NEW POD - CAN A NEW, OLD-TIMEY NEWSPAPER BRING AMERICA HOME?

Some of the country's best writers are optimistic about it!

Only now that it’s all coming back to me am I fully understanding the absolute dehumanization that public health and our institutions are capable of. The it I refer to is a panorama of images and ideas that evoke our lives before the Big P.

I recently spoke of a Dior runway show as profoundly therapeutic in its beauty, simplicity, the craftsmanship and fabrics. Full length skirts brushing aqualine feet in strappy sandals with flat heels. I could almost hear the swish. The pintuck tailoring and relentless commitment to an almost colourless palette were nearly bridal. How I wish I’d been there. Sitting at home with it unfolding on a large screen, I swooned.

So how do I connect the dots between a newspaper, which is the subject of this week’s show and haute couture? The Dior collection reminded me that beauty and grace are allowed once again. The Balenciaga Bondage Teddy was was a low point — not that long ago and still unexplained.

When I heard about County Highway, the brand new literary broadsheet from heartland America, my pulse quickened. It was as if, like the Dior creations, we are heading back toward something like measurable quality. It is the opposite of the postmodern ugliness and debauchery that has captured our culture, especially legacy media. One of the founders of County Highway is novelist and critic, Walter Kirn, author of 8 books, a couple of which were made into films. Kirn is an Oxford/Cambridge man but in a good way.

Here’s how the Montana Free Press covered County Highway’s debut.

LIVINGSTON — In July, “County Highway,” an ambitious and print-only bimonthly magazine that comes in the form of an old-school broadsheet newspaper, made its debut.

The publication’s essays, reviews and interviews — jam-packed and splayed across 20 large, inky pages — traverse the geography, political ideologies and history of America. The inaugural issue features an exposé on the gentrification of the desert lands of southern California, a heady visit to the Miracle of America Museum in Polson, a doomsday critique of Big Tech, a wheat crop report from Oklahoma, a spicy reflection on the early 20th-century con man Titanic Thompson, an unflattering assessment of a new Barbara Kingsolver novel (“NPR listeners are suckers for this crap,” reads the sub-sub-sub headline) and a brief interview with firebrand presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on his love of falconry. And then there’s the other 17 pages.

True to its anachronistic form, you can’t find “County Highway” online. Readers can purchase a copy at a selection of bookstores and record stores across the country (including six in Montana) or, alternately, buy a subscription through the publication’s bare-bones website. (Also true to form, the newspaper’s back page is devoted to classified ads, only some of which are real.)

County Highway is not a cutesy take on small town America. But rather a smart take on the places where most people live — which is to say outside of the bi-coastal asylums that now pass for cities. Says Kirn:

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. 

I did this long trip around the country and I noticed something almost immediately: Even in small towns people often couldn’t give directions to a town that was 50 miles away. They’re like, “Don’t you have a phone?” It would turn out that all I had to do was go down one road, take a right and take another left to get on the way. But people didn’t know where they were. It’s amazing how geographically illiterate we’ve become.

But the other thing about rural and small town and small city America is that no matter how depressing certain circumstances have become, it’s a place that has succeeded culturally over the years through its good humor. It gave us Mark Twain. It gave us the blues. People need to entertain themselves and console themselves and stay healthy.

Nice to wake up today to a Canadian email showcasing some of the wonderful coverage from rural farm newspapers in this country.

Hi Trish and Team,

Just listened to another amazing episode and wanted to share and promote the Farmers Forum which you may or may not be aware of. They do have an online version https://farmersforum.com/ (which even has a section dedicated to the freedom convoy) as well as print.

I learned about it from my in laws who live in rural Ontario on farm land and subscribe to the hard copy version so they can enjoy it with their coffee on the deck. They share them with us when they are finished and highlight the articles that they know would interest us. Our friend Rex Murphy is a guest columnist quite regularly and there are always insightful opinion pieces from the other contributors. As well as promoting local farms and the work being done by those who feed us. 

Your conversation with Walter Kirn, who is such an interesting intellectual and I look forward to reading his newspaper, really resonated with my  We take for granted how much information we are bombounded with every single day with the majority of which we learn absolutely nothing of value to our daily lives. The perspectives are so obviously one sided in anything mainstream and anything not is censored heavily and fact checked which only makes it infuriating to read with these ridiculous banners warning that these opinions are not kosher in the eyes of the “them”. 

Here are a few snips of some articles within the Farmers Forum. I think you may find some of the reading up your alley and speaking for myself, it’s always such a blessing to come across reasonable and intelligent reporting, and so few and far between these days, so I couldn’t not share. 

As always, thank you so much for what you do. I look forward to your new episodes and re listen to old ones in between. You are a shining light in an otherwise dark and scary time. 

Natalie

There’s a few slots left for a freebie County Highway first edition. Upgrade to paid or write a sentence or two about your favourite pre-digital newspaper. And do comment below on this week’s show. Your words always cheer me.

Stay critical.