Tag Archives: County Highway

Music, Non-fiction

County Highway 1.2: The Swifties Edition

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“They’re Taylor Swift fans,” the woman cleaning the floor beside me helpfully explains. “They’re very nice, but they leave glitter everywhere.”

Is County Highway, the new newspaper for America written and edited by living human beings, selling out in its second issue or weeding out its readership by publishing a five-page article on Taylor Swift’s Eros concert in Seattle? I can’t say I was prepared to read it, but I did, and taking two pages before getting to Swift herself was helpful. (I shouldn’t say that, because I don’t dislike I’ve heard of her music. I can still a few lines, but as a 50+ year old man, I feel I have better things to listen to, like maybe K-pop.) Writer David Samuels contrasts the messaging in Swift’s concert with the reality of living in Seattle, where cops have no power to handle public harassers and residents learn to ignore all humans around them in an effort to Do No Harm to the ones who’ve intended harm to themselves. The mostly female concert audience affirmed they were cute and deserved better—yeah, that’s the message the city needs to hear. If only music would get them there.

What’s in the rest of this issue? There’s a lengthy piece on Mule Days, “The Greatest Mule Show on Earth,” in Bishop, California, which used to be “one of the biggest agricultural festivals in America.” There’s an essay on logging in July, another on the equinox, and one about a 1986 cookbook called White Trash Cooking–“A Confederate general and a gay man who liked cole slaw have more in common with each other than with a Yankee.”

There’s an article about interviewing one of the men who claim to know Many Important Details about extraterrestrials and UFOs and is both eager and reluctant to share. If you watched some of the congressional hearings on UFOs several weeks ago, you probably saw this guy. Yes, he knew critical details; no, he couldn’t share them openly.

There’s an interesting piece on how GPS changes the way we understand our environment, our local world. Alex Perez has a humorous story about professional wrestling in Puerto Rico. There’s a chilling account of corrupt dealings with Columbian presidents and the Clinton Foundation.

Perhaps the heart of County Highway can be seen in this quote from the essay, “The Bull Calf,” by Sage Radecki.

Trying like hell to fix something we saw as a problem, when in reality, it wasn’t ours to fix. Nature, in all its beauty and sorrows, is something we cannot overcome. It’s simply something we need to make space for. I’m learning this daily here, on the ranch, in our work in the field and my time tending to the garden.

That’s a good word.

Non-fiction, Poetry, Publishing

County Highway, a New Magazine Delivered as Newspaper

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When I read on Twitter (X) that novelist and editor Walter Kirn, along with David Samuels, had created “a magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper,” I looked up the website, and when I saw it would be for sale at one of my town’s cute local stores, I decided to check it out.

County Highway is meant to represent the heart of America, a place with natural rhythms, relationships, and grassroots sense. It’s written by “actual human beings,” which is more than some websites can say. “We hope to advance the same relationship to America that Bob Dylan had when he wrote his versions of folk songs” or when Neil Young, Gram Parsons, Mark Twain, and Ralph Ellison wrote of their country.

I enjoy the feel of reading this paper, which cheekily touts itself as “America’s only newspaper” and plans to publish six issues a year for a $50 subscription. Kirn’s front page piece is on his visit to The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, Montana, a place where memorabilia, props, and junk attempt to preserve a moral history. Duncan Moench has a report on artificial intelligence and the imminent threat of corporate technocracy.

I was pulled in by a review of Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead (2023 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction), which says Kingsolver’s skill is clear and subject matter well chosen, but this “protest novel” in the form of Dicken’s David Copperfield is heavy on ranting, light on humanity. Other articles in this first issue include a lengthy piece that circles around Joshua Tree National Park, a front story on an American con man from last century, four pages on music, feature on Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s falconry hobby, and a full page of legit classifieds: Wyoming cabins, bookstores, alpacas for breeding, and ‘shrooms.

I’ve enjoyed reading some of these, and there are a few more I’d like to get to. There’s a little poetry, a few wisecracks tucked in a small column, and attractive illustrations of a vintage sheen. The articles feel like those I’ve seen online and hoped to get back to, but often don’t. The Internet is ethereal; newspapers sit on the desk.

I may buy the next issue to try to balance what I read in the first, but I’m put off by the feel of the whole. Is it cynical? Maybe too secular? There’s a column about fugitives from someone who speaks positively about the Weather Underground. I believe he says he helped a couple of them back in the day. That’s like longing for time when your granddad would tell stories of fighting alongside Che Guevara. And then there’s this in a joke section: “Drag queen story hour — it’s what my pops used to call church on Sundays.” I don’t know what to do with that. Maybe I should untie my laces. (I wrote about the second issue also.)

Alt Culture: To balance the earthiness of America’s newspaper, let me point you to the new season of Doubletake from World News Group. This is a podcast of long features that can get complicated. Today’s episode is on what some people are doing in the Metaverse and a church trying to reach them.

Poetry: John Barr’s “Season of spores”:

“a bric-a-brac of fluke and ruff,
lavender cap, topiary puff.”

Photo by Wolfgang Frick on Unsplash