Significant Objects

Object No. 46 of 50 -- Significant Objects v2 (Photo by Adrian Kinloch)

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Chris Adrian, here. Part of a special collaboration with Underwater New York, this object's story will ship rolled into a vintage bottle found on the beach of Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn. Proceeds from this auction go to 826 National.]

My brother and I could not agree on how to worship the mouse.  It was typical of us back then that we could agree that it should be worshipped—that was obvious from the day it arrived in the mail, a gift from our father, who had been in Vietnam for three years, which was one-third of George’s life and one-half of mine, on business more important than his wife and his sons. The last gift had been a green and yellow straw mat, and we agreed that it was, in fact, a prayer-mat, the use of which only became clear with the advent of the mouse. The evening it arrived we knelt in our room in our pajamas in the dark. George had his flashlight out and he shined it on the mouse’s face.

“Great Faaa,” he said. “Mighty Faaa, hear our prayers.” He said the name in a sing-song, high-pitched voice. We had just seen “Day of the Dolphin” the week before. I put my hand on the flashlight and pushed it down, so the little monkey in the mouse’s heart was more plainly illuminated.

“Mr. Peepers,” I said. “Source of the All, forgive our sins! Don’t punish us!”

“What are you doing?” George asked, and our argument began.  (more…)

• History of science fiction fandom: Useful MeFi links. http://bit.ly/cylDXh #
• Next week we team up with Underwater New York, some amazing found objects, stories be a great writer team. Details: http://bit.ly/b7Dohs #
• The Reanimation Library in Brooklyn: “a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation.” http://bit.ly/Fe6wA #
• T-shirts featuring retired book-cover designs: http://www.outofprintclothing.com/Shop_a/152.htm Via Listenerd #
• Post by @jimhanas: “In storytelling, will media be the new narrative?” http://bit.ly/7f5cl3 #
• Report from Boston Book Futurists. S.O. discussed, but check @jomc ’s three “unusual form” narrative examples: http://bit.ly/duUpPj # (more…)

Object No. 45 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Luc Sante, here. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

After my friend Claude had his accident I went to visit him in the hospital. When I saw him I had to cough to divert a laugh. He looked like a guy in a cartoon, his entire body wrapped in bandages. He had broken everything that could be broken, from his skull to his toes. Somehow he was conscious and could speak, although to hear him I had to put my ear right up to his mouth-hole. I thought he said “door,” so I shut it, but he was still agitated. Eventually I got it: “drawer.” The one in his bedside stand contained a single object, a ball of wrapped flannel that looked like his head, only more colorful. I went to pick it up with my fingertips, but then had to readjust. Astonishingly, the thing weighed at least five pounds. I gaped at it, but Claude was making noises. I finally understood: “Don’t unwrap it.”

Claude went to glory a week later, felled by some hospital bug. The ball sat on the shelf next to my bowling trophies. Occasionally I’d blow the dust off and pick it up just to feel its weird heft. After a while I forgot about it, as stuff got parked in front of it and stayed there. One night I was rooting around trying to find my paintball gun and there it was. When I picked it up it seemed twice as heavy. I got spooked and reburied it. (more…)

Photo by Adrian Kinloch

Next week, we close out Significant Objects Volume 2, our cycle of 50 stories and auctions, with proceeds going to 826 National.

And to go out with a bang, we have an extraordinary team-up to announce: We’ve joined forces with Underwater New York to bring you five stories about things found on the beach of Dead Horse Bay, Brooklyn.

The writing crew? Chris Adrian, Deb Olin Unferth, Kathryn Davis, Robert Lopez, and Tom McCarthy. The objects? You’re already looking at some of them, but more after the jump.

Photo by Adrian Kinloch

And the extra-special bonus? As always, we’ll send the winning bidder a printout of the Object’s story — but each story in this collaboration will arrive rolled up in an awesome bottle also found on the Dead Horse Bay beach! Each bottle is unique of course, but see above for an example. This is definitely a two-objects-for-the-price-of-one situation.

The packaging for stories shipped in our UNY collab.

If you don’t know about Underwater New York, here’s the deal. It’s an online anthology of art, stories, and music inspired by underwater objects. It came to be after Nicki Pombier Berger read an article by Chris Bonanos in New York Magazine listing a couple dozen strange findings under the waters around New York City. She sent the list around to some writer friends as a story prompt, and what began as a fun summer writing project grew when more and more people showed interest in the idea. Helen Georgas and Nicole Haroutunian got on board as editors, and when the group connected with Adrian Kinloch, designer and photographer extraordinaire, together they built UnderwaterNewYork.com.

