Sam Pickering update

Pleased to become a part of my Cabinet, Samuel Pickering shared with me an essay he had just finished writing about Karrakatta Cemetery, which he often visited while living in Perth, Western Australia: In part I write about death because I have reached the noose end of my days. More importantly, though, optimism thrives amid the humus of tombs. Sam Pickering also describes the Perth War Cemetery: The grass was green and plush. The stones ran in straight lines, and not a tendril had worked loose from plantings embroidering walkways. The order, of course, masked the turmoil war imposed on families. Back at Karrakatta (where Heath Ledger's family has a plot, I learned when I Googled the above image) Sam has taken a break: After leaving the cafe, I decided to read more tombstones, for epitaphs are often the beginnings, not the endings, of stories, for example, "Our Pop" and "We have lost what heaven has gained / The best little girl the earth contained." In the essay, he wanders the "renewed" and the sandy, blighted old sections of the cemetery, picks up and puts back down a half-buried small oval grave number he considers taking home: "That's the end of it," I thought. But that wasn't the end. Certainly endings in cemeteries are more complex, turning back on themselves and becoming beginnings and middles. I agree with Sam that the older sections of cemeteries are the more appealing. When I went to a meeting of the Association for Gravestone Studies back in 1987, the group toured a local burial site that was being reclaimed from a stand of woods. I had to hurry to get some beautiful photographs of the slate stones before restoration-minded members plucked the ivy off.

Samuel Pickering

My favorite professor while at the University of Connecticut was Samuel Pickering, who still teaches in the English Department. He is a prolific essayist and an inspiration for the Robin Williams character in the film Dead Poets Society. I reestablished contact with him several years ago and sent occasional e-mails about my progress toward my M.A. When I told him I was writing about anthropodermic books and that the trial transcript of William Corder--bound in his own hide--was on display, his response included a quote from “Anchorite,” an unpublished essay of his about the museum at the back of Surgeons’ Hall in Edinburgh:

Displayed in a separate case along with historical matter describing William Burke’s malevolent doings was a pocketbook, the cover of which had been fashioned from Burke’s skin. “Skin from his forearms,” a volunteer told me…In Edinburgh Burke’s skin has the status of a relic, demonic but still a relic worthy of display.

William Burke and his partner in crime William Hare were notorious bodysnatchers and it was thought quite fitting that Burke's sentence for his multiple murders to supply doctors with bodies for dissection was to be anatomized himself. Today, his skeleton (pictured above) and death mask are also on display.

The legacy of Edward Bulwer-Lytton

The 1st time I heard the name Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873) was out of the mouth of my college English professor Samuel F. Pickering, Jr.* so I hear it in my mind with his wonderful Tennessee accent. Bulwer-Lytton (1st image) was an English novelist remembered for being not only prolific, but verbose. Here are some of the well-remembered phrases of the writer (2nd image, the library at his family estate Knebworth House):

• "the pen is mightier than the sword"
• "the pursuit of the almighty dollar"
• "the Great Unwashed"

The following quote, which begins with another familiar phrase, is used to inspire entrants of a special literary contest:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been sponsored since 1982 by the English Department at San Jose State University and now attracts tens of thousands of entries every year. Described as "a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels," it accepts multiple submissions, but discourages puns and entries that exceed 50-60 words. The winners of the 2011 competition have just been announced. Though the grand prizewinner is admirable, the winner in the Romance category is the one I find fall-down funny:

"As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand - who would take her away from all this - and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had."

*This post is dedicated to Sam, a reader of this blog who published his latest book in February.

