I promise you that the best thing you’ll read today is this remembrance of the Kilimanjaro climbin’, chemotherapy-cocktail imbibin’, tank bustin’ and cricket playin’ life of Major Robert Crisp, D.S.O, M.C.
“Bob wasn’t the settling sort.”
Let’s Have a Panel About It
Man Booker Prize-winner Marlon James is finished talking about diversity, and here’s part of his logic: “A panel on diversity is like a panel on world peace. It should be seeking a time when we no longer need such panels. It should be a panel actively working towards its own irrelevance. The fact that we’re still having them not only means that we continue to fail, but the false sense of accomplishment in simply having one is deceiving us into thinking that something was tried.”
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The Dynamism of Duos
Is “the two-person collaboration… the essential creative act”? Joshua Wolf Shenk thinks so, and he’s written a book defending his position, aptly titled The Powers of Two: Finding the Essence of Innovation in Creative Pairs. While John Lennon and Paul McCartney are his primary examples and the root of his argument, famous author duos are also referenced – C.S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, for one. Shenk even “works to transform even famously lonely figures — Rainer Maria Rilke, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr. — into one side of a duet.” Consider us skeptical but intrigued.
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Off to the Races
Following our coverage of the Man Booker Prize shortlist, it’s now time to place your bets on which book will eventually triumph. At The Atlantic, Joe Pinsker offers a tip based on previous winners: focus not on the book itself, but on its reviews.
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That Which I Love
Recommended Reading: This jarring, surreal “amalgamation of three different pieces” on Hannah Arendt by Bobbi Lurie over at 3:AM Magazine. Arendt, herself a political theorist, would likely have appreciated this piece from The Millions on the life and afterlife of literary theory.
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