There’s an evocative landscape under New Yorks’s waters, littered with castaway surprises that just beg for stories. The list of objects in UNY’s creativity-inspiring collection continues to grow today, with the findings of divers and sea captains, detectives and engineers, environmentalists — and everyday city-dwellers like team UNY. It was on a recent excursion to Dead Horse Bay, a cove in Brooklyn strewn with debris from the early 20th century, that Nicki, Nicole and Helen found a crop of once-underwater doodads that seem ripe for Significance.

You can imagine why we were excited to join forces with them! (more…)

Object No. 44 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Mark Jude Poirier, here. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

We drove to Wildwood Aquarium, left Alice at her apartment, even though it had been her idea to go. The week before, a German visitor to the aquarium had been killed, bitten in two by Sammy, the angry orca, as he held a fish for it. The crowd had cheered when the water turned red, then pink. People posted videos and photos on the Internet, but they had barely mentioned it on the news because the garbage strike was in full force then, and the city smelled like death.

They couldn’t very well just let Sammy go, and animal rights groups wouldn’t let the aquarium kill him, so he stayed there in the glass-walled pool, and people lined up for hours to see him. When we finally pushed our way to the front, Brad pressed his lips against the cold glass, blew up his cheeks and tried to attract Sammy the Killer with his tongue — ’til I reminded him how thousands of people had probably touched the glass right there after using the restroom and not washing their hands. I listed the problems Brad might suffer: “Impetigo, herpes, trench mouth, the flu, New Jersey gum rot, oral lice, lip chiggers, pink eye, the common cold, staphylococcus, pinworms, ringworm, hookworm, guinea worm, roundworm, tapeworm, and/or the clap. And mono.”

“Shut it,” Brad said.

We stole Alice a souvenir because we were afraid not to. I had wanted to get her a Sammy the Killer T-shirt, emblazoned with the image of a cartoon Sammy with half a German tourist in his jaws, but they were too hard to steal, hanging high up on the wall, so high you had to ask an employee to get one down for you with a hook on the end of a stick. Instead, we snatched her something else. (more…)

Our experiment has answered the question of whether narrative adds measurable value to near-worthless tchotchkes with an emphatic YES. But how does narrative do so? Is every form of narrative exposition, for example, equally effective in encouraging the reader to regard a thrift-store castoff as somehow meaningful?

Apparently not. We’ve determined that in the 100 stories we published as part of Significant Objects volume 1, three types of exposition are employed. One of these three expository stratagems, according to the chart following after the jump, is particularly effective at investing insignificant objects with significance.

DESCRIPTION: Over the course of the narrative, peculiarly and uniquely significant characteristics and features (exclusive of use or function) are attributed to the object. Examples:

• “Russian Figure”: In Doug Dorst’s story, we read that “effigies of St. Vralkomir may come to life and begin dancing, throwing sparks from their wooden pedestals.”
• “Smiling Mug”: Ben Greenman’s story claims that a surrealist sculptor designed the mug to “like a face, of course, because a face is the only thing that is capable of smiling (or is it?), but it also looks like a tooth, because a tooth is the only thing that is capable of showing when a face is smiling.”
• “Duck Vase”: The narrator of Matthew Klam’s story notes: “If you decide to keep it by your bed (as I did) and begin seeing colorful lights reflected on the walls and windows as you try to sleep, DO NOT WORRY AS THE OBJECT IS OPERATING NORMALLY.”

SEQUENCE: From the narrative, we learn about the object’s role in an event or sequence of events meaningful to the narrator/protagonist or reader.

• “BBQ Sauce Jar”: Matthew J. Well’s story claims the jar was used for a “blood-soaked shave” by Harry Thaw in 1908, the night before his murder trial.
• “Uncola Glass”: Jen Collins tells a story from the perspective of a woman whose father abandoned her family when she was 13. “When I got home after track practice that night, my mother told me my father wasn’t coming back. ‘He left you a present,’ she said. ‘An abandonment present? Is that customary? No thanks.’”
• “Crumb Sweeper”: When the narrator of Shelley Jackson’s story first meets her future lover, he’s brushing hairs from his clothes with this item.

CLASSIFICATION: During the course of the narrative the object’s use, function, origin, or else its symbolic meaning, is revealed to be particularly fraught.

• “‘Hawk’ Ashtray”: The narrator of William Gibson’s story claims that Pentagon technocrats lobby one another, in order to get new weapons into development, by manufacturing and distributing promotional items like this one.
• “Maine Statutes Dish”: The narrator of Ben Katchor’s story would have us believe that the dish, intended for peanuts, was “meant to encourage lawyers and public advocates to acquaint themselves with the latest revisions to state law,” and that in fact each chapter was keyed to an estimated number of peanuts.
• “Missouri Shotglass”: A character in Jonathan Lethem’s story claims that the bird represented on the shotglass symbolizes the fact that Missouri is “one vast harrowed and furrowed MFA workshop.”

