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.
The Dynamism of Duos
Color It Away
Need to relax? Check out an adult coloring book. Sales have skyrocketed in the past two years. Coloring books could stifle creativity instead of helping it grow, though.
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Getting Turned On
December 26, 1962 marked the first time that Playboy Magazine ever used the phrase “turn-on.” Since then, humans have conceived of a remarkable variety of metaphor and colorful language in an attempt to try and make some sense of copulation. Over at Hazlitt, Chelsea G. Summers takes a close look at the increasingly electric language of sex. Unsurprisingly, sex is never far from the mind of a literary writer, either.
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Mavis Gallant, Diarist
Rejoice: Mavis Gallant's private journals are being released by Knopf in the US.
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“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”
Continuing Tin House’s great “The Art of The Sentence” series, Vishwas Gaitonde dives deep into the opening line from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. (Come on, we all know the one.) Be sure to catch Tin House's previous TAoTS series installments as well.
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Oylmpics: A Cautionary Tale
Remember, everybody. Running with the Olympic torch is temporary, but a misspelled tattoo is forever.
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Women’s Artistic Genius
Over at Public Books, Katie Fitzpatrick writes that Dana Spiotta's Innocents and Others is a novel on women’s artistic genius. Pair with Jason Arthur’s review of the novel.