Phillip Lopate distills everything wrong with creative writing profs

The "teaching" of "talent" and wading in the kiddie pool of the mind

I am a mindless sheep. Whenever I see NYRB put out a new book, I beeline to it in the bookstore like one of the machines of God that that turn of phrase suggests to a brightly-coloured flower. But no, as invoked before, the more appropriate animal would be a sheep. Baaaa, I say to the cashier as I point to the tasteful minimalist cover, baaaaaa.

Generally this works in my favour. Darius James, Lisa Morante, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Magda Szabó, Tayeb Salih—these are only a handful of the brilliant writers that NYRB Books have brought into my life through its Classics imprint. I love a lot of the essay/journal shit they put out too, Brian Dillon is a fucking treasure, and I’m excited to dig into Sonny Rollins’ notebooks soon. I don’t think they’ve ever steered me wrong. That was until I read Phillip Lopate’s A Year and a Day.

My first reaction was frustration, because the cover they gave Lopate is just so fucking nice, just look at it! It’s beautiful!

What is inside, however, is a collection of extremely subpar blog posts that Lopate wrote over the course of a year (and a day). Why anyone thought these merited printing onto paper is an absolute mystery to me, let alone NYRB Press of all fucking people. Lopate quite obviously had himself an inside man, because I can’t imagine writing this boring getting so much as a second glance from most publishers. Maybe he’s got an errant page of the Epstein flight logs with Emily Greenhouse’s name on it. We’ll never know for sure.

Lopate is an instructor in a creative writing program, and I could have figured that out without ever having read as such. Lopate reminds me of too many other creative writing instructors I've known: a dull, middling-intellect; a milquetoast, cocktail party bore, only it's a party I wouldnt be caught dead at and I don't even have the benefit of being hammered. Lopate tells us that while his friends were reading Pynchon & Burroughs, he was reading Henry Fielding. He would. The same aforementioned professors were always reading Wodehouse. “Everything new is just a version of some old thing” he smugly suggests in his defense. Yawn. A sophomoric assertion you can hear from a million other nobodies. Any halfwit can make the same bad faith, self-congratulatory claim that, oh I don’t know, Pynchon is merely just a duplicate of Laurence Sterne or some such nonsense by cherry-picking a few commonalities and deliberately ignoring everything that separates the two. The approach, the style, the content, the themes of Pynchon bear some resemblance to his fore-bearers but he is changing and adapting and merging his influences into something that is still “new,” and if that wasn’t the case there’d be no reason to create “new” things in the first place. If Lopate actually believes his stupid fucking claim, then why does he stop at Fielding? Why not rewind the clock all the way back and spend the rest of your life reading the Epic of Gilgamesh? Afterall, everything is derivative, so a repeated reading of Epic of Gilgamesh is an identical experience to instead reading Tom Jones anyhow. At least he still likes Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra, whose dissonant melodies I’m surprised he doesn’t tell us are merely a shallow imitations of Bach or Scriabin.

What is perhaps even more obnoxious is his political commentaries. This book chronicles, by simple kismet, the lead up to and fallout from the 2016 election, and Lopate was a Hillary guy. “I am an impurist,” he tells us, “which is why I voted for Hillary Clinton and not Bernie Sanders in the primary. Oops, there goes half my readership.” That’s merely from the intro, a delightful whif of what’s to come as derangement begins to sink into his insipid liberal brain. There are times when this insipid liberalism shows its hand and he unintentionally says more than he even realizes:

I must do all I can to defeat this charlatan: time to ring doorbells, make cold calls, send Hillary Clinton more money. Aside from her many qualifications for the Oval Office, she is a politician, which is to say, someone who alters her position based on what is achievable at any moment. And so what? Are we such purists, such moralists, that we expect our leaders to be consistent or saintly? But Donald J. Trump is another story. He is not a politician, or he would never say the things he does.

The truth, of course, is that Trump was saying a lot of what most politicians merely believe; he was “saying the quiet part loud.” Trump was calling Latin American migrants “drug-dealers, criminals, and rapists,” which isn’t anything a Clinton would ever say so explicitly. No, Clintons merely support legislation that makes the lives of Latin American migrants a living hell and speaks for itself. Trump made all sorts of racist claims about Black crime—but I believe the euphemism Hillary prefers is “superpredators.” Lopate claims that Trump is “evil” in that he is “ignorant.” I would personally call “being a mass-murdering warhawk in charge of the State Department” evil. But that’s just me. Cliton, however, is beyond her flaws, or so he tells us—because she “contains multitudes.”

Like many people, Lopate is of course missing Whitman’s point entirely with the whole “containing multitudes” thing, to the point that I question whether he has even read “Song of Myself” in the first place. The titular “Self” Whitman is speaking of is complex, and this complexity is not only contained by internal personal contradiction (that would be really uninteresting, tbh) but by a connection to all mankind and to his country—this is a major preoccupation of Whitman. Songs and singing especially in Whitman are tied to this theme—Whitman imagines all of America singing together in one fractured chorus in “I Hear America Singing,” and in “I Sing the Body Electric” he is “engirthed” by the “armies of those [he] loves,” and he goes on to, as he so often does, describe deep metaphysical connections between all mankind. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman describes the experiences of plenty of people, not just himself, but the “butcher-boy,” the “negro,” even the “wild gander,” writing about how “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The multitudes are literal you fucking idiot, he contains literal fucking multitudes. Clinton does not contain multitudes, because she has no connection to humanity, she’s severed it by doing the things she’s done. The only “multitudes” visible in the woman are the body-counts she’s racked up in places like Libya, Honduras, and Syria. Like many liberals, Lopate also tells us he is “against Netanyahu” while still being “sympathetic to Israel.” Yes, I’m sure he is—Israel contain multitudes, afterall. Fascists and baby-killers.

