EphemaWHAT?!?

actually mean? I tell people what I'm working on, and they're like, what, that's Sarah Wasserman who has made a career out of answering questions like these. My name is Sarah Wasserman, and I am a professor of English and this other thing called material culture studies at the University of Delaware, and I am finishing a book about ephemera. It's called The Death of Things. A good place to begin, as you might expect, is to pull the word apart.

It comes from a Latin Greek combination word so epi, meaning of or on, as we have in Epicurius something like that, and camera meaning day. And the word was originally used to signify things that basically only lived for one day. So the mayfly was the classic example in a single day or sometimes a long weekend, depending on the particular species. The mayfly transforms into its adult winged stage,

flies around, molts, mates, lays its eggs, and dies. Over two thousand species of may fly make up the aptly named order if Optera. In the most rigid connotation, ifemera refers to paper, it's come to mean mainly printed material that doesn't stick around for long. So we use it to think about broadsides, ticket stubs, brochures, pamphlets, flyers, envelopes, lottery tickets, paper dolls, maps, posted notes. You can drive yourself crazy trying to make an exhaustive list of all

the printed material that passes through people's hands. That's the textbook definition, right for me, someone who's interested in expanding that definition. I always think of it as an object that is signaling its own imminent disappearance or destruction. So it's an object that sort of announces when you encounter it, hey, I'm not going to be here for long. I'm not going to be here in the nearer future. And that makes it different than other kinds of objects that people

think about sometimes as being ephemera. It's really about that knowledge when you encounter the object, that that it's short lived, it's transigent. But there is an inherent paradox here that I get stuck on. The thing isn't supposed to last, and yet in spite of or even because of its transience, it is given a second life. Is a mysterious piece of tape still ephemera if you put it in a podcast and push it out to the web. We don't have to think about contemporary media to answer that question.

Let's take a classic example a stamp. Ironically, they're called forever stamps. Doubly ironically, I think one of the very first forever stamps depicts an Iceberger polar ice cap that is melting. But if you take the stamp right, Generally, when people buy stamps, you use them once you send your letter, and then it's done. Someone's going to throw it out somewhere. It's not meant to be kept. But of course many people have stamp collections. They're worth a

lot of money, they have sentimental value. People collect them in albums, they save them forever. You get your grandfather's stamp collections, so on and so have you ever in your entire life seen anything so beauty? I'm sorry, I don't know anything about steps. I'll give you another example, me to innovation promotional shoot for Winnebago. The RV company was going horribly wrong. The Winnebago concepts and engineering departments

have developed a multi functional bathroom privacy. I don't need what the im reading frustrated salesman Jack Revney kept blowing his lines, erupting with anger, and swearing continuously on camera. Things got so bad that the crew cut together a tape of the most egregious moments. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Tony don't slam. The star reportedly in an effort to get Rebney fire. Listen. I've got to

give a clue here now. I don't want any more both any time during the day from anyone that includes me. This video would become known as Winnebago Man and would become infamous for years. The videos survived within fringe cultural institutions. Individual collectors duped and traded it on VHS along with other art. The clip would air, believe it or not, on public television. Flies in my head the vehicles like

the show with No Name out of Austin, Texas. We had this all right, this, this is this is one of the all time favorites, and it really is this is, this is the golden clip. Um, this is And in two thousand and six, a digitized version would be posted on a then fledgling YouTube, quickly going what would be

called viral. Let us get stuff here. That could have been the end of the story, but over the next few years, filmmaker Ben Steinbauer tracked down Rebney, now in his eighties, and united the former salesman with fans he didn't know he had at the Found Footage Festival in San Francisco. They documented the adventure in the two thousand nine film, also titled WINNI begg a Man? So how do we chase the distance between those two poles? On one end, the salvage raw tape of an obscure commercial

that I'm not sure ever went to air. On the other, a phenomenon that's been adapted, remixed, and viewed millions of times, A unique work that could last physically and culturally for who knows how long. If Winnebago Man is a modern example of ephemera, and I think it is, how do we reconcile that duality? It's not that ephemera just by default are gone and lost to us. But I do think it takes some effort. Because the things aren't meant

to last. Someone somewhere has to decide that they're meaningful and resurrect them, or maintain them, curate them, disseminate them. It's not just de facto going to come to us. Part of the reason it feels tricky to talk about ephemera is that in English, at least, we have an underdeveloped vocabulary on this subject. And curiously so, given how into our stuff we are, we have a lot of

