A Literary Celebration of America, From Bob Dylan to Borscht Belt

‘250 Great American Things: A Sesquicentennial Celebration’By County HighwayHard Cider Press, 409 pagesCounty Highway, a bi-monthly magazine about America in the form of a 19th century newspaper, has published a book that celebrates America to commemorate the nation’s recent 250th birthday. True to its founding spirit — and its spiritual founder, Mark Twain — the magazine asked its roster of writers to compile 250 things that make America uniquely great. County Highway, which debuted in July 2023, is the brainchild of novelist Walter Kirn, writer-editor David Samuels, and publisher-film producer Donald Rosenfeld. It has published some of the most interesting writers working today, who are described on the back cover as “America’s finest essayists, humorists, fiction writers, and other prose stylists and wises asses.”The entries are as sweeping as you might imagine. Like the country it chronicles, “250 Great American Things” is broad-ranging, polyglot, eclectic, quirky, tub-thumping, comic, erudite, profane and organically, not prescriptively, diverse. There are entries that read like the farmer’s almanac and others that resemble beat poetry. Some entries are a single terse line, while others are essays — the entry on all-American provocateur Abbie Hoffman spans eight pages. The entry on the Kentucky Derby, almost as long, reads like a short story and provides infallible and unlikely advice on picking a winner. All together, these entries assemble 250 facets of our gloriously unfathomable and ever-shifting republic. Chandler Fritz writes a gastronomical appraisal of drag racing. Ryan Baesmann pays solemn literary homage to surfing; Liel Leibowitz testily reframes the concept of the American melting pot; Walter Kirn waxes elegiac about Waffle House; Meaghan Garvey explores the mysterious duality of Marilyn Monroe; Donald Rosenfeld delves into the incredible intricacies of Hollywood; Krist Novoselic, bass player for Nirvana, extols the American virtues of the five-piece band. There are entries on Mormonism, twenty-four hour diners, the Model T, and so on.To think of the process by which these entries were compiled and alphabetized is a gasser in itself. Take the entry that praises the Boeing 747 as the ultimate workhorse of American commercial flight. It comes directly after an essay on Bob Dylan, the probable godfather of Americana itself. Before that you find an entry on Borscht Belt, that rich seam of Jewish comedy from the Catskill mountains, and “Bongs,” the heroic toking implement of choice for all weed loving Gen-Xers, though the author casts a disapproving eye on vapes, edibles and dabs. Before that is bourbon, probably the most American booze there is. No wonder it goes well with coke, which also has an entry.Wonderful tidbits of history get thrown in as well. We learn that the Grilled Cheese sandwich was first mentioned in the 1929 daily bulletin in Van Wert, Ohio. Or that Robert Evans, one of Hollywood’s greatest film producers, got his start as an actor portraying Irving Thalberg, another legendary Hollywood producer. We are informed about John Moses Browning, greatest gunsmith in history and holder of 128 firearm patents. We’re told that First Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, who conducted the first formal topographical survey of the Grand Canyon, pronounced it “Altogether Valueless.” We also discover that the “y” at the end of Grand Ole Opry was a deliberate thumb nosing by disc jockey George D. Hay at sophisticates who had expected to hear opera. The name stuck, and Nashville became the Vatican of country music.County Highway. WebsiteThere is cultural history as well. David Samuels traces back the omnipresent eyeball in American corporate insignia the eye in the CBS logo, as well as IBM and Time Warner Cable, to a passage in Emerson’s essay “Nature.” “I am become a transparent eyeball” Emerson wrote, describing the transcendental states he achieved in the American outdoors. “I am nothing, I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I become part and particle of God.” Some may call it a poetic stretch, but the connection between philosophical rapture and corporate insignia is a deeply American one — witness Steve Jobs returned from India. This piece of metaphysical sleuthing is found under the entry “Emerson’s Transparent Eyeball.”A larger intent emerges while thumbing through amusing and enlightening entries, however. The ineffable “something” that each author is hunting is the ephemeral spirit of America; the ever elusive quintessence that makes America American. We begin to understand how the idea of America beguiles us with its promise, appears to linger for a moment, then is gone to inhabit something else. All of us, it seems, are Jay Gatsby peering longingly at the green lamp across the lake. Yes, Gatsby gets his own entry.The one great achievement of this book is that it leaves us contemplating this American essence and where it can be found. Does it reside in the blinking of a Vegas fruit machine, the sizzle of a grill at a Chicago diner, the clink of a quarter in an Austin Jukebox, the rumble of Hells Angels through New Mexico? Is it in the endless perfection of the Pacific Coast along Highway 101, or the endless trinket and junk store that is now the length of Route 66?America, it seems, is all and none of these things. It is a feverish bricolage, an impossible amalgam running on a bottomless fund of hope, innovation, chutzpah, fearlessness, and ludicrous audacity. It is a country so large and improbable it creates its own mythology almost as a shrugging afterthought. America isn’t merely great because it is already something, but precisely because it is always becoming something greater.At this time of America’s sesquicentennial, this generous and all-embracing view of the republic appears to be under siege by a finger wagging, pointy headed barista class who wish to see it punished for its intersectional sins. In their shrill, reductionist view, all the marvelous and improbable excesses of America should and must be atoned for. They want this glorious mess reduced to drab formulas of equity, a world where Ginger Rogers gives up her dance shoes and winds up “Me-Tooing” Fred Astaire.County Highway’s “250 Great American Things” compilation is the antidote to this sour and sad state of affairs. Rummage through it with Rabelaisian gluttony. Tear into it unapologetically like a double cheeseburger. Revel in the greatness of America. It’s not going anywhere.

A Literary Celebration of America, From Bob Dylan to Borscht Belt

A Literary Celebration of America, From Bob Dylan to Borscht Belt

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