Significant Objects

What?

Not enough stories about objects in your week?

Well then! Check out these entries in the Significant Objects Fictionaut Group, where the following talented writers have all created stories about the above object. Which one do you find to be most Significant? Chime in over on Fictionaut, or let us know here in the comments. We want your feedback! After all, our earlier Fictionaut-made story, by Nicholas Rombes, ultimately fetched nearly $150 — we’d love to see something like that happen again on behalf of Girls Write Now. Help us, readers!

(And either way, it’s pretty amazing to read a half-dozen responses to a single object — yet another affirmation of the story/object possibilities that helped inspire this project in the first place.)

Here are links to the six stories in our group, with the opening sentence of each:

• The Egg Whisk, by Sari Cunningham.”Two days after his bypass surgery she walked in on the nurse adjusting his catheter and dispensing dietary advice.”
• Where Is Love? by Lynn Chakoian.”I didn’t always have this metal thing poking out of the top of my head.”
• Summer Lawn, by Shelagh Power-Chopra. “That summer my mother moved to Maine and my father stayed put in the old house in Savannah.”
• Culinary, by Meg Pokrass. “He said most food was better when baked evenly.”
• How I Learned To Cook, by Susan Tepper. ” Ingredients: 1 cup long hair ….”
• Whiskers, by Paul de Dunas. “He worked on in the early first light, chopping with a crooked axe at the knotted stump of oak that stubbornly grasped the ground.” (more…)

A glimpse inside Significant Objects' laboratory.

Years ago, when I was (briefly) a grad student in Sociology, at Boston University, I discovered that positivist science doesn’t offer satisfactory models for synthesizing a cluster of elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, generative first principle, or essential core. Significant Objects now faces this problem. Our efforts to organize our experiment’s data into a simple pattern haven’t worked — doubtlessly because our model is too reductive. Perhaps we should consider the Hausdorff dimension; or maybe a parabolic partial differential equation is called for? Hmmm…

What am I going on about? Our project’s hypothesis, that narrative is a key x-factor influencing an object’s exchange value, i.e., by transforming a qualitatively and quantitatively “insignificant” object into a “significant” one, was definitively proven by the pioneering quasi-anthropological experiment that Rob Walker and I ran from July to November 2009. As a result of our experiment, which involved using 100 stories by talented authors as item descriptions for 100 objects that we listed on eBay, the “value in trade” of those objects increased from a mere $128.74 to an astonishing $3,612.51.

Yes, MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program scouts, you heard right: We employed narrative to boost the qualitative-quantitative significance of castoff objects by over 2,700%. But that was just the beginning of the important work we’re now doing behind the scenes here at Significant Objects.

From October through December 2009, we shared our experiment’s results here at the Significant Objects website, via a plethora of incontrovertible charts and graphs:

• We classified the 100 objects in our experiment as talismans, totems, evidence, and fossils.
• We presented the raw original price/final price data.
• We listed the week in which each story was published, and its associated object listed for auction on eBay.
• We neutralized the Duration Factor by adding $18.00 to the final sale price of each item in Week 1, $17.00 to the final sale price of each item in Week 2, and so forth through Week 18 of 19. The resulting Adjusted Final Prices have been used in our figuring ever since.
• We presented the experiment’s overall, week-to-week mean and median price data.
• We compared the Final Prices and Adjusted Final Prices, and made it possible to rank sales data by either factor.
• We presented the experiment’s Top 25 most significant objects (according to adjusted sales rank) in a visual manner, and invited readers to point out aesthetic considerations that might explain the objects’ popularity (i.e., independent of the associated narratives).
• We also invited readers to point out aesthetic considerations that might explain the unpopularity of some objects.

The above tables and charts demonstrate, in granular detail, exactly what narrative does. But how does narrative accomplish this miraculous transformation, this transubstantiation of insignificant into significant object? Since December of last year, our crack team of analysts — working in Savannah and Boston — has struggled to pin down a clear cause-and-effect relation that might explain how this process works. So far, no such relation has been discovered.

To paraphrase a scrap of doggerel from The Scarlet Pimpernel: “Is it in Heaven, or is it in Heck / That damned elusive cause-and-effect?”

Not that our research has been in vain. If the insignificant-to-significant objectual transubstantiation were a simple, straightforward matter, then it would already have been discovered — no doubt by fully funded marketers and brand consultants — years ago. We now strongly suspect that the relation between the cluster of elements in our data set cannot be reduced to anything so simple as cause-and-effect. Which is why we’ve jury-rigged a Verifiable Insignificant-to-Significant Transubstantiation Analyzer (model 1.0), pictured below.

