A tragicomic week

Teaching’s been fun this week. I finished Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in one class. We’re in the middle of King Lear in another. I got to lecture on Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments in a third, and that’s brought all the tragedy into context.

I highly recommend Doyle’s Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, The Van), followed by his Mann Booker award winner, Paddy Clarke ha ha ha. Once you read them all you’ve gotten Irish literature. Pathos, bathos, comedy, fuck and shite. You still have to read your Yeats, Joyce, Heaney, and Medbh McGuckian. But you’ll have a good foundation.

But my novel’s been off track for weeks. That’s the problem with teaching other people’s great works. Your own feeble ones fall by the wayside (and “fall by the wayside” apparently comes from the Gospels … that’s an old idiom).  My book’s been languishing, and it bothers me.

That means I’ve broken one of my main rules. Write every day. Set a schedule, and stick to it. I didn’t come up with this rule, of course. I’m not sure if you can find the first person who came up with that one. But it’s the main writing rule. Romantics believed in inspiration, but the good ones still wrote every day. I’ve always been on the fence between the Romantics and their predecessors, the neoclassicists, the Augustans, the eighteenth-century writers, whatever.

So, tomorrow comes, and the writing resumes. I might get a few pages in today. We’ll see.