The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, December 17, 2024

Notably: It’s been a while since we could celebrate a new publication, a newspaper especially. Here’s one: Country Highway. It defies the conventions of today’s newspapers. It’s published only six times a year, in broadsheet format. It’s non-ideological without being a-political. It’s modernist in reporting and nostalgic in layout. It’s rich in stories and variety. I’ve been reading Wade Graham’s enormously long “Beyond the Dead Pool,” an account of his trip down the dying and desecrated Colorado River, for a few days. It reminds me of Edward Abbey’s famous piece in Desert Solitaire on the Colorado before Glen Canyon Dam was built (“The beavers had to go and build another goddamned dam on the Colorado”). An excerpt from Graham’s piece: “In 1980, Ronald Reagan, a swaggering, wisecracking embodiment of US Cold War truculence in the face of its ungodly, communist enemies, was elected president. Like Reagan’s presidency, reaching Full Pool at Lake Powell amounted to the delayed fulfillment of promises made to Americans, or at least some Americans, in the 1950s: the successful culmination of the Cold War through indomitable will and technological prowess, projected into American living rooms by cathode-ray tubes. Full Pool was a battle won in the nation’s other endless war, the war against wasteful, irrational nature, which would be transformed by man’s rational technology from natural menace to natural resource.” The pool, of course is no longer full, and the Reagan swagger has, as Max Boot tells us in his new book, that tome of disillusion, proved to be what the man himself was if you looked close enough: mostly a chuckling mirage. Country Highway says it’s print-only, but in fact it has a pretty elaborate online version of the print newspaper, if you pay for it (in replica form). The editors, Walter Kirn–a younger Wendell Berry–and David Samuels, have a healthy dislike of all medias social, and respect the printed word too much to pander to its effluent disseminations in any other way but through what they call on the  front page “America’s only newspaper.” It may well be. “[W]hen I read “County Highway,” it feels like there’s a recurring tension between optimism and faith in America, and a mourning of what’s been lost in the country,” Max Savage of the Montana Free Press said in a question to Kirn, part of an interview on the paper.  A very quick run-through of some of the articles in this issue: A wry profile of Bitcoiners, a piece on South Phoenix I haven’t figured out yet (this is another characteristic of Country Highway: you will not see lead paragraphs or “nut” graphs that sum it all up for you. You have to read, and at times read half way through the riverine piece, to figure out what’s going on). Samuels writes a long piece on a Trump rally in Montana (“Donald Trump’s rallies aren’t cool. Like you, probably, I’ve watched them on TV, first as a supposed harbinger of the coming American fascist state, and then as a species of light comic relief while folding laundry. Generally speaking, I prefer loud guitars and 7th-inning home runs or simply sitting outside on the porch of my farmhouse and watching grass grow.”) He gives Trump pointers for being an entertaining storyteller. There’s an article from “The Invisible America” about “The Longest Yard Sale,” apparently a 700-mile event along U.S. Route 127, through Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Michigan. The more you get into Country Highway, the more it reads like a print version of This American Life, a show I have listened to, in segments, maybe twice. There’s an enormously long piece about recycling at the Oregon Country Fair and something about an old VW bus. There’s a piece about Keith Jarrett, the tragic keyboard jazz composer and performer who had to give it up because of strokes and paralysis. There’s a lot more. The latest issue has a piece on the Asheville flood I can’t wait to read but for Briefings like this that keep me away from it, and a piece by Tama Janowitz! I haven’t seen that name in print since the Reagan years. For some odd, probably bigoted reason, when I think Tama Janowitz, I think  Tonya Harding in print. I only heard about Country Highway because they sent me a complimentary copy somehow. I hadn’t asked for it. I was hooked. I shelled out for a three-year suscription. It now arrives in the sort of thick-see-through cellophane they used to wrap porno mags in, as I recall from my days when I’d furtively buy the odd Penthouse at the Korean convenience store at the corner of Queens Boulevard and 40th Street, coming off the subway at Lowery Street in Queens. The unwrapping of Country Highway is its own evocation. I don’t have this much fun reading the New York Review of Books, let alone the New Yorker, which has fallen on its hip. The paper is offering a two-year deal for $89. Take it. 

—P.T.

 

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The idea of “County Highway,” to be a little glib, is to invert the famous “New Yorker” map of America cartoon, which shows Manhattan in the foreground, and then this long and undifferentiated expanse of the rest of the country. My partner, David Samuels, and I want to reorient that around the interior of the country. The heartland, for “County Highway,” starts at the Hudson River and really goes all the way to the Pacific, excepting maybe Santa Monica and so on. And truthfully, we’d write about those places too — we’d just write about them as towns rather than capitals. We wouldn’t award them that special primacy that they’re used to. We’ve decided to make it a newspaper of America that treats everything the way small town or small city newspapers treat their places without special status or metropolitan privilege. Now, as you said, if you’re gonna be honest about America right now, there are a basic set of thematic contours that are inescapable. There’s a great sense of loss in America: loss of tradition, loss of cohesion, loss of neighborly knowledge, loss of local knowledge, loss of vocational knowledge. There’s an inescapable theme of technology overrunning people’s lives, hollowing out a lot of the country that used to be a little bit more intact. […] One of the big motives underlying this newspaper is to honor the cultural variety and achievement of Americans who are somewhat overlooked. It’s not Lake Wobegon. We’re not writing cute stories about extremely familiar America. We believe that a cosmopolitan, witty and worldly attitude toward local stories is both an amusing and useful approach.

–From “The Sit Down: Walter Kirn,” in Montana Free Press, Aug. 9, 2023.

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