The VISTA 1.0, multiple patents pending

The VISTA 1.0 has improved our analytical efficiencies tremendously. (more…)

Object No. 10 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[The bidding for this object, with story by Blake Butler, has ended. Original price: 99 cents. Final price: $59.00. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now.]

My granddad’s granddad had a box under his bed. If you got to open the box (you had to beg) you would find a little door. The little door had a combination on it that you had to know to get inside the second box, which I did. I had the combination tattooed on my spinemeat when I was four while on a trip to see the circus. The tattoo was free. My granddad’s granddad was very powerful and rich.

With granddad’s granddad in the bed asleep above me, I opened up the box inside the box. My knees were bloody from the begging. I could see way down into the box. There was a black pattern, then a ladder. I fell forward and grabbed ahold. The inside of the box smelled like the backyard where the money got made from skin. I began to climb along the ladder, getting older every rung. I was a very special boy. (more…)

A significant objet d'art

We’ve mentioned a few other art projects that use eBay as a platform or medium. The idea-based artist Caleb Larsen’s A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter is a fun one. It’s a significant object — a sculpture, supposedly, though it looks pretty much like a black box with wires running into it — that forever attempts to auction itself on eBay.

From Larsen’s website: “Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.”

A Tool To Deceive And Slaughter is listed on eBay this week with a starting price of $6,858.00.

Going once, going twice...

Object No. 9 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Duane Swierczynski, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $16.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

Hi there.

Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you.

I understand your trepidation. It’s not everyday a torn suit hanging on a rack starts talking to you.

Yes.

Yes, I really am a suit, and I am indeed talking to you.

Come over here a minute.

See the pack of superfine needles over there? Right there, on the table? Pick them up, please. I need your help.

Argh… This is what I’m reduced to. Talking to myself, imaging that someone is actually listening.

***

Let me start again. My name is Ralph Rainey, and I’m a size 34 regular black Don Imprecio suit.

I wasn’t always a suit. I was born a man, a man named Ralph Rainey…

Ahhhhh fuggit.

***

Me again. It’s funny; this feels like good old-fashioned writer’s block — which I’ve had plenty of in my day, believe me. You can’t crank out endless reams of lurid pulp tales without hitting a mental ROAD CLOSED sign now and again.

But this is different, especially in that I’m not typing these words on my trusty Underwood. I’m composing these hideous sentences on an imaginary typewriter in an imaginary room in my mind. (The mind that is currently housed in the aforementioned suit.) I’m painfully aware that, at any moment, I can leave this imagined room and be right back in my tortured reality: the reality that is me, hanging on a wooden rack in the middle of a men’s consignment shop in Sherman Oaks, California.

It was a good suit, once.
(more…)

Object No. 8 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Lakin Khan, has ended. Original price: $1.00. Final price: $21.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

The cardboard sign, neatly hand-lettered in black, was propped in the front window of the crowded little shop: “Fans For Sale.” I imagined an army of mercenary fanatics willing to cheer for, blog about whoever paid their wages. I sure needed some ego-boosting fans: here I was, 29 years old, five years out of grad school, two years out of a bad boyfriend, a flunky for Closets-R-Us L.A.

A crowded shop, not much larger than some of the his&her walk-in closets I laid out for people who had actual, bona-fide fans. Midday light dimmed by high fog barely made it inside; the door shut behind me with a sharp jangle from outsized bells on a red strap, just audible over the susurration of many switched-on fans.

Fans of every conceivable shape and size lined shelves racked along all three walls. Large, square window fans. Short, round stand-alone fans with blades protected by a bubble of chromed grillwork. Slowly whirling ceiling fans, with down-turned lights that were the only indoor illumination. Fans to mount on a car dash, small desk fans with clamps, portable battery-run fans, fans attached to the bill of a cap. Slick oscillating affairs on stands and stools were herded into the middle of the floor. Air currents tugged this way and that, ruffling the sleeves and hems of my linen jacket.

From the repair shop in back, a thin, stooped man angled himself through the dull gray accordion-fold door that was permanently left either half-open or half-closed, depending on how you looked at it. He stood behind a long glass display case that also served as the counter, pushed his graying ponytail behind his shoulder with one hand, gesturing a soundless hello with a wave of the other and two raised eyebrows.

