically progressive, celebrating in many of his greatest films the vitality of the working class, he was also the supreme elegiast of his own aristocratic world--exemplifying, as it were, that truism that patricians often feel more compatible with the poor than the middle class.

—From “Totally Tenderly Tragically”