Huge

I have blogged about petroglyphs before (see Scratchings and "TRENT"), but never about geoglyphs, either the well-known Nazca Lines in Peru or the lesser-known markings in England, Australia, and the U.S. (take a virtual world of ancient and modern geoglyphs here). I even skipped over the weird news that broke a couple of years ago about geoglyphs exposed in the Amazon rainforest after clear-cutting. But described in the most recent issue of Antiquity is an extraordinary geoglyph - found by satellite imagery and visible on Google Earth (coordinates: 54°56'33"N, 59°11'32"E) - in an entirely different part of the world. At an undetermined time in the past, an ancient people carried out the large-scale project on a slope in what is now Zjuratkul National Park (1st image) in the southern Urals of Russia. By systematically arranging and layering large and small stones (2nd image) in a trench 2-4m wide, they created the image of a large hoofed animal with 4 legs, 2 antlers, and a large projecting muzzle (3rd image), probably an elk. The figure measures 218m x 195m and would have been visible from the height of an adjacent ridge. The use of the native white quartzite meant that the figure would initially have looked white and slightly shiny against the green grass background, with subsequent infilling of dust and soil turning much of it grey. The accumulation of soil over the virgin soil of the trench suggests that the geoglyph possibly dates back as far as the Neolithic age, 7,000-9,000 years ago, but probably more recently. It would have been laid out in an open landscape, which puts it at 2,500 years ago, when forests developed in the area. The Russian elk differs in technique than the geoglyphs in the West, though - like them - the figure certainly had a cultic character. "There are, to our knowledge, no analogues for our figure in continental Eurasia," write Stanislav A. Grigoriev of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Nikolai M. Menshenin of the State Centre for Monument Protection, Chelyabinsk. They indicate that research including further excavation, radiocarbon and luminescence dating, and palynological and petrographic analyses will shed more light on this unique elk.

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Here's what Sam Pickering has said about my new book:

"Dissection on Display is an astonishingly interesting and good book - learned, well-written, and filled with quick, not dead, anecdotes. Bodies sold for dissection on the basis of their length--what a thing! And the poor Hottentot Venus! Before reading your book, I had not thought about the distinction between an autopsy and a dissection. Richard Grazemark seems, alas, a modern--such horrors never end. But, golly, this is a fine scholarly book, one that informs and entertains and the combination makes it a rarity."

Follow-ups

Placing of rocks and Ice swimmers In the wee hours following this post, modern Druids and others were greeting the summer solstice by gathering at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire, U.K. At the other end of the world, Australians were marking the winter solstice with a traditional dip in Antarctic waters.
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Birthing and hoarding bunnies Two responses to this post: Samuel Pickering remarked, "I am amazed, and I know better than to be amazed at anything people do. What a story. I am speechless, words having hopped out of my mind I suppose." And follower Angie loved it, especially since the "R-word" is not spoken aloud on the Isle of Portland, where she lives (scroll down here for more)!
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Whose hand? and Prosimians A list of interesting animal hands and feet, including this one belonging to our friend the tarsier, was posted on Environmental Graffiti last week.
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Oldtimer The death of Tomoji Tanabe of Japan, the world record-holder for longevity, leaves Henry Allingham of England the oldest living man in the world at the age of 113.
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The house that May (re)built Reminding me of this post about a woman moving her house by hand from Hertfordshire to Norfolk, this article is about the proposed brick-by-brick relocation of several U.K. landmarks that will be threatened by global climate change. The Clavell Tower at Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset (pictured), has already been moved inland.
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Pied Piper of Hamelin A remote Aleutian Island has finally been declared rat-free! Alaska's "Rat Island" was so named after a Japanese ship wrecked and spilled the rodents 229 years ago, an accident that decimated the local bird population.
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Flannery O'Connor In this strange story out of Koah, N. Queensland, Australia, firefighters were called to rescue a peacock from a tree! It had been spotted hanging upside-down, but there is no accompanying photo of the presumably embarrassed bird.