At one point he refers to the “ex-lovers” of Hillary’s husband, which is a really funny way of saying “victims of sexual assault.” That being said, he’s a creative writing professor, so his definition of consent may plausibly be a little different from you or I. He talks about a much younger wife who I pray was not formerly a student of his, and he certainly talks about women like a creep. Take this passage:

I passed a beauty in the street the other day. She did not notice me, she was talking on her cell phone. Or perhaps she did take notice of me but immediately ruled me out as of no interest, I being a graybeard and she so young and lithe, with a shapely figure and bold, intriguing eyes. We men are taken to task nowadays for describing with enthusiasm women’s body parts—

[emphasis my own]

Yes, Phil, many men look at women on the street, but they don’t all um publicly write about it in exactly the way you do, such as describing the subjects as “young and lithe” or talking about their… “shapely figures.” He writes about women the way R. Crumb depicts himself thinking about women… when he’s trying to expose his id as the repulsive pervert it is and make us all feel dirty and complicit by extension.

But let’s continue:

—the objectifying male gaze, it’s called. I would not dream of reducing a woman to her body parts; I was fully aware that the beauty I passed might have possessed a complex psyche, an admirable spirit, and a nuanced intelligence, which I would have loved to learn more about had I been given the chance, but I was also noting the plain fact that she was lovely, and in any case, how was there time to register more than her face and figure when she disappeared so quickly?

Lopate ironically suggests he’d never reduce a woman to her body parts, but then his language betrays that he doesn’t necessarily think of all women as having complex lives and interiorities. To say nothing of the fact that such admiration is still effectively within the scope of “the male gaze,” qualities of a woman’s interiority which nevertheless exist to stimulate the one who gazes; it calls to mind a regrettably poignant excerpt from one of my favourite punching bags, Margaret Atwood, on the subject of male fetishes.

Of course, the situation Lopate finds himself in does not demonstrate “the male gaze” to begin with and we again are confronted with Lopate’s relative ignorance or possible illiteracy—“the male gaze” usually requires the presenting of the woman to be objectified. Berger and Mulvey were talking more specifically about depiction, of framing, not about looking at someone on the street. You looking at a woman walking down the street is not “the male gaze.” You deciding to write about her to an audience by talking about her “shapely figure” and how “young and lithe” she was is “the male gaze.” There’s another theoretical term Lopate should maybe look into, and it’s called orientalism:

Was she Japanese? Filipina? Hispanic? I couldn’t be sure. All I sensed was that she held a foreign allure. Part of me would give a lot to be other than who I am, the child of Russian and German Jews, or, failing that, to be with someone from a different culture or background than mine; yet such attraction is now considered disreputable—exoticizing, as in: projecting a set of caricatured signs based on outward appearance. Still, I ask myself: Why is it a sin to feel excited when a lovely foreign-looking stranger crosses my path? Is it not one of the prerogatives of urban living?

Not worth even commenting on this one.

Lopate is a self-deluded cretin, and he’s an exemplary case of what is wrong with creative writing programs and creative writing professors in particular. For every “brilliant” writer in any given CW department's arsenal there's always at least a half-dozen or more bog-standard bozos who often prove that those who can't do actually can't teach either. Creative writing departments often turn into a battlefield between competing personality cults as the insecure writers of baffling mediocrities (if even that) aim to get their students high on their farts and have them validate their own limping egos. And sometimes, infamously, their limping dicks. This one prof of mine had a protege (although the proper terminology would be, I believe, “sycophant”) whose dedication to his master went so far as to have the man sporting the same painfully unstylish t-shirt-and-blazer combo as the professor, as well as growing his hair to the same length, maintaining the same styling and grease percentage, and sporting the same spotty facial hair. Another prof at the school has a bona fide cult of young women she conditions with constant verbal abuse followed by strategically-placed praise into craving her validation, and then chooses the most obsequious to form a sort of personal Praetorian Guard.

Now, I had the great fortune of, right out of the gates, having a professor who is not only a remarkable genius of the craft with many well-earned decorations but also an extremely thoughtful mentor in said craft who seems to experience recurrent ego-death in her quest to foster young poets in their own unique directions (I don’t even think she really likes most of my work yet encouraged it anyway). But she is the exception, not the rule. Most professors in the program were so singularly-directed at jerking themselves off (or jilling themselves off! Gotta be inclusive!) that their primary focus with their students was to make carbon-copies of their own stylistic and thematic hangups, and I don’t think many of these were writers worth imitating anything about. I’m a writer of considerable arrogance, as anyone who reads this blog can attest to, but even the most arrogant egotists feel pangs of shame for their audacity at times. I’m not ashamed, however, of my audacity to claim I could write circles around some of my professors and probably could do so since my first year of undergrad—I’m not ashamed because I believe this of a lot of students I went to school with. Outwriting Jon Paul Fiorentino for most undergrads would simply be a matter of typing.

Lopate sure quotes a lot—from some undeniable greats such as Benjamin, Proust, Flaubert, what have you—but literary genius doesn’t confer itself through osmosis, just as simple recitation of the Bible will not make one a more holy person. An arsenal of Montaigne quotes will not substitute for wit if you have nothing of substance to draw from it. “Hillary Clinton contains multitudes, because that's something Whitman said!” Pathetic. The spasms of the sophist. The absolute kiddie pool of the mind. The tumour of dullness that weighs on the already impossible task attempted by creative writing programs: “teaching” students how to be touched by God.