Wednesday, 18 April 2012, 7:30–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

Previously hosted by City Reliquary, “Show-and-Tell” is exactly what it sounds like: Anyone can bring an object of personal significance and talk about it for up to three minutes. There is no theme or agenda — interesting objects and the stories behind them are their own reward.

Objects that have previously been presented at “Show-and-Tell” have ranged from the eccentric (a glass eye, an electroshock machine found in an abandoned mental hospital) to the everyday (a candy bar with an odd connection to a Chinese funeral, a pair of jeans acquired via some highly unusual haggling at an Egyptian village market). But “Show-and-Tell” is less about the objects than the histories that accompany them. Look in your own pocket or home, and you will find many excellent show-and-tell candidates.

You can either (a) bring an object and be prepared to talk about it or (b) simply be part of the audience, because show-and-tell also needs people who like being shown and told.

PS: If the object shown above looks familiar, that’s because Cabinet has published a photo of it before. In fact, Significant Objects co-founder Joshua Glenn wrote a story about it for Cabinet in 2006. You can read that story at the bottom of this page. The story begins “Forget The Da Vinci Code, that ham-fisted compendium of half-baked claptrap.”

“Nearly all of art history is about trying to identify the source of value in cultural objects. Color theories and dimension theories, golden means, all those sort of ideas, assume that some objects are intrinsically more beautify and meaningful than others. New cultural thinking isn’t like that. It says that we confer value on things. We create the value in things. It’s the act of conferring that makes things valuable. Now this is very important, because so many, in fact all fundamentalist ideas, rest on the assumption that some things have intrinsic value and resonance and meaning. All pragmatists work from another assumption: No, it’s us. It’s us who make those meanings.”

— Brian Eno, “A Big Theory of Culture” (1997)

Thanks, Jess Bruder

Check this out:

Inspired by the work of Significant Objects … and how they got that way, Grade 11 students (ELA 20-1) from Wm. E. Hay High School are embarking upon a journey of their own to see where it will lead them.

In September they chose their “insignificant” objects and began writing stories about them to create their significance. On Friday (Dec. 9) we began publishing the stories along with the items on eBay to see if people will buy them because of their newly created significance.

The Brooklyn-based Proteus Gowanus gallery recently announced an exhibition on “The Migration of Objects.” They’ve sent out a call for submissions. Here’s the idea:

When we think about migration (as we have been doing all year), we tend to focus on people and creatures, the mobile inhabitants of the planet. But life and motion create products and byproducts: tools, waste, the implements of culture. These are often the things that drive us onward in our migrations. Their stories are ineluctably connected with our own. At the points where our stories intersect with obects, much is revealed, not only about our personal trajectories but also about our precarious relationship with the environment.

Do you have an object whose story you would like to share? An heirloom, an artwork, a toothbrush, a stone? An object which has inspired you, dominated you, educated you, exalted or degraded you? For our second exhibition of the Migration year, we invite you to lend us your object and include with it everything you know about its migratory story.

These objects will be our starting point for a three-month exploration of the Migration of Objects. We will view them as independent beings with stories of their own, stories that began before the object’s encounter with you and that will likely continue long after you part. Your story of the object may start with you but may necessarily migrate into the economic, the industrial, the political, the historical, the geologic, the environmental and so on.

If accepted, Proteus Gowanus will send you instructions on how to document your story and when to drop off your Object and story.

While you wait, buy a print.

Readers, as we mentioned in passing recently, this site is going to be quiet for a while, as the Significant Objects team holes up in its secret laboratory facilities to make the final tweaks and arrangements leading up to the publication of our book, to be published by Fantagraphics next year. We’ll be back at that time with a variety of mind-boggling surprises and entertainments.

You can follow us on Twitter or Facebook in the meantime, so you’ll be among the first to know when we gear up the machinery of Significance again; or sign up here for notification via email the next time new material appears on this site.

Readers, as you know, the initial Significant Objects experiment hewed to the strict scientific standards necessary to demonstrate our initial hypothesis: that narrative, even 100% invented narrative, can add measurable value to formerly valueless things.