Sammy

I have done 2 posts about author and professor Sam Pickering. In the 1st, I remarked that he was my favorite professor at the University of Connecticut, and in the 2nd I included an excerpt from an unpublished essay he wrote about his visit to Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth, Western Australia. In this 3^rd post, I bring to your attention his 21^st book, A Comfortable Boy: A Memoir. Of the book he writes, “My readers are likely to be old and content, their muscles corpses of themselves, their thinking realistic, beyond believing in reformation by sentence. Still, for readers intent on nosing up lessons, the book is filled with little, forgettable accounts of decency and love, stories that nudge the funny bone and provoke soft smiles. Perhaps a few readers will close this book and scrolling back through their years discover the stuff of their happiness, material that will make them appreciate the present more.” It’s a gentle book full of strong characters that does make you conjure up remembrances of your own. It provoked in me the memory – undocumented in any photo album – of my Dad icing up the horn of the life-sized rhinoceros he, my sister, and I built in the front yard of my childhood home after a heavy snow. As an only child growing up in the South, Sam liked nothing better than to rummage in his relatives’ attics, and in this memoir relays the fruits of some of those labors: the quirky content of birthday cards and saved newspaper clippings, in addition to letters shared between family members who fought on both sides of the Civil War. My favorite story in the book follows the description of young Sammy’s voracious reading habits. “After reading Treasure Island,” he writes, “I roamed landlocked woods hoping to find gold, not pieces of eight in a dead man’s chest, but an abandoned car, money hidden in a suitcase under the front seat, or if not money, a body, preferably a skeleton, locked in the trunk. Forty years later when I found a Volvo in woods near our house in Nova Scotia, moss flaring up over the sides and planters of ferns on the roof and atop the trunk, I scattered forty ‘loonies,’ brassy dollar coins, throughout the car. The next day I led the children on a salamander expedition during which we just happened to discover the car and its golden treasure. A man does not become the books he read, but books can certainly contribute to the fun of being a parent.” With only a few such insights into the man, the bulk of the book is about the physical and metaphorical wanderings of the boy. And his comfort rubs off on the reader.

Animal mummies

Researchers may have uncovered a 5th reason that ancient Egyptians mummified and entombed animals. Until now, animal mummies have fallen into 4 categories:

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Beloved pets, like the monkey pictured above, were carefully prepared after a natural death by their grieving owners and later entombed with them. It is also possible that some pets were sacrificed when their owners died so they could be buried with them. Cats (mentioned in a previous post) and dogs were assumed to be mummified pets when entombed with their owners, but when buried separately were likely symbols of the gods Bastet and Anubis.

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Sacred animals, like the birds in the middle image, were worshipped in animal cults as incarnations of deities and carefully mummified after death. The falcons in the photo represented Horus and the ibis represented Thoth. The most cumbersome sacred animal to mummify was the Apis bull, an incarnation of Ptah, creator of the universe.

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Votive offerings, like the fish in the top image, were purchased by pilgrims to the various animal cult centers and placed in catacombs as gifts to the particular gods. The fish were most often Nile perch, of a species that no longer exists. Ibis, sacred to Thoth (see above), filled two catacombs as votive offerings - one in Tuna el-Gebel and the other in Abydos.
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Food for the dead, often consisting of butchered meat but sometimes entire fowl, were placed in tombs so that the deceased would be well-fed in the afterlife. The animals were preserved, wrapped in linen, and placed in "coffinets" made of sycamore wood.

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In 2001, the unique discovery of a lion in the tomb of Maia, King Tutankhamun's wet-nurse, did not seem to fit into any of these categories. The male lion was found, along with some cat mummies, in an area of the tomb sacred to the female cat deity Bastet, and may have been considered an incarnation of the son of the related lion goddess Sekhmet. The remains were thought to have been mummified, but no linen wrappings were discovered. It was evident from the skeleton and teeth that the lion had reached a great age and had been kept in captivity, but it had been placed in the tomb long after Maia's death. "Maybe this lion's importance is as a family pet rather than as a representative of a god. The context doesn't seem to fit," says anthropologist Robert Pickering.
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Earlier this month, it was reported in National Geographic that the site director of Hierakonpolis, Egypt's oldest city, has found evidence that a number of large animals buried at the edge of a cemetery belonged to the city ruler's menagerie. A 3,500-year-old baboon and fellow creatures are the earliest evidence of a practice that later spread through the country. So category 5 appears to be zoo animals!