Life and Form: On Phillip Lopate’s “A Year and a Day”

WHEN DID blogging become indistinguishable from a marketing strategy? Amid such business school terms as content ecosystem, video embedding, cross-channel promotion, and user experience, have we lost sight of the basic purpose of a blog: to communicate?

Not Phillip Lopate. In 2016, the respected essayist, short story writer, film critic, novelist, and poet accepted a challenge from the editors of The American Scholar to write 45 new essays on his blog in the space of a year. Lopate agreed, despite disdaining the very idea of the form. But he soon discovered that the freedom to “exit quickly” was only one of the blog’s advantages.

A Year and a Day: An Experiment in Essays (2023) is a collection of these posts that explores each of the advantages in a conversational, somewhat self-effacing tone. Lopate had an uncommonly busy year, traveling to China and India, publishing a new book, teaching classes at Columbia University while also directing the graduate nonfiction program, touring museums, haunting film festivals, reading voluminously, taking part in the usual family rituals, and agreeing to The American Scholar’s proposal.

But Lopate’s would not be just any blog. “I […] permitted myself to discourse on a range of subjects—books, movies, politics, travel, education, painting, jazz, urban form, past friendships, obituaries, family life—that might have appeared random, presumptuous, or amateurish in another format,” he writes.

I was not putting myself forward as an expert in these matters but only as an observer responding to my latest encounters. In that sense, the blog functioned as a diary. The result, I would like to think, is a self-portrait of one human being’s life as it’s being lived that is fuller, truer, and more rounded than any I have yet put forth in my previous collections.

To some, the author may seem a latecomer to the form. But then, Lopate is a known quantity. He has already established his bona fides, having been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and two NEA grants. His work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and several Pushcart Prize annuals.

Lopate used the blog format simply as a change of pace from his usual book and magazine work, though still with the object of conveying ideas and impressions rather than hawking a product (apart from himself). Unlike most blogs, Lopate’s was largely a lark. He did not need to concern himself with cost-effective marketing, brand positioning, lead generation, content monetization, web traffic, or readers’ changing desires and interests.

The post “Selling My Papers” details Lopate’s most gratifying event of the year, selling 36 cartons of his papers to Yale University’s Beinecke Library after the New York Public Library and Columbia University, his alma mater, showed only passing interest.

“I was outsourcing my memory,” shares Lopate, best known for his 2013 book To Show and to Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. “Though I had never been scrupulously anal about archiving myself—one can either live one’s life or curate it, not both—I had managed to accumulate quite a heap over the years.”

A Year and a Day deals with matters as homespun as “summers in Vermont,” as confounding as “the paradox of urban density,” as thoughtful as a remembrance of Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami, and as elegiac as “memories of jazz nights.” Lopate’s writing is as infuriating as postmortem “reflections after the election” (of 2016), as wistful as “The Road Not Taken,” and as achingly familiar as “the death of friendship,” as he plumbs the mystifying and unsettling demise of a long-standing relationship.

In “The Dead of Summer,” Lopate contemplates the blog itself and finds himself in accord with Gustave Flaubert, who dreamed of writing a book about nothing, sans plot and characters, immersed in the charm of prose style.

“What if I have nothing to say? The challenge of keeping a blog such as this one, in my view, is to write precisely about nothing and somehow fill up five hundred words with improvised filigree,” writes Lopate, “like a jazz pianist playing block chords while waiting for the star saxophonist to return to the stage.” But “I am no Flaubert,” he confesses, “so I have to at least pretend to follow a topic.”

It is all too easy for a blog to become an echo chamber, with essentially the same information being repackaged repeatedly. Lopate’s interests are so diverse that the writing remains fresh and insightful, post to post. And he is keenly aware of the value of sharing anecdotes to personalize observations.

One could argue that the blog is a perfect vehicle for a populace whose attention span erodes with each passing year. The average glance at an article or image lasts 8.25 seconds, according to estimates that roiled the internet in 2015 but turned out to originate from Microsoft’s advertising department.

Lopate’s meatier content notwithstanding, is blogging still relevant? Yes, but it is more challenging and time-consuming to grow one. More to the point, does blogging suit the current climate? Web Tribunal places the number of blogs at more than 600 million worldwide, with at least two million new posts published each day on WordPress, and 31.7 million bloggers in the United States alone. Tumblr is the dominant platform with an estimated stable of 495 million blogs.

The form would seem to be in relatively robust health––from the standpoint of volume if not quality. As a forum for information and opinion, social media cannot compete. But the sheer number of blogs obviously makes it that much harder for an individual to stand out, and for some readers to locate congenial material or parse the worthy from the poseurs.

Lopate embodies no such difficulties. During his challenge, he also had the freedom to be playful. Or melancholy. “The prose style in the blogs is fairly similar to the one I employ in my essays: the I-character or voice of the narrator, the humor and irony, the attempt to reach some honesty and compositional shapeliness, all basically the same,” he writes. “I will say that the prose in these blog pieces is more relaxed and impromptu than in my essay collections.”

The posts in A Year and a Day are not all in their original form. Lopate reedited some, made minor changes, and shuffled their chronological order. He also excised a few while substituting an equal number of short essays composed after the blog had run its course.

No matter. The voice is the same, the perceptiveness unaltered. Even in this mode of modest engagement, Lopate finds the core. He has always refused the mantle of “public intellectual,” and with it the overweening self-confidence and smugness the term can imply. Lopate prefers to be known for the skepticism, self-mockery, and doubt made viable by the personal essay, girded by individual experience.

“I, being a writer, am always looking for new angles, contrarian ironies, paradoxes that will undercut stale pieties or received ideas. Even in daily conversation, I monitor my speech closely, trying to root out the obvious,” writes Lopate. “In doing so I often stay silent for long stretches rather than mouth the banal.”