Friday February 19, 2010

Announcing “Why They Cried,” a Significant Objects mini-series

A week from today, I’ll be participating in the Significant Objects project, an idea cooked up by NYT Magazine columnist Rob Walker and writer Joshua Glenn. The basic idea? They buy an object for next to nothing, ask a writer to write a story about it, then post the object and the story on eBay and see what happens. And what does happen? Well, people pay more (often a lot more) for the newly narrativized (?) object than they would have before. This touches on so many of my interests I can hardly count—I’ll try to write about few of them here in the next week—and gets to the heart of how significance (and meaning and value) are created. Because that’s what we, the humans, do when it comes to meaning. We create it.

Rob and Josh have been at this for awhile. Mine will be the 155th object to be auctioned, so I wanted to put some sort of spin on the idea. Ben Greenman recently wrote a description for a “mystery object,” for example. This Borgesian project yielded $103.50. Designer Debbie Millman, meanwhile, submitted a handwritten story, which embued her object—a paperweight—with $197.50 of significance. And since I’ve been experimenting with serials, I decided to do a series.

My object and story will go up on eBay a week from today, but it will be the fifth installment in a series called “Why They Cried,” which will start on Monday. (Don’t worry, the series isn’t as maudlin as it sounds, although—okay—it is somewhat maudlin in patches.) The first four “episodes”—the series is a collection of short vignettes unified by the common theme—will appear next Monday through Thursday on both Facebook and Fictionaut.

If you’re not familiar with Fictionaut, it’s a social network for writers and readers created by Carson Baker and Jürgen Fauth. I think I admire it because I attempted something similar (very badly) in 2006, with a Digg clone I cobbled together called the The Lit List. It quickly became a spam trap—and I later pulled the plug—so I understand how much care and time it takes to tend to a community like this and make it grow in a sensible way. These guys have taken the time. (Anyone can read stories there, but if you’re a writer and would like to comment and/or post your own work at Fictionaut, send me an e-mail. I have a few invites to give.)

So, next Monday through Thursday, I’ll post the first four installments of “Why They Cried” on Fictionaut and Facebook, which will serve as the lead up to the fifth installment, which will appear on the Significant Objects site and, of course, on eBay. If you are now saying to yourself, “I cannot miss a single moment of this,” here’s what you can do, in order, from the cleanest to the noisiest, signal-wise.

1. You can join my Facebook group, which I use to announce projects like this. I’ll send alerts about the new installments to that list next week.
2. Follow my blog. Same deal, although you might get posts about other things as well.
3. Follow me on Twitter. Get the alerts plus a bunch of other Twitter business. Consider this the “Getting to Know Me” package.
4. If you only like to use the newest and shiniest, you can also follow me on Google Buzz, which I like—whatever the FTC says.

That’s it. Hope you’ll follow along, then bid early and often.