When our project unexpectedly turned into a popular ongoing object-fiction concern, we embraced collaborations and experimentation to keep the mix of objects, and fictional forms, fresh and compelling: Underwater New York, Fictionaut, Electric Literature, and Litquake are just a few examples of esteemed literary entities with which we have teamed up.

So we were intrigued at the possibility of working with an interesting new service called Thumbscribes. Describing itself as “a platform for collaborative authorship,” Thumbscribes is designed to make it easy for its far-flung membership to work together to write “haiku, poems, short stories, flash fiction, novellas, exquisite corpse and songs, real time or asynchronously with your computer, tablet, cell phone, IM and even twitter.” Stories and other words “are created and passed between Thumbscribe authors who collaborate by adding a new chapter or section to the work until it’s completed.” Users create private works and invite a handful of friends to pitch -—or they can open a creation to the world.

Co-founder Jacqueline Bosnjak adds:

The collaborative approach utilizes the genius of countless individuals and draws inspiration from every contributor. Thumbscribes recently launched a featured collaborative short story with Electric Literature and writer Aimee Bender in which 100 people collaborated on a story. “It was just fun to click on the link a short time after it started and see all these people online adding to it!  Like watching a plant unfurl, a very very strange plant.” says Aimee Bender [also a Significant Objects contributor, of course — ed.] of the experience.

Thumbscribes was devised by Idealogue, an award-winning digital studio founded by Bosnjak and Mark Beukes, and best known for such campaigns as Adicolor films for Adidas; Diesel Flash Fiction, featuring such writers as Jonathan Ames and A.M. Homes; and the Sundance-selected Little Minx Exquisite Corpse, a distributive narrative based on the surrealist parlor game, created for Ridley Scott & Associates.

Significant Objects is about to enter an eight months-long publishing hiatus while we work feverishly on our forthcoming book. But before we go, we couldn’t resist giving the Thumbscribes team a couple of objects, to see what sort of collaboratively written Significance might emerge. We will publish the two resulting stories — each of which ended up being written by groups of six writer-collaborators — this week: one tomorrow, and one on Friday.

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1) Ben Greenman published a new collection, Celebrity Chekhov (Harper Perennial), which takes the short fiction of Anton Chekhov, removes the characters, and inserts contemporary celebrities. It has been called “nothing short of brilliant,” which may or may not be true, but may be true.

2) Ben Katchor will participate in a roundtable discussion on “The Art of the Graphic Novel” with Lynda Barry, Hillary Chute, Christopher Couch and Francoise Mouly on Dec. 5th at 2:30 pm at The Philoctetes Center, 247 East 82nd Street, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10028. Katchor will also be reading at Comics Plate, a performance/screening event on Dec. 13th at The Wild Project, 195 East 3rd Street, New York, NY 10009.

3) J. Robert Lennon has new stories in Weird Tales and Electric Literature, due out shortly.

4) Matthew Sharpe will read from his relatively new novel, You Were Wrong, this Thursday and Sunday. Read an excerpt from the novel at Swink.

Thursday, December 2, 6:00 p.m.
Reading at Labyrinth Books
122 Nassau St., Princeton, NJ

Sunday, December 5, 3:00 p.m.
Reading at Sunny’s Bar
253 Conover St.
Brooklyn, NY 11231

More tour information here.

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

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1) Jason Grote will be presenting a lecture based on his Hilobrow series of Silver Age comic book double-entendres at Adult Ed in Union Hall in Brooklyn on December 7. View the original series of posts here.

2) Terese Svoboda recently read from Pirate Talk or Mermalade with Diane Wakowski at the “Other Words” conference in St. Augustine. “Angelface” and “The Financier” at Brooklyn Rail. “How Big a Boat” in JMWW.

3) Teddy Blanks is working on a solo album. The movie he scored, Tiny Furniture, has been released by IFC Films to glowing reviews and a better-than-expected box office. The soundtrack is available as a free download here. There’s an interview with Blanks about the movie’s poster design here.

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

1) Jenny Davidson‘s novel Invisible Things was released yesterday. It is the sequel to The Explosionist.

2) Alissa Nutting‘s Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls was picked by Steve Almond as one of his Favorite Fall 2010 Books, on NPR’s “Here and Now.” Listen to the show here.

