Never Liked It Anyway is a new website “where once loved gifts from once loved partners get a second chance… We’ve all been there. We’ve all got stories to tell and things to sell. This is a place full of marvelous deals. And tales of the mild, mutual and monstrous.”

The elevator pitch: Significant Objects meets “Breaking Up With Shannen Doherty.”

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.

From the March 21 (2011) New Yorker.

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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Rob Walker’s Unconsumption tumblr recently mentioned PASS THE BATON, a Japanese on- and offline retail concept that updates the thrift store experience by adding — yes, you guessed it! — meaningful narrative to castoff items.

For more evidence of the Significant Objects Meme, click here.

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming 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!

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!

This is the eighteenth 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).

86. Joe Wenderoth’s BALANCING BIRD THING story. Excerpt:

It works like this: in an outdoor space, bricks are stacked—two stacks; between the two stacks, a yarn is pulled tight and secured beneath the top brick on both sides. Next, a Birdman (a native Icelandic priest) tries to balance the Menstruating Judgment Bird on the yarn. If the Bird remains balanced for the next 10 seconds (in the Birdman’s head), the Bird has become ripe for Pronouncing Judgment. After ten seconds (in the Birdman’s head), which way the Bird falls decides the argument. All of the Judgment Bird’s verdicts are understood to be completely just.

87. Jim Hanas’ WIRE BASKET story. Excerpt:

“Yes I suppose our love was like the wind,” he said. “Subtle, omnipresent, powerful.”

“No, no, asshole,” she said, frantically running the heel of her free hand under each eye. “I’m not crying. The wind got in my eyes and…”

“Bracing, kind…”

“I wasn’t even thinking about you,” she screamed as she swung the basket at Rex’s left temple, showering the sidewalk with clementines and five whole grains, which strangers happily helped pile back into Jacqueline’s basket as the paramedics loaded Rex onto a stretcher.

88. Jenny Offill’s MINIATURE TURKEY DINNER story. Excerpt:

“When is everyone coming?” my daughter says. “Isn’t everyone coming?” She drags her dollhouse out of her room and begins arranging and rearranging the dining room chairs. It is hard to make them as they should be, it seems. One is always askew. She is so solemn, my little girl. So solemn and precise. Carefully, she places the tiny turkey in the center of the table. It is golden brown. Someone has carved a perfect flap in it. Why, I wonder. Why must everything have already begun? “Hurry,” she murmurs as she works. “Hurry, hurry!”

89. Jeff Turrentine’s “WOMEN & INFANTS” GLASS story. Excerpt:

Bertani 2002 “Catullo” Veneto ($20). Wow. Stunningly bright fruit (especially cherry and blackcurrant), moderate acidity. They were officially divorced a year later. Whenever I would ask my mom about my dad, or wish aloud that I could meet him, she would say that every time she tried to arrange for a visit he balked at the last minute, citing some work-related or personal conflict that couldn’t be avoided. I spent my childhood believing that my dad just wasn’t interested in meeting me, much less being a part of my life. I served this with some re-heated Chinese food the other night and drank the whole goddamn bottle by myself, it tasted so good.

90. James Parker’s KITTY SAUCER story. Excerpt:

Floyd inclined an eyebrow à la Errol Flynn. He was at the shoreline, and some sort of John Bircher was fixing his gumline. Karma was a pretzel sometimes. And he hadn’t even begun to think about the kitty plate. Why had someone left it in his car last night, this little milk-saucer with the face of a cat painted on it? He had floundered heavily into the driver’s seat, with the bar-reek on him, to find it propped on the dashboard like a rebuke. The cat was ginger-ish, with a distant, unreadable expression. “And the same to you, partner,” Floyd had mumbled, tossing it onto the back seat and scraping at the ignition. He’d never owned a cat. He didn’t like cats. Which was not to say that he didn’t understand the cat thing: he knew any number of ex-radicals and tired misanthropes whose single connection to the world-as-commonly-experienced was via some sullen feline. Barney Breaks, for example, the PI he’d hired to spy on his first wife. Pissed-off to the core. A disenchantment with humanity that was truly cosmic. Now there was a cat guy.

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!

I feel like the New York Times Magazine invented this feature — the annotated photograph of someone’s den, telling stories about their significant objects — but here’s an example of the genre from Seed Magazine that I came across the other day…

For more evidence of the Significant Objects Meme, click here.

MORE NEWS: For updates about the Significant Objects project and forthcoming 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 seventeenth 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).

