Rest in Pieces
Rest In Pieces: the curious fates of famous corpses
Bess Lovejoy
Simon & Schuster, New York: 2013
Many ‘novelty’ books can leave you feeling a little hollow. Paradoxically, given its abject matter, Bess Lovejoy’s brilliant Rest In Pieces conveys to its reader a feeling both for the vibrancy of things that have passed through dying and for the volatility of spaces in which they might be supposed to rest. The pleasure is intellectual, but sensual also, starting with the material of the book itself: its dark, silky, shroud-like wrapper, the weighty body of the book with the dimensions of a casket. The cover illustration slices spade-like through cloud and clod alike.
And what scenarios Lovejoy has unearthed! While she has restricted herself to the well-known, it is clear from Lovejoy’s selection of stories that any body can and will be subject to volatile human and physical geographies: changes in burial traditions, family disputes, economic redevelopment, trade in body bits, archaeology, treasure hunts and rainfall. Here we find a local artist sitting down to capture Einstein’s brain, the ashes of broadcaster Alistair Cooke smuggled into Central Park in a Starbucks paper cup (only for the contents themselves to fall under suspicion), body part harvesters replacing bone with plastic piping, a train that ploughs into a monumental masons and wrecks only one stone - Edgar Allan Poe’s - and the eleven month carriage trip taken by Descartes’ corpse “disguised as a bundle of rocks to thwart bandits”.
Lovejoy has no inhibitions about the jumble of grave goods she discovers: there are as many foaf tales here as documented exhumations; of Walt Disney buried beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland, the safety deposit box in New Jersey that accommodates Einstein’s eyes, Mozart’s screaming skull, scandalous tales from the cryogenics industry involving a brain and a tuna can, the Emperor Augustus accidentally knocking the nose from Alexander the Great’s mummy, while under Lenin’s closed eyes are fake eyeballs.
Often there are two or more skeletons for the same celebrity, or one skeleton and two skulls, or the same body spread between various locations (the currency of competing civic pride or subject to criminal ransom), the brains of unconventional thinkers stored in the cupboards of bureaucrats and morbid empiricists; most appropriately, the body of the dualist Descartes has “lost his head”. Bodies are business, politics, art; their treatment is often a symptom of some other process: the care of Lenin’s preserved corpse has been taken over by “a private firm called Ritual Service” whose contemporary clients are “Moscow’s deceased gangsters and nouveaux riches”, Mussolini’s stolen corpse was hidden for a while in a Milan convent “staffed by sympathetic friars”, while nobly and bizarrely Dorothy Parker gave her corpse to Martin Luther King Jnr.
Lovejoy’s prose is always a delight, on every page there is some evidence of wit and an intuitive feel for the absurd connection: “body bits... functioned like spiritual walkie-talkies”, “better living through skull-fondling”, “the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies”, “Relativity Cigars”. Most precious to us, though, are the spaces that Bess Lovejoy evokes: the robbed tombs, Lincoln lying under four thousand pounds of cement, the graveyards where the stones and plaques move about with a life quite unconnected to what lies beneath, the billiard hall covering Columbus, and, perhaps most affecting, the little wooden cross decorated with a cane in the corner of a Swiss field marking not the ‘final’ resting place of Charlie Chaplin but rather the site of its temporary burial by ransom-seekers. We are mobile in death.
CrabMan
Bess Lovejoy
Simon & Schuster, New York: 2013
Many ‘novelty’ books can leave you feeling a little hollow. Paradoxically, given its abject matter, Bess Lovejoy’s brilliant Rest In Pieces conveys to its reader a feeling both for the vibrancy of things that have passed through dying and for the volatility of spaces in which they might be supposed to rest. The pleasure is intellectual, but sensual also, starting with the material of the book itself: its dark, silky, shroud-like wrapper, the weighty body of the book with the dimensions of a casket. The cover illustration slices spade-like through cloud and clod alike.
And what scenarios Lovejoy has unearthed! While she has restricted herself to the well-known, it is clear from Lovejoy’s selection of stories that any body can and will be subject to volatile human and physical geographies: changes in burial traditions, family disputes, economic redevelopment, trade in body bits, archaeology, treasure hunts and rainfall. Here we find a local artist sitting down to capture Einstein’s brain, the ashes of broadcaster Alistair Cooke smuggled into Central Park in a Starbucks paper cup (only for the contents themselves to fall under suspicion), body part harvesters replacing bone with plastic piping, a train that ploughs into a monumental masons and wrecks only one stone - Edgar Allan Poe’s - and the eleven month carriage trip taken by Descartes’ corpse “disguised as a bundle of rocks to thwart bandits”.
Lovejoy has no inhibitions about the jumble of grave goods she discovers: there are as many foaf tales here as documented exhumations; of Walt Disney buried beneath the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland, the safety deposit box in New Jersey that accommodates Einstein’s eyes, Mozart’s screaming skull, scandalous tales from the cryogenics industry involving a brain and a tuna can, the Emperor Augustus accidentally knocking the nose from Alexander the Great’s mummy, while under Lenin’s closed eyes are fake eyeballs.
Often there are two or more skeletons for the same celebrity, or one skeleton and two skulls, or the same body spread between various locations (the currency of competing civic pride or subject to criminal ransom), the brains of unconventional thinkers stored in the cupboards of bureaucrats and morbid empiricists; most appropriately, the body of the dualist Descartes has “lost his head”. Bodies are business, politics, art; their treatment is often a symptom of some other process: the care of Lenin’s preserved corpse has been taken over by “a private firm called Ritual Service” whose contemporary clients are “Moscow’s deceased gangsters and nouveaux riches”, Mussolini’s stolen corpse was hidden for a while in a Milan convent “staffed by sympathetic friars”, while nobly and bizarrely Dorothy Parker gave her corpse to Martin Luther King Jnr.
Lovejoy’s prose is always a delight, on every page there is some evidence of wit and an intuitive feel for the absurd connection: “body bits... functioned like spiritual walkie-talkies”, “better living through skull-fondling”, “the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies”, “Relativity Cigars”. Most precious to us, though, are the spaces that Bess Lovejoy evokes: the robbed tombs, Lincoln lying under four thousand pounds of cement, the graveyards where the stones and plaques move about with a life quite unconnected to what lies beneath, the billiard hall covering Columbus, and, perhaps most affecting, the little wooden cross decorated with a cane in the corner of a Swiss field marking not the ‘final’ resting place of Charlie Chaplin but rather the site of its temporary burial by ransom-seekers. We are mobile in death.
CrabMan