The first tomato (Cherokee Purple) of the year.
Change happens, with or without our participation, in the cultural blink of an eye. Consider that it has only been 12 years since I stopped wearing a jacket to Friday night dinner at Hunter’s Cafe in Sweetwater. It’s something I recalled when a recent farm volunteer expressed her discomfort with wearing anything but sweatpants and T-shirt to college classes: “It would make me feel too uncomfortable to ‘dress’ up.”
No turning back, I guess. Even more Quixotic would be to arrest the digital flood of information that too often buries good writing. Although ‘flood’ may not be the best description; a flood leaves damage and evidence of its passing. The digital word, this most ephemeral of ephemera, this nontangible, unable to hold content for longer than the next click, diffusing into the ether with a fading screen, is my chief concern.
Newspapers, pamphlets, magazines, journals, quarterlies, newsletters, letters, ephemera of all sorts, have almost entirely disappeared from our lives, leaving behind only the debris of seldom-read mass-produced circulars to be dumped into the nearest landfill. The digital world has completely replaced the regular timetable of the printed with an endless flood of content, curated or not, in an inbox that vanishes from the mind, even if read, before the next click of Refresh.
The humble church bulletin (or any newsletter from a community group) is now replaced by a Facebook page, or a QR code. The nature of that particular ephemera was that it lingered in your life, the bulletin floating around on your car seat or countertop, a visual reminder that someone was sick, dead, or getting married.
Or ponder the endless stream of well-curated writing on the online platform Substack. It’s a venue where smart and intellectually curious people craft some of the best essays to be found, but the pieces are written for the digital world, amid the tsunami of information and amusement. They have no permanence. They flood in and wash out into nothing, given life only briefly by our distracted eyes, the authors already busy creating new “content” before the last article has disappeared under the sedimented layers of bytes.
Here on the farm, we still subscribe to several print journals and receive newsletters from those dwindling number of organizations that bother with paper. It may seem too obvious to say, but the thing about receiving a copy of Local Culture (Front Porch Republic) or the wonderful Farming Magazine (Kline family) in the mailbox is that those publications linger in our lives. I may sit down and read it cover to cover and toss it aside or stack it by my reading chair. A month later Cindy may pick it up and read an article or essay. “Did you read the piece by Kunstler?” she asks.
“Hmm, remind me,” I’ll say. She does and I realize I need to reread it. Or I pick up the year-old copy of Farming Magazine in the bathroom and read the series on growing potatoes, again. Having printed matter at hand encourages conversations, fosters relationships that endure far longer than those engendered by the sharing of a link by email. Print is, literally, durable. The online world promotes a restless consumption, whose writings are instantly out of date. We don’t go back to the inbox, because it is already jammed anew. What is read is then gone — out of sight and out of mind — with the blink of a screen.
You won’t discover a scrapbook of digital links put together in an old trunk by your grandmother, a QR code for the funeral service bulletin for your grandfather in a file or a book. You won’t go into the bathroom and find a collection of essays in cloud storage nestled on top of the toilet. This world is ephemeral; ephemera belonged to another age.
We no longer exist in a continuum where time and custom are married. Today’s culture is all too immediate and of no lasting duration. Our contactless future is now. So, shuffle over here in your bunny slippers and hit Delete, then Refresh. A world of fresh distraction awaits.
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Reading this weekend: The Epistles of Horace (translated by David Ferry)
Farming magazine reflects the way agriculture should have turned out. I read it cover to cover, usually at night, while trying to fight off drifting off. It is a bit of comfort to know there are pockets of sanity left in rural America.
I do the same, and then, much later, reread and sometimes reread again.
It is an excellent publication.
One of my favorite writers was Gene Logsdon. I have many of his books and I also appreciate his blog, The Contrary Farmer. https://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/post-list-2/ His family has kept the archive online and accessible, which is so kind of them.
Like you, Brian, I have a wonderful library of books and still enjoy reading them. I enjoy writing and keep several journals handy for making notes while I’m reading. I also have started an electronic journal because it is easier to add links to sources of information that stimulated my thoughts.
Maybe I’m old fashioned but as the internet developed I started storing electronic files of the things I read that seemed important. There is nothing I hate more than recalling something I read and not finding it any longer with a search engine. I loved how easy it is to store images and use them in powerpoint presentations. I have folders on topics that may have a dozen subfolders that have more subfolders, that makes sense only to me. I keep thinking I really should sort and organize (especially when I’m looking for a old file), but I don’t get around to it. Some day when I’m gone my files may well be deleted, although I have hope that my youngest son will find value in them. He has a mindset similar to my own and I enjoy our many stimulating discussions.
