WRB—Nov. 15, 2025

“cultural loop”

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the newsletters of this world!

Links:

• In The Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring interviews Lance Richardson about his new biography of Peter Matthiessen, cofounder of that magazine and onetime CIA operative (True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, October) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Oct. 11, 2025.]:

  Piepenbring: What led him from spying to starting a magazine?

  Richardson: The problem with Matthiessen’s cover soon became clear—the labor of a writer is pretty invisible to the outside world. It looks like we’re just sitting inside and not doing anything at all. Matthiessen’s handler told him he needed a visible profession. And one day in one of the cafés he runs into Harold “Doc” Humes, another American who was running a magazine called the Paris News Post, which he had acquired for six hundred bucks, because that was the trend among expats in postwar Paris. Everyone had a little magazine going in that time—there was Merlin, Points, Zero.

  Humes was a real character, a bit of a loose cannon. He was wearing a cape when Matthiessen saw him at the café that day. He brought on Matthiessen as his fiction editor. But Matthiessen saw the Paris News Post as a lightweight endeavor. He suggested one day to Doc that they flick it off and make something better. Doc jumped at the idea—or, if you take his word for it, it was really his idea, and he planted it in Matthiessen’s head. Peter didn’t want to be the top editor, so he phoned up his friend George Plimpton, whom he’d known since they were children on the Upper East Side. Plimpton was in Cambridge, England, at the time, about to graduate, not sure what he was going to do with his life. And he seized the opportunity to come over to Paris and start editing this new magazine, with Matthiessen still on as the fiction editor.

  [As always, the WRB is extremely open to receiving CIA funding. Please pass this information on to the CIA operative in your life. I’m not sure, though, that they’re still in the business. Many aspects of the 1990s—grunge, heroin chic, Tom Hanks, basically every piece of art reckoning with the End of History—make more sense if the guys at the CIA who previously made sure that American culture was good got reassigned when the Berlin Wall fell. —Steve]

• In The Yale Review, Adam Biles interviews Miriam Toews about her new memoir (A Truce That Is Not Peace, August) [An Upcoming book in WRB—Aug. 20, 2025; we linked to a review in WRB—Sept. 3, 2025.]:

  Biles: One way this book attempts to locate meaning is in, we might say, metaphor. There’s the repeated appearance of this skunk at your house who’s trying to get back to the plot of land where she previously lived. You also have the idea of a wind museum, which takes on increasing meaning as we go through the book. How useful were these metaphors for you once you had, at least to some extent, disposed of narrative for understanding why you write?

  Toews: The ridiculous idea of the wind museum—the idea that I would be able to contain the winds of the world in a museum, in a building, in different rooms—was really funny to me. And it works as a metaphor for what writing is. Because the idea that we can take everything inside of us—our thoughts, our feelings, our notions, our ideas—and somehow contain them all in a book is just as ridiculous. And yet we do. I mean, we don’t achieve it. We’re not successful at it. But we make the effort. I think it’s in the effort that life exists.

  [As Blake says:

  To see a world in a grain of sand

  And a heaven in a wild flower,

  Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

  And eternity in an hour.

  And Odysseus had a bag with all the winds except one in it; he could, perhaps, have saved some time by establishing a museum on some Aegean island.

  I don’t think the goal of a book is to contain “everything inside of us.” Most books are more modest than that, and even the few that aren’t still necessitate artistic decisions about what to include, what to omit, and how to present it. —Steve]

Reviews:

• In our sister publication on the sweet Thames,

  Adam Smyth
  reviews a book about Gutenberg (Johannes Gutenberg: A Biography in Books, by Eric Marshall White, June):

  It’s not surprising that historians have been preoccupied with what we might call monumental books: the seventeen volumes of the Encyclopédie (1751-65) of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert; or Christopher Plantin’s Biblia Polyglotta, eight folio volumes of parallel texts in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and Aramaic, with Latin translations, printed in Antwerp between 1568 and 1573; or John James Audubon’s Birds of America (1827-38) with its 435 hand-coloured, life-size prints; or The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer printed in 1896 at William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (“a pocket cathedral,” according to Edward Burne-Jones); or Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), the book we call the First Folio but shouldn’t (because it wasn’t). These are big books, both physically and in their impact, but they are also vastly unrepresentative. And in focusing on the connection between print and preservation, we miss the culture of ephemeral texts that Gutenberg’s innovation unleashed. His technology produced thousands of copies of texts that didn’t endure—alongside a few that did—and Gutenberg, like almost all printers after him, kept his business afloat through these slenderest of texts. The historian Elizabeth Eisenstein caught this nicely when she observed that the printing revolution was not “centrally about the history of books,” but rather a wider, wilder sea of “images and charts, advertisements and maps, official edicts and indulgences.”

  [Why not try to have some of the glamour of Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies rub off on you? —Steve]

[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:

• I reveal the purpose of the novel

• I reveal the purpose of romantasy, specifically

• K. T. on a Poem by Michael Lavers and the good life

If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.

And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? The best way to support us is by subscribing, but the second-best is by sharing the WRB with other people. —Steve]