Those are the strategies. Which one shows evidence of offering the most significant value-creating payoff, according to our results? The chart is below.

(more…)

Object No. 43 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Robin Sloan, here. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

So there was a banshee on our property.

We heard the wail first (naturally) and we heard it for a while before we ever saw her. At first we thought it was a wolf; then we thought maybe it was some weird machine at Fort McLean. Like, some big whining drill over on the other side of the valley.

But then we saw her. Far away at first. It’s actually scarier, in the forest, to see someone far away than it is to see them up close. You don’t know their disposition; you don’t know what they’re up to. You just see the shape coming across the clearing. Yikes! But up close, people aren’t that scary, and neither are banshees.

And then we saw her a lot. Whenever dad came home late, mom would ask: “How’s our friend?” “Oh, fine,” dad would say. “Looking lovely, as always.”

That was true. When she came closer to the house, pacing past the scrim of trees at the edge of the yard, you could see that she was lovely. Tall and willowy, as you’d expect. (Has there ever been a big voluptuous opera-singer banshee? That would be something!) And her hair was very dark but also red, like clotted blood, and it floated up around her head like she was underwater. There was just tons of it, a huge dark mass, totally cumulonimbus. She was more hair than banshee. It obscured her face entirely. Very creepy. (more…)

We always love it when our buyers send us pictures of their Significant Objects in their new homes, or add such pictures to our Owners’ Flickr Pool. Here’s a recent, and distinctly awesome, example:

Object No. 61 from the S.O. v1.

Jeannie and Trifin Roule have acquired several Significant Objects since this project began, including this, the Hand-Held Bubble Blower + Story by Myla Goldberg, from Volume 1 of the project. In this case the author, at a recent reading, signed both the object and the story. And not only that: (more…)

Object No. 42 of 50 - Significant Objects v2

[Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Willy Vlautin, here. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

When he woke up in the middle of the night she was laying on top of him and he thought he was dying. It was summer in Houston and the air conditioner on full kept the bedroom just under eighty-five. He pushed her off and stared at the coconut pirate her father had given her before he moved in with a nineteen-year-old girl outside of Vinh, Vietnam.

She brought up her father a few times a week, and at least once a month she’d break down in fits over him.

“How could he leave us for a nineteen year old girl?”

“I don’t know,” he’d say.

“All men are perverts,” she’d cry.

“Jesus, not that again,” he’d say and then it would start and it would take a long time for it to stop.

He looked at the coconut and flipped it off.

The coconut cleared its throat and said, “Just wait, she’ll be on your ass day in and day out. She’ll take every cent you make and then complain about it. Did you notice how she quit her full-time job when you told her you were moving in? That weren’t no coincidence. All the women in their family are like that. Why do you think I got a job on a ship? I was seasick for five years before I got my legs. I woke up puking and went to bed hurling and still it was better than where you’re at.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“She’ll climb on you and try to heat you to death but she won’t climb on you and ride you.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” (more…)

Object No. 41 of 50 - Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this item, with story by Carl Wilson, has ended. Original price: $3.00. Final price: $20.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

Wetnet Constitutional Group: Auratic Object Background Report

1

Archive fragment: John Forsythe (voice) as Charles “Charlie” Townsend; Farrah Fawcett-Majors as Jill Munroe (1976-77, recurring 1978-80); Kate Jackson as Sabrina Duncan (1976-79); Jaclyn Smith as Kelly Garrett; Cheryl Ladd as Kris Munroe (1977-81); Shelley Hack as Tiffany Welles (1979-80); Tanya Roberts as Julie Rogers (1980-81); David Doyle as John Bosley.

2

Limbic archive trace data: At public school in Lansing, Mich., 1978, subject Derek F. is made to carry the Object to lunch every day by his mother, who dresses him in over-tight velour sweaters and corduroy “floods” [no trans. available] and has misread her ten-year-old son’s interest in a popular show. As the larger boys daily thwap his tailbone and head with its milk-swooshing bulk, they bark out “Sabrina! Sabrina!” and laugh.

The term catches on so robustly that in schoolyard argot it long remains an all-purpose insult, more androgynous than “gaylord,” as subject’s younger sibling Krissy F. finds out to her cost after frugal Mom hands-her-down the Object in 1983. This despite there being a Kris on it too.

Aural trace clip, semi-musical (folkloric): “Sabrina, Sabrina — chipmunk cheeks suckin’ on a weena!” (more…)