But today, we need to take a moment to thank some great friends for throwing a rather amazing Significant Cocktails party the following night, to celebrate the book’s release.

This wasn’t just hanging around drinking and yakking and having fun — although there was plenty of that. It was a creative event unto itself: In the spirit of the project, three expert mixologists created new cocktails inspired by … objects.

Contributing writer (and superfriend of the project) Ben Greenman contributed a curious gun-necklace trinket to this effort. The object inspired Martim Smith-Mattsoon to devise the Trinket Gimlet, featuring Beefeater 24 gin, earl grey tapioca pearls, and lime.

Molly Peck, one of the cunning and delightful individuals who purchased a Significant Object or three during the project’s active-sales period, offered up a mysterious bottle-stopper featuring a grinning head that some surmise may be a representation of Dwight Eisenhower. It became the muse of Michael J. Cirino, who concocted what he dubbed the Temporomandibular, including vodka, Bugal Especial, Plymouth Gin, Cointreau, tequila, and Coke.

Finally, project founders Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker came up with a pair of suspiciously similar buggy toys (the true significance of which is a proprietary secret of Significant Objects Enterprises, our shadowy parent company). Lynette Marerro responded with a drink called the Malibu Beach, featuring Goslings Black Seal Rum, lemon, and raspberry shrub.

These brilliant creators of drink were rounded up by Emilie Baltz, who masterminded the evening, along with Allan Chochinov. Chochinov, a longtime friend of the project, made everything happen, under the auspices of the Products of Design MFA program he has created for New York’s School of Visual Arts. The new and highly impressive Products of Design space was, in fact, the venue for the party. Allan and Emilie’s colleagues Kofi Aidoo and Stephanie Pottinger also played crucial roles in making the evening a success.

We offer sincere thanks to all of the above. But there is one more entity to thank, as well: eBay. That’s who sponsored the evening, and we are particularly grateful to Marie Tahir and Dane Howard.

In short, it was quite a night. We got to see some friends again, make lots of new ones, meet in person writers who contributed great stories to the book, and generally spend a few hours feeling like we’d done something worthwhile (and, also, getting drunk). The cocktails were all quite wonderful, but it was really the creative spirit of the night that made it a perfect celebration of the strange and unlikely thing that is Significant Objects.

Please see the slideshow above, and/or this Products of Design post, and this Flickr set, this HiLobrow post, and this post on Emilie Baltz’s site, for more.

Cheers!

Earlier, Significant Objects chose Girls Write Now to receive all proceeds from one of our “volumes” of stories and auctions. We were thrilled to donate over $1,700 to this worthy organization. But today’s check is going out on behalf of twenty-four contributors to the Significant Objects book who requested that we donate their honorarium to Girls Write. So, public thanks to:

Rob Agredo
Rob Baedeker
Rosecrans Baldwin
Susannah Breslin
Kathryn Davis
Meg Cabot
Tim Carvell
Dan Chaon
Mark Frauenfelder
Amy Fusselman
William Gibson
Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
Neil LaBute
Laura Lippman
Stephen O’Connor
Todd Pruzan
Dan Reines
Greg Rowland
Matthew Sharpe
Marisa Silver
Deb Olin Unferth
Margaret Wertheim
Matthew J. Wells
Cintra Wilson

PS: As mentioned yesterday, another batch of writers directed their fees to 826 National.

Our thanks to all for being so generous!

Here is a VIDEO PREVIEW of the gorgeous book. DON’T FORGET: Join contributors Luc Sante, Matthew Sharpe, Mimi Lipson, Ben Greenman, Annie Nocenti, Shelley Jackson, Jason Grote — and editors Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker — as they read stories from and celebrate the release of the Significant Objects book at New York’s Strand Book Store, on July 10 from 7 pm to 8 pm. Buy Significant Objects or a $10 Strand gift card in order to attend this event. Both options admit one person. The event will be located in the Strand’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway and 12th Street. Tell your friends!

Today, Significant Objects donated $450 to the youth creative-writing tutoring program 826 National! As you may recall, in 2009–10 we raised over $2,200 for 826 National via the auctions associated with the second “volume” of our project’s stories.

We made the $450 donation in the name of the following 18 contributors to the Significant Objects book (forthcoming from Fantagraphics in July) who requested that their $25 honorarium go to this worthy charity.

Matthew Battles
Tom McCarthy
Mark Jude Poirier
Douglas Wolk
Jenny Offill
Peter Rock
Gary Panter
Kate Bernheimer
Tom Vanderbilt
Heidi Julavits
Doug Dorst
Kurt Andersen
Kevin Brockmeier
Charles Baxter
Ben Greenman
Susanna Daniel
Matt Klam
Todd Levin

Significant Objects commends these terrific writers for their generosity. And 826 National, if you’re reading this, the check is in the mail today.

PS: Another group of our contributors donated their honoraria to a different creative-writing tutoring program. So keep an eye peeled for another announcement soon!

REMINDER: Join contributors Luc Sante, Matthew Sharpe, Mimi Lipson, Ben Greenman, Annie Nocenti, Shelley Jackson, Jason Grote — and editors Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker — as they read stories from and celebrate the release of the Significant Objects book at New York’s Strand Book Store, on July 10 from 7 pm to 8 pm. Buy Significant Objects or a $10 Strand gift card in order to attend this event. Both options admit one person. The event will be located in the Strand’s 3rd floor Rare Book Room at 828 Broadway and 12th Street.

PPS: Here is a VIDEO PREVIEW of the gorgeous Fantagraphics book.

The book (which comes with two different covers) is available for pre-ordering now. As the publication date draws nearer, watch this space.