3) David Abrams has a short story, “The Things He Saw,” appearing in the Fall 2010 issue of The Connecticut Review. He continues to blog about Fobbit, a serio-comic novel in progress about the Iraq War.

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

1) Joanne McNeil recently wrote a catalog essay for the New Museum exhibition “Free.” Her essay “Overfutured” looks at Jon Rafman’s “9 Eyes of Google Street View” and other technology-inspired art in the show.

2) Ropert Lopez’s Asunder (Dzanc), a collection of stories, was released earlier this month. Lopez is the author of two previous novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, the latter of which was named one of the 25 Most Important Books of the Decade by HTMLGiant. Watch the animated book trailer. Lopez tells us: “There is a release event for Asunder at Barbes in Park Slope, on Saturday, December 4th at 5 p.m, hosted by Nelly Reifler. There will be guest readers and some guest stars playing music.”

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

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This is the twentieth installment in a series of twenty posts announcing — in no particular order — which 100 stories will be collected in the Significant Objects book (forthcoming in 2011 from Fantagraphics).

96. Bruce Sterling’s METAL BOOT story. Excerpt:

We do not know how Wheat transformed his Italian enemies into his fiercely loyal followers, apparently overnight. We do know, as a historical fact, that Roberdeau Wheat distributed certain tokens to the men, just before they embarked from Naples. Those tokens were small brass boots. Every man who joined the Wheat expedition received one of these boots directly from Roberdeau Wheat’s own hand. The men wore the boots on their persons. What were these tokens, what was their meaning? Some Masonic recognition symbol — perhaps an aid to prayer, chained to a rosary? Given Wheat’s Louisiana origins, they may have been voodoo charms.

97. Todd Levin’s ZIGGY HEART story. Excerpt:

Mary Eileen’s supply of M&Ms was seemingly bottomless. She even found M&Ms in special colors around the holidays — an act in which I’m sure she took some kind of near-erotic pleasure. And whenever — seriously, whenever — you’d swing by and grab a few pieces of candy on the sly, Mary Eileen would unfailingly say, “Treat yourself!” That word — “treat” — from her lips was like an iron file dragging against the edge of my front teeth. The works, from Ziggy vaguely threatening me to “have a lovely day!” to the pink and red M&Ms on Valentine’s Day, to Mary Eileen’s matronly invocation, all seemed calculatedly designed to make me feel infantile.

And I guess that’s why I stole that Ziggy paperweight. I emptied the bowl of M&Ms into my backpack, too. An appropriately infantile act I suppose. But why should she have that power over me? And why can’t Mary Eileen find a means of happiness that’s, I don’ t know, grown-up? She never once complained — not formally, anyway — and it’s been stashed in my desk, M&Ms and all, for I don’t know how long.

98. Susannah Breslin’s NECKING TEAM BUTTON story. Excerpt:

I imagined my father had won his place on the All-American Necking Team sometime during 1953, his senior year at Brooklyn Preparatory. I knew what he looked like back then from photographs: a young man with deep-set eyes undershadowed by dark circles, his long form gangly with the awkwardness of his youth, a thin tie knotted at the base of his bird-like neck. Once, my mother had told me about his penchant for drinking Zombies, about the time in the middle of a party, he had proclaimed, “I’m a tree,” and then fallen flat to the floor, how she had stolen him from another woman older than her, who had a child — and in the remembering, my mother had smiled. But that summer, his father, my grandfather, a frustrated CPA with a roaring temper fueled by an abiding love of Four Roses and the failures of the Brooklyn Dodgers, had fallen dead of a heart attack while taking the IRT subway to work one day, and my father’s life had changed forever.

99. Ben Greenman’s SMILING MUG story. Excerpt:

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.”

100. Marisa Silver’s TOY CAR story. Excerpt:

The fourth time I went to take the test, my brother gave me one of his toy cars for good luck. My dad had bought him the car, telling him it was the same model as the first car he’d ever owned. The car was pink and my brother had tried to paint it over, but he didn’t have the right kind of paint so the car ended up looking like a school bathroom. I put the car in my pocket, turned off my brain, and took the test. I passed. I made no mistakes at all. By this time my parents had split up and my aunt was waiting for me in the waiting area because my mother had started back at her old job selling perfume at the department store. I kept my brother’s car all these years, even though the wheels have broken off and gotten lost, and it is so derelict even my own kids won’t play with it. It reminds me that even if you look down the road to catch a glimpse of your future, there’s not much you can avoid.