terms that are very indistinct. I mean, I think when we talk about the objects in the world that we encounter that we use, we talk about stuff, is it, how stuff works? Dot com? We talk about things this thing, that thing, very undifferentiated, and then there's rubbish, trash, refuse. There's obsolescence which BCR is right for you, obsolete object, the outmoded object, and all of those terms I think are related and intersect in interesting ways. The stamp, at

some point it becomes trash. You might also argue that they're becoming obsolete. Who sends letters anymore? The particularity of ephemera is that they're not really meant to leave a remainder. Generally, unless someone is doing some work of saving them, they're lost to us. That's different from something like trash, which we throw away. I mean, there's that a way. We're not meant to see it. We put it somewhere. We

don't really know where it goes. We have a suspicion that it's going somewhere that's probably not good for the environment, but it's still around in some form biodegrading. Maybe the obsolete is something that if you have a box of VHS tapes or c d s and they're taking up space and you don't know what to do with them, you are encountering the physical remainder of the obsolete that sticks around in a way that ephemera doesn't. When a

bego man, in a way is reconstituted trash. The tape was bound for the cutting room floor, which is actually an outmoded term, since you don't generally cut the physical video tape when you edit it. The ported YouTube version retains the artifacts of its obsolete VHS origins, and as it gets remixed and re remixed, it's picked up some digital artifacts along the way. Studying ephemera is a way

of touring our history. There are so many incredible objects that are keyed to particular moments in history, like a World's fair, you know New York nine World's Fair. That's a big one, or World War Two memorabilia, These moments where the objects can teach us about our own history and make meaning for us. In Chicago, tears of joy mingled with cheers as a minion, people saying and danced

in the streets. Narrative meaning affective meaning, different kinds of meaning that you can maybe get at better through a depiction of these objects than just you know, a plot point or straight history. Let's say you've done a podcast episode on no longer available or obsolete form of television

broadcasting I have, but more on that later. So let's say there's a museum exhibition on that form of broadcasting, and you can go to the museum and you can see all the equipment they use, and they have the stage set up, and they've done a recreation. You are a dandy crowd the museum in trying to recreate this and trying to make it available to visitors to experience. You get a sense of the thing, the object, you know what it is, what it was, but you don't

get a sense of its disappearance. In effect, by resurrecting and recreating it, they don't recreate the disappearance, which is obviously the thing that I think can be really poignant and meaningful. Sarah's thesis is that narrative storytelling in fiction or elsewhere, functions especially well at this difficult task because it's not giving you the object itself. It's giving you a descript and of it that you you know, you

have to read, You have to imagine. There's an imperative to narrate the object and its disappearance, and it's vanishing, and it's loss that I think other forms have trouble getting to Winnebago Man the movie four grounds this aspect. Whatever happened to this character would occurred in the twenty year gap between commercial shoot gone wrong and Internet sensation. If narrative helps us see the whole picture, the moment and the loss of the moment simultaneously, well what do

we do with that knowledge? One art by Elizabeth Bishop, The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost, that their loss is no disaster lose some thing every day, except the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster, places and names and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch, and look my last or

next to last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones and vaster some realms. I owned two rivers a continent. I missed them. But it wasn't a disaster. Even losing you. The joking voice a gesture I love, I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing is not too hard to master. Though it may look like righte it like disaster. Elizabeth Bishop published one art.

I think she really gets at the way that the written work can do more than just give us an object, give us a historical object, but give us the loss of that object. It's like the poet saying to herself, if I write it, if I write about this loss, I turn it into something that isn't disaster. Although clearly it is right. I mean, it's so it's filled with so much pathos. What happens when you take that loss and the cycle of production, consumption and disposal that creates it,

and ratchet it up to eleven. That's the recipe for America in the twentieth century. We Americans in the twentieth century become I don't know what to call it, ephemerad juggernauts. Making has been on a companying sound effect to all of American history. Listen to the heartbeat of a great industry. We are the pioneers in many ways of technologies for creating disposable goods, everything from I don't know, paper plates

and plastic cups to paper tablecloths and hygiene products. The wide variety of fabrics that pour out of textile mills plays a great part in your daily life, a far bigger role perhaps when you realize in your home and in every home rich your poor, from coast to coast. Susan Strasser is a great book called Waste and Want that chronicles this consumer history of Americans in their obsession

with disposable things that happens in the twentieth century. Hey in the American way of doing things as produced and is producing a better living than anywhere else on earth. We also have planned obsolescence. The famous one is the light bulb. The light bulb companies figure out, hey, if your light bulb burns out sooner, you're gonna have to buy a new light bulb sooner. So we're gonna make some more money on that. And that's still very much