In a recent Design Observer post, Rick Poynor visits Istanbul’s Museum of Innocence, founded in April of this year by Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, and flatteringly describes it as “a fabulously extended example of Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn’s ‘Significant Object’ genre of writing — in this case, a vast system of objects constitutes a fully realized fictional world, where every item, wherever it happened to come from, acquires a new backstory.” Thanks, Rick!

We’re also grateful to Bruce Sterling for spreading this meme (Significant Objects as a literary genre) via his Wired blog, Beyond the Beyond.

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

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.

Thumbscribes Story Number Two.

[This is the second of two stories created for Significant Objects by participants in Thumbscribes, a collaborative-writing platform. Thumbscribes is auctioning this object here, and will give proceeds to a charity or nonprofit of its choosing.]

I had a friend who once gifted a SPAM jigsaw puzzle. It’s the kind of gift that lets a person know how you feel. It says, “You’re a compressed mystery meat conundrum and I don’t mind getting my hands dirty.” My gifts rarely speak so candidly.

My mother doesn’t eat sweets anymore. The doctors told her they were killing her. It used to always be so easy to buy her presents. Cakes, pies, cupcakes. I’d just go to the nearest bakery and choose the most delicious-looking thing. Now when I see her for holidays, we share a silence of sweets. And so, the absence of sweetness in my gifts pained me. It threatened to sour our family time, for the memory of sweetness is the sweetest of all things, until custom and overuse curdles it. And then I found this. A void encased in a prison of pastry: a metaphor for life. A savory joke.

At first glance, memories of Katie’s plum-colored face, wheezing, struggling for air as she convulsed on the floor with her hands on her throat, filled my mind. Diabetic shock: overbearing sweetness can be so bitterly destructive at times. After her attack she would often remind me that stressed spelled backwards is desserts. In fact, she went so far as to divide the whole world into people who like desserts, and Maoists. After a few glasses of wine she would sometimes shout with righteous indignation, “Let them eat cake.” Being in the people-who-liked-sweets category was inherently better than being in the Maoists’ camp. That said, I was still a little hesitant about how she would respond to my most recent purchase.

As I was about to give her the present, the New Yorkers arrived like a bumper commercial during the cliffhanger of my gift-giving moment. The dogs raced to the door as my mother rushed gushing to meet my brother and his girlfriend. “Baby Cakes, all the way from the East Village,” Serena exclaimed. “Baby Cakes indeed,” I thought gleefully as my mother reluctantly refused the sugar-coated gift. Keith insisted she try one, saying the cakes were sugar-free and made with Agave. I looked up startled as I watched my mother slowly bite into the forbidden; that of which we had for so long not spoken. I rushed over, chastising my brother for his ignorance. “Mom can’t eat ANY sweets. It makes no difference if it’s extracted from cactus or corn.” She seemed fine, although visibly unhappy that I’d robbed her of her pleasure. That was when I decided not to give her the pie-shaped container.

Written collaboratively by Thumbscribes users Alex Rendon, Carly, Chris, Jacqueline, lickicon, and Rafael. For a breakdown, view the story on Thumbscribes, and click “view details.”

Thumbscribes Story Number One.

[This is the first of two stories created for Significant Objects by participants in Thumbscribes, a collaborative-writing platform. Thumbscribes is auctioning this object here, and will give proceeds to a charity or nonprofit of its choosing.]

I was born on 11/11 at 11:11 and there is nothing extraordinary about my life. We live in an ordered universe where patterns and co-incidences are bound to arise. The Chinese egg was different. I first saw it at my psychoanalyst’s office above The Ear Inn. It was planted by him, of course. A strict Freudian, he believes that there are no accidents, and when he can, he makes sure of it. Placed on the bookshelf just over his right shoulder, in my eyeline. I struggled not to laugh. A maternal figure, on an egg, of all things. Obvious, even for him. His polished scalp comically mirrored the shape of the object. I began to wonder of the similarities between the human brain and an egg, specifically of the hidden being inside one’s mind, yet to form, but when it does — turns into an animal independent of the body. Then it hit me.

Square across my face. In the throes of such a metaphysical quandary, I didn’t see that egg coming. “You must free yourself of all that Oedipal guilt,” said Dr. Ljunggren in his thick Swedish accent as the oval object bounced off my cheek. My child’s failure-to-thrive syndrome was no fault of mine. I stood up, albeit a little shaken, walked over to where the ornament had landed and picked it up. The Doctor was prone to have these dramatic outbursts and I was becoming well-versed. I replaced the offending object and returned to the chaise lounge and reclined. My gaze was drawn back to the ceramic egg while I proceeded to answer Ljunggren’s questions about my week, developing relationships, occasional instances of distress and other nuances. I traced the egg’s decorative embellishments, following golden outlines across its painted surface while I spoke. Ljunggren, the unrivaled master of the uncanny, was getting increasingly agitated that I had not reacted to or acknowledged the egg incident. I was wrong to have confided in him about my reoccurring deja vu with the egg. He was part of the collusion. I felt uncomfortably strange and oddly comforted.

“It’s just that the Geisha looks so well fed Doc,” I said with a quiver in my voice, as I gawked at her pasty white complexion. Ljunggren raised his right eyebrow and stated: “And brimming with innocence and purity,” as he stroked his pointy goatee. I began to feel a slight swell occurring on my face. Ljunggren and the elephant in the room were suddenly completely transparent. He needed my neurosis about the egg as much as he needed a reason to get up in the morning. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” I said, walking on egg shells out the room. “And an egg is just an egg,” Ljunggren wisecracked.

Written collaboratively by Thumbscribes users : Alex Rendon, Chris, Goldcat, Jacqueline, lickicon, and Rafael. For a breakdown, view the story on Thumbscribes, and click “view details.”

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.