And there, opened in semi-circles and layered on the red velvet shelves of the case in front of that half-open, half-closed door, were the handheld fans, the ones made of paper or foil or embroidered cloth. (more…)

Object No. 7 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Lance Gould, has ended Original price: $1.50. Final price: $14.50. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

Carpenter usually took a bathroom break at 11:15. Today, the skinny bastard was still going through e-mail at 11:47. He hadn’t gotten out of his chair since he first parked himself in it at 9:03.

“God DAMN it — what the hell is he doing?” Kohler muttered into the phone.

“His insides must be bursting,” Goldberg replied.

Carpenter rose and stretched. He took three somnolent steps toward the restrooms. Kohler and Goldberg exchanged arched eyebrows, and signaled to Velasquez, who had also been eyeing the suspender-wearing pigeon. Then Carpenter’s phone rang. The middle manager ambled back to his desk, answered it, smiled, and settled in for what seemed like it could be a lengthy exchange.

“JESUS,” yelled Velasquez, so loudly that all business in the office briefly came to an abrupt halt. Goldberg rebuked him with a murderous stare, and Velasquez shrunk back behind his laminated steel desk. Kohler picked up the phone and called Goldberg. “Maybe I could be a piano page turner or somethin’.”

“What’s that?”

“A piano page turner. You know, a dude who all they do is turn the page at a recital or whatever.”

“But you don’t know jack all about classical music.”

“I know how to turn a page.”

“There’s so much more to — ah, forget it.”

Carpenter stood up, stretched again, and this time nearly sprinted to the restroom. Velasquez, too obviously, raced toward Carpenter’s desk. Kohler winced, but he and Goldberg also hurried over to Carpenter’s corner cubicle.

Velasquez got there first. The red-metal gumball machine with shatterproof polycarbonate globe was filled with peanut M&Ms. Velasquez spun the handle furiously — five, six, seven times, gluttonously filling his palms with the colored candy. The accountant’s sweaty hands started bleeding red, yellow, and green.
(more…)

Object No. 6 of 50 -- Significant Objects v3

[ Bid on this Significant Object, with story by Benjamin Percy, here. Significant Objects will donate the proceeds of this auction to Girls Write Now. ]

I brought to school a rubber-band gun I bought at the mall. I bought it at that store with the tarot cards and the stink bombs and the beer T-shirts and the posters of women in thongs bending over on beaches with sand stuck to them in all the right places. So I brought to school the gun and showed it off to Stacey Swanson. I was a little in love with her. By that I mean I regularly jerked off into an athletic sock when thinking about her naked.

Normally she would not talk to me except to say, “Don’t even talk to me — you haven’t even gone through puberty yet.” But this time, when I held out the rubber-band gun, she said, “Let me see that.” She grabbed the gun and weighed it in her hand a moment before lifting her arm and staring down the line of it and shooting me directly in the eyeball.

The eyeball did not fare well. The rubber band hit the pupil directly, punctured it, buried itself like a worm. The doctor removed the eyeball and put it in a bottle of formaldehyde. (more…)

These just came in today — and they’re too amazing to keep to ourselves! Above: Toy Airplane + Robert Lopez Story; below, Mermaid Figurine + Tom McCarthy Story. And check out the amazing story-in-a-found-bottle presentation, courtesy of Underwater New York. Fantastic!

As it happens, both of these Significant Objects were purchased by Susan Clements, who shared these images with us. Thank you, Susan!

(more…)

Our data analysis to date has focused largely on Volume 1. But for fun, here’s an integrated top 25: The highest prices from the 150 (!) Significant Objects auctions that have closed to date.

Questions? Comments? Let us know.

(more…)

from The Atlantic Monthly

READ MORE about the Significant Objects Meme.

Object No. 5 of 50 — Significant Objects v3

[The auction for this object, with story by Jim Hanas, has ended. Original price: $1.50. Final price: $27.00. Previous installments in Hanas' series "Why They Cried" are here. Proceeds from this auction will go to Girls Write Now. ]

Why They Cried: Jacqueline

Cause: Sharp, icy wind

The air was cold and the wind was sharp, causing Jacqueline’s eyes to water in a manner resembling weep-based tear production—a fact she tried to explain to Rex, the bastard, when (of all the luck) she ran into him as she emerged from the food co-op, a basketful of fruits and brans and probiotic solutions hanging from her bent right elbow.

“I knew you missed me,” he said, seeing the tears streaming down her red cheeks. “I knew you couldn’t live without me.”

“I don’t miss you and, yes, I can live without you,” she said, erasing the tears with her tightly gloved fingers. “It’s the wind.”

He smiled.

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