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

1) Colleen Werthmann is currently appearing in a play by The Civilians, an investigative theater company, at the Irondale Center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. IN THE FOOTPRINT, a new play with music, tells the story of the largest development project in Brooklyn’s history. The play examines the conflicts that erupted in from Atlantic Yards’ unveiling through to its current resolution in an attempt to discover how the fate of the city is decided in present-day New York and what can be learned from this ongoing saga of politics, money, and the places we call home. The play is constructed from interviews with real life players in this Brooklyn epic, including local residents, business owners, Daniel Goldstein, political leaders such as Letitia James and Marty Markowitz, activists, union members, and community leaders. Info: http://www.thecivilians.org

2) Josh Kramer is excited to announce The Cartoon Picayune, a new self-published magazine fusing the art of comics and the tools of journalism. Cartoonpicayune.com is now online, and you can put in your email address to stay in the loop. Josh is currently working on the first issue, which will be full of his own comics reportage and hopefully done in time for MoCCA fest in New York City next April. More of Josh’s work can be seen at his blog.

3) Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer has published a new video-essay at Ryeberg.com: “Human Factory: Re-enactment and Repetition.”

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!

This is the nineteenth installment in a series of twenty posts announcing — in no particular order — which 100 stories will be collected in the Significant Objects book (forthcoming in 2011 from Fantagraphics).

91. Dara Horn’s MONKEY PUPPET story. Excerpt:

In addition to The Trial, Kafka at the time of his death was also at work on another manuscript, tentatively titled Metamorphosis II: Monkey Puppet. A sequel to The Metamorphosis, Metamorphosis II continues the story of the surreally afflicted Samsa family. After Gregor the cockroach’s death and Mr. and Mrs. Samsa’s relief as they notice their daughter Grete’s blossoming young figure (“they had come to the conclusion that it would soon be time to find a good husband for her”) in the final pages of Volume 1, Metamorphosis II resumes ten years later, with Grete Rosenzweig, née Samsa, as a discontented hausfrau and indulgent mother of three in Prague. In the opening paragraph, Grete Rosenzweig awakens from uneasy dreams to discover that she has been transformed into a plush puppet belonging to her surly and ungrateful six-year-old son Adolf.

92. Curtis Sittenfeld’s SPOTTED DOGS FIGURINE story. Excerpt:

I liked Ronald better because he was taller and because it was harder for me to guess where things stood with him; I had to work to draw him out. Larry just flat-out adored me. He’d always compliment my outfit, and once when he said my perfume smelled nice, I told him in kind of a haughty way that I didn’t wear perfume, it was just shampoo. At the movies he’d take my hand even before the trailers had ended. When he picked me up for a date, he’d mention whatever he’d seen or done since we’d last been together that had reminded him of me — a song he’d heard on the radio, for instance, or these spotted dogs, which he gave me after we’d been going out a couple months.

93. Cintra Wilson’s BASKETBALL TROPHY story. Excerpt:

As we discussed, I wish my best most coveted and rare valuable trophy prize to be safely in your Beloved hands. You may then assure me with your sweet words, Dear Heart, that you have it resting in a mounted place of honor in your diplomatic safe house. I will be afterwards in waiting for your signal to transfer the misallocated foreign aid (US) $344 MILLION I have received in error to threaten my political life daily, into the bank of your politically stable country. Also I am hoping to send, at future times, to our secret beautiful love child out of wedlock, the contested blood-diamond necklace worth (US) $6,900,00.00 belonging to my dearest departed aunt Hortensia Claire Watsson, may she lie in eternal embracing of the Christ.

94. Chris Adrian’s KANGAMOUSE story. Excerpt:

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.

95. Carl Wilson’s CHARLIE’S ANGELS THERMOS story. Excerpt:

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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 NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming (Fall 2011) collection, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. For Author Updates, visit the archive and subscribe via RSS. Also: Check out the Significant Objects Bookstore!