What is important in the words we read is how they fire our imagination and shape our thoughts. The sad thing about all the click-click-clicking that passes for social media is that it no longer shapes or inspires our lives. I found that spending a few hours every morning reading and writing in my journal was one of the best habits I ever developed.
Jody,
After I wrote and published this piece, I realized that it hadn’t quite captured the pleasure of having printed ephemera in our lives.
Above my desk is a framed copy of a receipt. It fell out of a book on William Morris, that was published around 1900. The woman buying the book was in Knoxville, TN in 1923. The bookseller was in London on Charing Cross Road. Now for any true bibliophile that road has a special place in their heart. Like Booksellers Row in NYC of the mid-20th century, that road was famous for its concentration of all things bookish. The lovely book (and film) 84 Charing Cross Road made it even more well known. To have a little, inconsequential piece of throw away ephemera, from that place, is consequential to me.
Or consider the paystub that I keep. It is for $17.33, dated June 1945. The paycheck was for $30, minus expenses of sewing thread, a pair of socks, and a few minor sundries. That was what a soldier or sailor got paid in WW2 for fighting for this country, a dollar a day, minus expenses. Which is where we get the expression, another day, another dollar. That this piece of ephemera belonged to my father, while he served in the Pacific, is something to treasure.
This is what I should have written. This is what we have lost.
Thank you for the link to Gene. I’m glad to have it, and glad to have a good collection of his works.
My best,
Brian
Each of those small pieces of paper are exquisitely precious. A true piece of history, unremarkable in and of themselves, but provide an undeniable physical link to our past. Lovely sentiment, Brian. I’m glad you will check out Gene. He was certainly a prolific writer about all things farming.
You won’t discover a scrapbook of digital links put together in an old trunk by your grandmother … this brought a smile.
It has already happened though that some Grandmother may well share some digital links with her Granddaughter. With thumbs a blazing at some tiny keyboard there is TOO much ephemera available. And while the content might be temporary – the leash attached to that content which keeps track of visits, likes, replies, and the like only seems to build over time and define us in ways that are also very new to our culture.
The piece of paper stashed away in some drawer or box which haunts me sometimes dates to a time when I was learning to print. One particular misspelling on the piece was quite comical to the adults who saw it – and so my Mother saved it. When Mom passed and her “boxes” were dispersed I was able to capture the evidence. My sibs know the story and when their big brother needs a vanity check they trot it out like some millstone. Why save such? Grandchildren… when the smart aleck Grandson gets sent to a time out for saying something, well… something not necessarily needing to have been said… then Grandpa’s ready to share a comment he scribbled once upon a time.
That an those embarassing Santa letters will haunt you until you die.
Beautifully put, Brian, thank you. Until I have the time to savor them properly, I resist the pressure to read the few things I subscribe to online as soon as the notice arrives. Hence the belated response to your marvelous post. Sometimes I miss things completely and I accept that when it happens.
Like Jody, I’ve taken to saving copies of online articles, reference material, or stories that I want to have access to in the future (like this post). It feels better than saving links, and I don’t have a complicated file structure or process. I finally let go of worrying about file formats and media types and the probable inability to access these digital things eventually. And yeah, after much resistance, one of my multiple backups is the Cloud.
I’ve also given up the idea of some kind of plan for the physical or electronic copies of my own writing. The boxes of papers and journal books are fine just as they are. Periodically I have a burst of energy for creating archive copies of the digital stuff but mostly that’s another letting go. I think letters mean the most to me, and I often forego other writing to compose a long letter. So I make copies of long letters to tuck in a journal.
I don’t have children to pass things on to, yet can’t quite let go of my writing: journals (still have my first one, from 4th grade), letters, files from an old website or posts from my first blog. I think I mostly save these things for myself, thinking they might interest me in the years to come, or help refresh a memory, or be useful in some other way. I’m curious: what do you do with your writing?
Sarah
I have a letter, somewhere, from a g.great aunt to her sister, my great-grandmother. Musedly griping that in her 70’s (this was 1883) she was getting fat from drinking too much beer. That in and of itself is funny enough, that she was teetotaler makes it even more amusing. So keep the notes and journals and let others make of them as they will. However, my expectation is that current and future generations are not paper oriented and are more likely to simply discard any of that odd stuff.
Regarding your query, I keep my old farm journals, letters received and copies of letters written get stuck in random books in my library (same with obituaries, wedding announcements, pictures of babies born, etc. etc.). I mentioned this in the post of 12/22 Falling Letters. It is one of my few ‘good’ habits.