Dear Significant Objects Readers and Prospective Significant Objects Buyers,

My new book of stories, What He’s Poised To Do (Harper Perennial, June 20), is about letters and letter-writing. In the stories, people use letters to embrace other people, or to keep them at arm’s length, or to express reality, or to evade it. Letters are highly significant things in each and every story, from a series of devotional pieces a young Cuban writes to the woman he loves (in a story called “Hope”) to letters a young man sends to his sad mother (in “17 Different Ways to Get A Load Of That”).

Given the letters and the significance, I thought it would be nice to combine the two and curate a week of Significant Objects with a letter-writing theme: objects accompanied by stories in the form of letters.

Once I had the idea, I set out to find a cause. I have published a story in the great literary journal OneStory (it was called “The Tremulant,” is now called “The Hunter and the Hunted,” and is in the new book), and so it occurred to me that the money collected from this round of Significant Objects should benefit OneStory, and that the stories would be written by writers who have also published in the journal. The five I contacted all said yes, heartily: they are Irina Reyn, Terese Svoboda, Scott Snyder, James Hannaham, and Joe Meno.

The week of OneStory/Significant Objects collaboration will culminate in an event June 21 at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. In theory, it is a launch party for “What He’s Poised To Do,” but I am hoping to minimize the part where I read and maximize the part where other people tell you about interesting projects they are spearheading. Jonny Diamond, of the L magazine, will read. Nicki Pombier Berger will speak about Underwater New York. Todd Zuniga, of Opium magazine, will read from Paris with the help of Fancy New Technology. And the actress and performance artist Okwui Okpokwasili will read James Hannaham’s Significant Objects
story, as Mr. Hannaham is indisposed that evening. Details here.

So, you know the drill. We will post an object each day, accompanied by a story by a OneStory writer. Objects will be on auction for one week. If you win, you will receive the object and the story.

And given that this is series of letters, we’ve made a special arrangement with some of our contributors — those stories, where noted, will actually be mailed to you by the writer.

Go to Town,
Ben Greenman

No. 50 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Greenman, has ended. Original price: 33 cents. Final price: $59.50. This is the last of three stories in our Identical Objects series. Proceeds from this auction go to Girls Write Now.]

“Dennis, Nell, Edna, Leon, Nedra, Anita, Rolf, Nora, Alice, Carol, Leo, Jane, Reed, Dena, Dale, Basil, Rae, Penny, Lana, Dave, Denny, Lena, Ida, Bernadette, Ben, Ray, Lila, Nina, Jo, Ira, Mara, Sara, Mario, Jan, Ina, Lily, Arne, Bette, Dan, Reba, Diane, Lynn, Ed, Eva, Dana, Lynne, Pearl, Isabel, Ada, Ned, Dee, Rena, Joel, Lora, Cecil, Aaron, Flora, Tina, Arden, Noel, and Ellen sinned” (the longest known name-based palindrome)