81. Mark Doty’s FISH SPOONS story. Excerpt:

As a young man I read a poem I’ve never run across again since. I found it in the school library. If you already knew what you wanted in this haphazard collection, you were sunk, but if you spent time pulling things off the high, not-much-visited steps, you could get lucky.

The poem was Anglo-Saxon, a riddle, and it had to do with cold armor that never clanked, with chain mail that moved with a strange fluidity, as if it were made of mercury – though I’m sure I’ve added that detail, in memory. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t have mercury, did they? Or maybe they did.

I think what I liked best about the poem was the feeling of things moving in darkness, beneath the surface, not at all troubled about being in the dark. That and something about the allure of ancient silver, that there were mines, somewhere in the far mountains, and people had learnt the methods of refining the hidden ore and bringing the malleable shining stuff into the light.

82. Laura Lippman’s MOTEL ROOM KEY story. Excerpt:

“I wasn’t spying,” she said. “But I have to ask – why did you save this?”

“Well, look at the name,” he said. “Perkins hotel.”

He waited, smiling broadly.

“I don’t get it.”

“Remember the movie Psycho?”

She did. Taxidermy, shower, mother issues. “That was the Bates Motel.”

“Yes, but the actor was Anthony Perkins. Isn’t that cool?”

“And what took you to Laconia, New Hampshire?”

“A road trip with a bunch of guys in our junior year of college.” He held the key, ran his thumb over it. “Drop in any mailbox,” it said, but he hadn’t.

83. Kurt Andersen’s SANTA NUTCRACKER story. Excerpt:

We were out on the porch again, me cracking pecans, and we’d just heard a train pass by and blow its whistle, and suddenly she asked if I wanted to take the Santa Claus cracker to keep, as a keepsake, since with Marcus Sr. gone she’d decided she’d stop baking pies. I didn’t really want it, but to be polite I said sure, and thanked her. Then in a big gulp she finished her third glass, and sort of giggled. “But don’t you ever do what I once caught Jimmy doing, OK?” When I asked what that was, she giggled again and said she couldn’t say, but I chuckled too and kind of insisted, so she told me. One afternoon in the spring of 1945, when Jimmy was 14, she’d heard on the radio that the Nazis had surrendered, so she ran into Jimmy’s room to tell him, and found him sitting on his bed with his pants off and his penis stuck in the nutcracker.

84. Kate Bernheimer’s PINK HORSE story. Excerpt:

That pink horse! How she loved it. Once when she had gone a very long way to gather her treasures — all the way under a natural tunnel inside the cliffs, which led to a narrow beach that would trap you and kill you if you were stuck there during high tide — an old woman with pink hair approached her and sang her a song. My daughter told me about this old woman, but I didn’t believe her. Later that week, my girl brought home a sea urchin, closed. She said that when the sea urchin opened, the old woman would return and that she had promised then to bring us good luck. I got an empty jar from the cupboard — it had once been full of beach plum jelly but had been long gathering dust. We walked down to the edge of the ocean and filled it with water. Back in the cabin, we placed the closed sea urchin carefully into the water, where it sank and stayed closed. The next morning my littlest girl didn’t wake up and the sea urchin had bloomed. It was on her grave that my other daughter placed the pink horse.

85. John Wray’s IMPLEMENT story. Excerpt:

“What is it?” said Lily.

“I just told you,” Oliver said patiently.

The Object expressed no opinion.

“Well, we might as well give it a try,” Lily said. “How do we make it do?”

Oliver squinted down at the Object for a while, and then shrugged. “I think we just set it down in the corner,” he said finally. “Give it room to do its work.”

Lily considered this a moment, then took Oliver’s hand, and they deposited the object, gently and circumspectly, in the room’s nearest corner. “How long will it take?” Lily wondered.

“Ten and a half days,” Oliver said firmly. Lily couldn’t help noticing, however, that he avoided looking her in the eye. You’ll never persuade me that way, Lily said to herself. The Object chittered and hummed in its corner.

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!

One of our favorite S.O. buyers sent along these images documenting a rare convergence of Significant Object, author, and new owner. On the left, that’s Stewart O’Nan, whose Duck Tray story was an early highlight of Vol. 1 of this project. On the right is David Mahlstedt, happy recipient of the Duck Tray (by way of a thoughtful gift from Trifin and Jeannie (who took this pictures) Roule. He is, we are told, an enthusiastic O’Nan fan. So how cool is that?

In addition to signing his story, O’Nan signed the object itself: “In my mind,” he writes, the duck tray is “still on Henry’s dresser.” Enjoy the story again here, and you may just agree.