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| Hearsay: |
I love stuff — artifacts, ephemera, pretty things, kitschy things, oddball objects with stories attached. But I don’t like the maintenance of said stuff — I’m not a good duster — and now that I live in a nice big house after years of apartment life, I’m always on guard against acquiring dreadful amounts of new stuff (with varying degrees of success). Fortunately for people like me, there’s Stuff Porn, books like Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes’ wonderful Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance and Leanne Shapton’s portrait of a Relationship as Defined by Stuff, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry.
And now there’s Significant Objects, a kind of interactive Stuff Porn site, where participating writers are invited to invent histories for random thrift shop items, each of which then goes up for sale on eBay accompanied by its fictional story. The winning bidder gets the object and a printout of its tale, and proceeds go to the author. It’s a fantastic idea on so many levels — as a creative experiment, sociological commentary, examination of mythmaking. Me, I just really really want Lydia Millet’s Chili Cat:
“We went with R to the diner and afterward we sat drinking and looking out at the river. Because she was homely, and all those boxes were full of the homeless, I took Chili Cat home.”
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July 12th, 2009 at 8:26 am
The Necking Team Button has 14 bids and is up to $36.88, but I like Chili Cat’s story better.
July 12th, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Stuff is a big deal with me – it is being collected in 3 locations across the globe as of this writing! It will be a real challenge to corral it into what now appears to be my 300 sq.ft eco home!!! Last weekend we got a stair basket – for cooking and gardening magazines and it is already sitting half full on the precarious stairs to our loft. Well, my proudest collection of stuff is a bunch of variegated cats that have endured the ages ( the oldest is currently 14) and Chester the Adirondack Beagle, found meandering in the wilderness and rightly plass around around stuff – he is as good stuff as stuff gets! Thank you for this post!
July 13th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
Thanks Lisa,
I’m glad you like Significant Objects — and also my book, Taking Things Seriously! I really should stop writing (editing, really) what you call Stuff Porn, but I have a couple more ideas, still.
July 13th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Oh please don’t stop, Josh. It’s really such good… stuff. I love Taking Things Seriously.