Dennis shot a man dead in Key West.
Nell told Ada to have sex with Dennis’s brother, Dan, in exchange for drugs.
Edna lied.
Leon lied.
Nedra lied.
Anita cheated.
Rolf was greedy.
Nora was greedy.
Alice was greedy.
Carol was wrathful.
Leo lied and was slothful.
Jane wore a new dress on a date with Dennis and then returned it.
Reed took naked photographs of young boys and sold them to a pawnbroker in Hialeah.
Dena worked for the pawnbroker but looked the other way.
Dale cheated on his wife.
Basil was slothful.
Rae sold used mattresses as new.
Penny should have picked Dennis up at the Miami airport, but couldn’t get out of bed.
Lana did coke and had a threesome with Dennis before he left St. Louis.
Dave suffered from spiritual torpor.
Denny suffered from spiritual torpor.
Lena suffered from spiritual torpor.
Ida ate too much.
Bernadette ate too much.
Ben hit and killed a dog while driving with his friend Ned and drove off.
Ray did a shoddy job inspecting rides at an amusement park; a ride collapsed, killing three.
Lila stole.
Nina stole.
Jo stole.
Ira falsified a work injury and sued for damages.
Mara ate too much.
Sara was prideful.
Mario was prideful.
Jan was prideful.
Ina lied.
Lily lusted after her cousin.
Arne, Lily’s cousin, lusted after her.
Bette, Lily’s mother, boasted about her daughter’s grades but was blind to the situation with Arne.
Dan, Lily’s father, left her for a much younger woman.
Reba lived in Key West; Dan came to live with her and open a restaurant; they dealt drugs out of the back.
Diane fell in love with Dan and felt despair.
Lynn fell in love with Dan and felt wrath.
Ed envied Dan.
Eva stole.
Dana was greedy.
Lynne was enraged that Dan could not tell the difference between her and Lynn.
Pearl was slothful.
Isabel, who was in love with Dan but despaired ever having him, wrote down her desires on a piece of paper, rolled it up, pushed it into a miniature souvenir bottle, and dropped the bottle on the beach behind the restaurant.
Ada coaxed Dan out onto the beach one night with the promise of sex.
Ned hit Dan with his car; when he heard the thump, he thought of the dog he and Ben had hit and just kept on going.
Dee, Ned’s passenger, felt despair.
Rena, who witnessed the accident, felt despair.
Joel, a cop, heard about the accident from Rena; he was sleeping with her while his wife was dying in the hospital.
Lora, Rena’s sister, was in the threesome with Dennis in St. Louis, and she told him that Dan was dead.
Cecil bought pictures of boys from the pawnbroker.
Aaron lied.
Flora was vainglorious.
Tina, also vainglorious, came upon Isabel’s bottle, pocketed it.
Arden, Tina’s lover, accepted the bottle as a token of Tina’s affection.
Noel, Arden’s lover, rubbed cocaine on her gums during sex with Dennis and casually mentioned that if someone killed her brother, she’d take revenge.
Ellen was having sex with Ned when Dennis burst into the room and squeezed off two shots.

Object No. 35 of 50 — Significant Objects v2

[The auction for this MYSTERY Significant Object, with story by Ben Greenman, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $103.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to 826 National.]

This object was the first artifact found at the Hasegawa house in Osaka, Japan, in 2006, immediately following the death of Nobuhiko Hasegawa. The Nobuhiko Hasegawa in question here is, of course, the famed Japanese giant, not the successful table-tennis player of the nineteen-seventies and eighties. Nobuhiko Hasegawa, the giant, claimed a height of seven feet, eleven inches, though spinal deterioration rendered him unable to stand upright from the age of fifteen onward. Since he could not be measured, the title of Tallest Japanese Man was not formally extended to him and was granted instead to Yasutaka Okayama, who stood a relatively modest seven feet, eight inches.

Hasegawa was a man of limited intellect, at best, and he did not have any great investment in—or perhaps even an awareness of—this issue. But there were those around him who believed fiercely that he deserved recognition, just as there were those around Okayama who believed in their man. These self-appointed proxies enjoyed a spirited disagreement regarding this title right up until Hasegawa’s death, at which time a wag in the Okayama camp conceded the seven-foot-eleven-inch height but suggested that it be reduced by six feet to reflect burial. This self-styled wit happened to be British, which should be apparent given the failure of his remark to take into account Japanese burial practices, in which the body is cremated and the ashes placed in a shallow mairibaka, or grave for visitation. One of the most prominent backers of the Hasegawa claim, the poet Kentaro Nakano, released a statement in response to the Okayama camp’s alleged witticism; it consisted simply of the words “shame” and “dog.”

