{"id":14050,"date":"2020-12-01T19:35:49","date_gmt":"2020-12-02T00:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/?p=14050"},"modified":"2020-12-01T20:00:44","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T01:00:44","slug":"episode-410-phillip-lopate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chimeraobscura.com\/vm\/episode-410-phillip-lopate","title":{"rendered":"Episode 410 – Phillip Lopate"},"content":{"rendered":"

Virtual Memories Show 410:
\nPhillip Lopate<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/secure\/virtualmemories\/Episode_410_-_Phillip_Lopate.mp3<\/a><\/audio><\/div>

Podcast: Play in new window<\/a> | Download<\/a><\/p>

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“This book is like a tracing of American history through the essay. The essay is way to process ideas. All these problems we face in America I came to realize we had cycled through again and again: immigration, racism, sexism, disabilities. All of these questions of inclusion and exclusion have been tackled by the essay.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>Essayist and editor Phillip Lopate<\/a> rejoins the show to celebrate the publication of The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays From Colonial Times To The Present<\/a> (Pantheon). We talk about the origins of this anthology & how it transformed into a three-part series (two more coming next year!), Phillip’s self-admitted megalomania about the essay form, how the essay both paralleled and helped change American thought over the centuries, and just what’s so Glorious about The Glorious American Essay. We get into the challenge of limiting the collection to 100 essays, the value of canons and the need to revise them, the postwar golden age of the essay, the challenge of compiling work from the 21st century, and Emerson’s role as the key to the American essay (and how Phillip came to understand him through reading his notebooks). We also get into how his pandemic is going, how his students’ essays about lockdown life are better than some of the ones he’s read from older writers, his take on the Mets’ new ownership and why he’s glad sports came back during COVID, and what it was like to read so deeply in the history of American essays and thought during the Trump presidency. Give it a listen!<\/a> And go read The Glorious American Essay: One Hundred Essays From Colonial Times To The Present<\/a>!<\/p>\n

“One of the plights of the anthologist is that, no matter how many pages they give you, if you just had 200 or 300 more pages, you could really nail that sucker.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n