What I Learned from Michael Chabon's Fountain City

So, I'm on Goodreads--have you heard of Goodreads? It's Facebook for books. Anyway, they have a challenge where you pick how many books you're going to read in 2011. My friend Mel showed me. I played along. I need the encouragement. I don't read as much as I did/should/would, but to be fair if I were able to bind all the student writing I read it would certainly give Vollmann's Rising Up and Rising Down a run for it's length (and that's yearly). It's a pathetically low bar I set for myself, but even so I find myself picking shorter and shorter books to read. Which is why I read Fountain City by Michael Chabon. It's not even a book, but four chapters of a failed book, a "wrecked" book with annotations and miscellany by the author. It was part of McSweeney's 36, so is actually, technically a magazine article, but it's on Goodreads freestanding so I'm counting it as a book. Point is you should read it. I should make my students read it. See how they like it. Having to read stuff. Here's a list of things I learned. I won't go into detail because since this is only four chapters, the spoilers wouldn't be the plot but how Chabon writes about his failure.

How writing can be suicide (non-poet edition).
The care of characters hanged from the "peg board of the imagination."
The role of the random.
Definition of draftitis.
Ditto authorial alienation
Thoughts on writing post-workshop
The need for a novelist's spouse (are you listening, Heather?).

Now to find something shorter to read.