present today. If you're looking at your iPhone ten and you know that the iPhone eleven is around the corner, we're still in that market mindset of planned obsolescence. If the first half of the century was about maximizing means of production, the trend of the second half has been

away from physical goods and toward the digital. So we create all these technologies to have cheap paper goods of all different kinds, the new paper towel that actually attracts moisture, even like clothes made of paper that you can throw away after one where it feels different too. In the second half of the twentieth century, we start to move away from paper and print, take you towards everything being seemingly immaterial as it becomes digital, how would you communicate.

Most people don't have hard copy printed photo albums anymore. They have digital photo albums, so they just have their photos on their phone. What digital technology like this drive into your local photomac could be a thing of the past.

And so there's a way in which the long history of consumer society in America is really a trend from the solid, the durable, I'm going to have a sweater that I mend and re mend, and I'm a steward of this object to the opposite poll, which is something like Snapchat, where it's designed to just go away instantly. It's a it's a really strong arc in our consumer history. Pick your poison, if it's Facebook or Flicker or a Google drive, where you start to wonder, Okay, this thing

seems immaterial, and yet I can never delete it. We're inundated. We're flooded by this immaterial, seemingly immaterial data about ourselves. And so we have this new activity in the twenty one century, which is something like self curation. You know, there was the court case not long ago in Europe about deletion and Google. People had to fight for the right to be able to delete things from Google. On the one hand, everything seems immaterial, all the objects seem

to have disappeared, from our hands. But they're also, in certain ways ever more enduring. You know, one thing that's been great as a as a researcher of this topic is I can access a lot of the ephemera I want to work on online. Oh I want to see an inverted Jenny stamp from the nineteen thirties. Okay, I can look that up online. I don't have to go to a physical archive. But I wonder if we're losing touch.

I mean to use that word conscientiously with the materiality of a lot of things, and we lose something in that process of translation. I have students tell me things like, oh, I didn't really grow up drawing on paper, I just grew up drawing on an iPad, you know. My I stop and pause and think, Okay, what does what does that mean? What gets lost if you didn't hold crayons or eat paste or uh, you know, have to crumple

your paper turn it over to the other side. And I don't want to be so conservative to say everything is lost and it's terrible and we should go back to the way things are. But I am deeply committed to thinking about the differences and and just making sure that we understand them at the very least, try to. If these things that were quote never supposed to last paradoxically continue to exist, is death somehow cheated. More to the point is interacting with ephemera and experience that consciously

or subconsciously connects a person with their own mortality. Ephemera I think are especially moving because they seem to have their own life cycle. They're made, they're born, they enter circulation, they live, and then they die. We think of things, We think of matter as being the opposite of mortal. We think of it as being enduring. We think of it as being stable and inert. And ephemia have this kind of time scale, this temporal dimension that makes them

seem mortal like us. I think that's part of the reason that authors find them meaningful. They can become proxy stand ins for humans or nations or communities. To make that more concrete, take an example, New York World's Fair Tomorrow was actually built on the Valley of Ashes, as

Fitzgerald calls it. In the Great Gatsby gate Way, five million dollar one land, they transform what is basically a dump into this bright, shining, gleaming future city and everyone goes I mean really everyone in a way that we can't comprehend today. Everyone goes from come countment, visiting by every mode of travel, every means of transportation. They arrived to view the marvels of the greatest exposition in history.

You go and you say, oh, this is the world of tomorrow, this is the world as it could be. There are all kinds of problems with the vision that gets staged. I mean racial problems, nationalistic problems, colonial issues, all sorts of things, but in that particular instance, people knew that it wouldn't be there. The fair was a

temporary installation, like a carnival set up in Queens. It was open for two seasons from April to October and closed permanently as most of the participating countries sank into

another World war. That experience, knowing that it's going to be gone feels exhilarating but melancholic for a lot of people, and so the souvenir craze, you know, the souvenir boom is huge around that fair because people want to take something with them so that when the fair is gone, when they're no longer there, but also the buildings are gone, they have something to remember it by the Paris here and the Trial On were the two iconic buildings, and

they get sort of one on everything rises above all else and the circling helocline that leads even the parts there's exhibits democracity is a pathway to the future. One of my favorite souvenirs is after you came out of Futurama, which was General Motors vision and sort of model city of the future, you would get a little button that says I have seen the future. Sensational is the Futurama that projects you into nineteen six the highways and a rise and show you know that you have this item,

