"I Feel Like Explaining Something"

"He founded a rag called the Paris News Post—'sort of a fourth-rate version of the New Yorker,' he drolly croaks here. He got Plimpton very, very high on Easter Sunday in 1952, and it is worth tuning in to Doc just to hear Plimpton's voice rise when he imitates his own stoned giggle of that afternoon. Somewhere in there, the Paris Review started. Humes claims that the magazine evolved from 'a conversation between Jimmy Baldwin and myself.' George, Being George, the new oral history of Plimpton's life, suggests that Peter Matthiessen nudged Humes toward the idea partly because Matthiessen was working for the CIA and needed a good cover. Everyone agrees that Humes was too wild actually to manage a publication. Still, it was poor form for them to knock him down the masthead, where, for a time, he dwelled ridiculously as the advertising manager."

Troy Patterson in Slate reviews a new documentary about the life of writer H.L. Humes.