If Nobuhiko Hasegawa was possibly the tallest man in Japan, he was also possibly the oldest; on his wall, he a framed birth certificate that indicated a birth year of 1876. It recorded, ironically enough, that he had been born in Britain, and specifically in Coventry, where (he would explain if asked, in his glacial baritone) his mother was a cook for the English inventor James Starley. Starley, of course, was the father of modern bicycles, and in 1876, the year of the giant Hasegawa’s birth, he developed one of his most famous inventions: the Coventry Lever Tricycle. The Coventry Lever Tricycle was a vehicular breakthrough; prior to that, all Starley cycles were based on a quadrisected wheel design that, if sufficiently sturdy, proved too heavy and too expensive for mass production. As a very young child, Hasegawa would tell anyone who would listen, he rode nearly every Starley prototype. When, in 1881, Hasegawa’s mother decided to return to Japan after a quarrel with Starley—there are rumors that she was not in his employ, but rather his lover, and even rumors that Starley was Hasegawa’s true father—young Nobuhiko said farewell to this idyllic existence in Coventry. Within a decade, he would be confined to a wheelchair as a result of his rapid growth and the attendant spinal issues. “From three wheels to four,” he liked to say, shaking his head sadly. “From three to four.”

To reiterate: This object was the first artifact found at the Hasegawa house in Osaka, Japan, in 2006, immediately following the death of Nobuhiko Hasegawa. A second visit to the house was planned but never carried out; after the insensitive remarks regarding Hasegawa’s burial, the rivalry between the Hasegawa and Okayama camps escalated. The poet Kentaro Nakano was ambushed by a pack of Okayama adherents and defended himself with a glass bottle, blinding one of his attackers. The next day, the Hasegawa house was burned to the ground. This object in question, then, is the only remaining possession of a famed Japanese giant, and it resembles him in contraries: it is as small as he was large, as mobile as he was immobile, as bright as he was dull.

[The auction for this Significant Object, with story by Ben Greenman, has ended. Original price: $2. Final price: $32.08.]

This object is best known from its appearance in the 1939 film No News From The Navy, a comedy starring James Wilton as a hapless midshipman who cannot set aside his seafaring ways, even when he is confined to dry land as a result of an injury.  Wilton’s character (who is called, simply, “Sailor”) competes for the affection of a young woman named Evelyn (Mary Hannan) despite the opposition of her father (Gordon Howard) and a larger, determined suitor (Kenneth Lopp). The film is a second-tier comedy, but there is one classic scene. in which Sailor shaves before taking Evelyn out on a date. He is clearly accustomed to shaving aboard his ship, and as a result, he is constantly attempting to regain his balance, despite the fact the floor is level and stable. The critic Leonard Folsom has written that “The unheralded Wilton has a scene that combines the physical complexity of a Chaplin solo with close-ups of inexpressive expression that rival the finest moments of Keaton.” At the beginning of that scene, Wilton uses this smiling mug as his shaving mug, and while he sets it on the shelf above the washbasin midway through, it remains, as Folsom writes, “an oddly compelling focus of the film so long as it is onscreen, enormous in its diminutive size, menacing in its cheer.”

There are other shaving mugs that resemble this one, but none was created as this one was: by hand, with the assistance of a kiln, by a famous surrealist sculptor. This one was. In fact, it was wheel-thrown and fired by the Belgian artist Paul Coppens in 1932; Coppens, of course, was part of the group of artists supported by the patronage of Edward James. “I have dreamed of a smiling shaving mug,” Coppens wrote to James in June 1932. “A sketch is attached. It looks 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. In addition, I have noticed that daily washing rituals, including shaving, are illogically equated with the whiteness of teeth. But there is more to the image. Look at the handle. It functions like an ear visually, but as there is only one, this figure is incapable of ‘smiling ear-to-ear,’ as the idiom has it. In addition, I have recently learned that ‘mug’ is a slang term for the human face in some parts of the English-speaking world. (Ironically, this practice comes from the fact that beer steins were fashioned in the human image, and unattractive specimens of our race were said be ‘mug-faces.’)” Coppens’ piece, which he called Tooth Fils (the wordplay refers both to dentistry and to its small size) was part of the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936.

How Tooth Fils came to be in No News From the Navy is simpler than the creation of either work. James Wilton, who himself trained as a painter and considered himself an acolyte of, if not a participant in, Surrealism, attended the exhibit, acquired it, and insisted that it be in every one of his films. As there was only one film, this is a condition that history has found easy to satisfy.