this object that's going to commemorate this event. It almost feels like it's shoring up against that feeling of mortality. Susan Stewart talks about the souvenir as an object that you need when an event is no longer repeatable. So if you go to your Ariana Grande concert, you want the ticket stuff because you're probably not going to go to another Ariana Grande show where you're certainly not going to go to the one in Philadelphia, and so you

need an object because it's not repeatable. Men any ephemera are doing that work. They're kind of saying, I was there, I saw this thing. It's gone now, but I save it, and that allows me to project myself into the future, to project myself into the past, to stave off that encounter with death that might be implicitly happening. In the intro to Sarah's upcoming book, she lends a warning to those embarking down this path. Once you're looking for it,

everything seems to be stamped with a half life. I start to wonder, like, is everything just becoming ephemeral? Is everything immaterial? I do think it's a kind of condition of being in the world. Some things just don't stick around, and things that we don't necessarily think about. So, you know, in the early twentieth century, you can look at these records where urban planners tell architects what the lifespan of

a building should be. So a hospital should die, let's use that word, sooner than a bank, because the hospital has to adapt to technology. But the bank should make people feel secure that their money is going to be there. So even our buildings, our city scapes have lifespan. So I do think it's baked in. But I do also think that we have encountered it and baked it into our experience, even more in this country in the past

hundred years or so than than some other places. Drink the fact that it is baked in that if femorality surrounds us in immeasurable, unpredictable ways, suggests perhaps that the best course of action may not be to draw exhaustive lists of disappearing objects, but to think of this as a lens for viewing the world prescription glasses we learned

to see only as we practice using the eyes. If you recognize that things don't stick around forever and yet leave some kind of trace, sometimes that's a physical trace, sometimes that's an emotional one, a historical one. I think many different things happen. I mean, I think one is that there's a kind of different relationship to environmental concerns. If we recognize our attachment it's ironic, our attachment to disposable objects, we can think about what that's doing to

the environment more. But I guess I'm also interested in recognizing that total loss, the complete erasure of an object, and total presence as an I possess it, it's mine forever, that they're both kind of fantasies. I think we do have something like a more realistic or realist relationship to the world. I think that that teaches us that temporary formations and temporary objects can can be meaningful. I think that it maybe helps us understand that we don't need

to cling so tightly. It's a kind of anti nostalgic position to realize that that some things change, and things aren't ours necessarily in the way that we think they are. To begin with. The fiction that I'm interested in is really good at reminding us of how important it is to to let go of things. You know, the trial and in the Paris heere that I mentioned from the World's Fair. When the fair closed, they stripped off the

plaster and they melted down the steel for bullets. It's an amazing moment that fiction Eel Doctor's book World's Fair helps us remember that these things that were icons of the beautiful, gleaming future just around the corner, in fact went into the most literal manifestation of the war effort.

Stories like that remind us of how flexible and fluid the material world around us is, and that we two should, in response, maybe try to be fluid and flexible thinking about disappearance and thinking about it as meaning making and something to sometimes celebrate and something that's really interesting and

there should be podcasts about it. You know that that that actually can teach us that disappearance is a part of our history and how it moves forward if Ehemeral is written, assembled by me, and produced by Any Reese, Not Frederick and Tristan McNeil, with technical assistance from Sherry Larson. Special thanks this episode to Master of Introductions David Weinstein, and to Sarah Wasserman. Please always bring along a home. Follow her on Twitter at Sarah L. Wasserman and at

her website Sarah Wasserman dot com. This track and much of the music in the episode came courtesy of the artist mon Plazier. Learn more at Loyalty Freak Music dot com. You'll find links to all this and more at ephemeral dot show Next time on Ephemeral. There are currently thousands of television networks, but once upon a time there were four NBC, CBS, this is the Colombia Broadcasting System, ABC

and Dumont. There's a treasure plature, a moment of leg There wasn't a lot of money in staving programs in the forties and fifties that they duman television at work. One of the big selling points of television is it's live in our TV. You're watching something as it's happening. Well bother you want to take this Trob loyal life, Its prepared nineteen thousand seven, ten meals there. He is beautiful a night. It is hardly forgotten today, but it

doesn't deserve to be. I don't I joke, got a little story about Dumart Brand visit us in the world, wind and in act with us and social media at the ship. It's on about podcast and I media. It's not that I media Apple podcasts are wiever years A you favorite Hills