What We Have Here is a Failure to Multitask
I can’t remember now if this post is supposed to be about One Hundred Years of Solitude or if it’s supposed to be about something else. I better check the notebook.
Ah, here it is. There’s another post about the novel, but this one is about summer goals and stuff like that. I wrote it by the pool this afternoon when it was about 100 degrees. Just like me back in the day – you know, very hot.
Given the title, you can imagine that solitude is important to the story. It’s a great novel. But it’s causing me some problems. You see, I’ve set out this summer to be a reader, a writer, a Spanish learner, a father, a fitness dude…in other words, too many things. So here’s what I wrote at the pool:
Maybe solitude is the theme for a poem. But I think I’ve got to get to blogging about the challenge of literary multitasking for me – my inability to be a reader at one time of day and a writer at another. I think I’ve learned that I’m happy I give kids class time to write, because I have a hard enough time of making time for it myself.
How much of the issue is guilt? How much of it is knowing that I’m not marking up One Hundred Years of Solitude but still trying to be attentive to detail? How much of it is thinking that, if I have time to write, I should be writing about the book? How much is it the fact that reading the book is an easily understood assignment, while the writing has no clear assignment to guide me?
I saw the CWP email about the lyric essay writing workshop, and I immediately thought about Segolene’s Camus project and his lyrical essays. Maybe an effort to do my own piece inspired by “Summer in Algiers” is the kind of assignment that is both doable and can lead to some poetry. Such a task won’t give me a chance to read as much as I set out to, but it will give me a chance to accomplish both kinds of goals (reading and writing) to some degree rather than accomplishing one to a significant extent only as I feel really badly about not really accomplishing the other at all.
I think this means that War and Peace will be incubating in the summer of 2010.
I can’t remember now if this post is supposed to be about One Hundred Years of Solitude or if it’s supposed to be about something else. I better check the notebook.
Ah, here it is. There’s another post about the novel, but this one is about summer goals and stuff like that. I wrote it by the pool this afternoon when it was about 100 degrees. Just like me back in the day – you know, very hot.
Given the title, you can imagine that solitude is important to the story. It’s a great novel. But it’s causing me some problems. You see, I’ve set out this summer to be a reader, a writer, a Spanish learner, a father, a fitness dude…in other words, too many things. So here’s what I wrote at the pool:
Maybe solitude is the theme for a poem. But I think I’ve got to get to blogging about the challenge of literary multitasking for me – my inability to be a reader at one time of day and a writer at another. I think I’ve learned that I’m happy I give kids class time to write, because I have a hard enough time of making time for it myself.
How much of the issue is guilt? How much of it is knowing that I’m not marking up One Hundred Years of Solitude but still trying to be attentive to detail? How much of it is thinking that, if I have time to write, I should be writing about the book? How much is it the fact that reading the book is an easily understood assignment, while the writing has no clear assignment to guide me?
I saw the CWP email about the lyric essay writing workshop, and I immediately thought about Segolene’s Camus project and his lyrical essays. Maybe an effort to do my own piece inspired by “Summer in Algiers” is the kind of assignment that is both doable and can lead to some poetry. Such a task won’t give me a chance to read as much as I set out to, but it will give me a chance to accomplish both kinds of goals (reading and writing) to some degree rather than accomplishing one to a significant extent only as I feel really badly about not really accomplishing the other at all.
I think this means that War and Peace will be incubating in the summer of 2010.
posted by Mike McAteer @ 9:47 PM
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