the compelling life stories of common objects
Earlier this morning, I was lying in bed listening to the sounds of the Sunday morning pundits wafting in from the other room. Eventually some senator or other was asked by George Stephanopoulos whether he thinks Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed for the Supreme Court. He said of course and began to rattle off the many reasons why she should be, one of which was her — brace yourself — “compelling life story.” I have no opinion on Sotomayor, but I am increasingly irritated by our need for public figures to have Compelling Life Stories along with — or even instead of — actual job qualifications. This, after all, is how Sarah Palin found herself in line for the Vice Presidency. (Although, no matter how many times I’ve heard her praised first and foremost for it, I can’t find a single compelling thing about her particular life story.)
It seems inarguable to me that we, as a nation, are problematically motivated by stories we are told or, perhaps moreso, that we tell ourselves. Just look at the rabid consumerism that has led us into this economic crisis — largely an act of trying to rewrite our own life stories. We, the people, are living lives we can’t afford in an attempt to measure up to other people’s stories (other people who themselves often can’t afford the life they're living). While I don’t exclude myself from this by any means, it’s one of my favorite reading subjects.
So I was interested just now to read about a rather fascinating experiment called Significant Objects. It’s the brainchild of Joshua Glenn (Taking Things Seriously) and Rob Walker (Buying In): “Our question was this: Can stories, even fictional ones, transform insignificant objects into significant ones? If so, how to measure this qualitative transformation?”
They’ve picked up a bunch of thrift store trinkets and enlisted a group of talented, well-known writers (from Stewart O’Nan to Kurt Andersen) to invent short histories for those trinkets. They’re posting the trinkets and stories on eBay and seeing what they sell for as compared to the price they paid. Unsurprisingly, a compelling life story can really boost the auction price of an unexceptional doodad. Especially one that gets 15 minutes of fame on BoingBoing.
And that’s what this really comes down to. The compelling story these things are benefiting from isn’t the made-up history itself — none of this is being done blind. The benefit is that they’re part of a larger project, one that has garnered the involvement of people whose names you know, one you read about at some hip website. And if you buy one of the objects involved in that project, you become a part of it, and it becomes a part of you.
So when someone says they really like your funky ashtray, you have a compelling story to tell.
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miscellany
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