Another exhibit, incidentally, purports to be a gravestone of his dead hero Genet.
The town's literary agents, book editors and reviewers (there are plenty of those, too) have learned to lay low, for fear of getting buttonholed by a hopeful author bearing a gravestone of a manuscript.
"It's kind of like having a party next to a gravestone of what it once was," he said.
Even if your ancestors didn't die in unusual circumstances, it's always worth using the information that you find on a gravestone to undertake a search of the local newspaper.
SWEET LAND Opens today in Manhattan Directed by Ali Selim; written by Mr. Selim, based on the short story "A Gravestone Made of Wheat," by Will Weaver; director of photography, David Tumblety; edited by James R. Stanger; music by Mark Orton; production designer, James R. Bakkom; produced by Jim Bigham, Alan Cumming and Mr. Selim; released by Libero.
A gravestone, made of red granite from the Isle of Mull and carved by a mason in Tobermory, was placed near the site in 1991.
Inspired by the Minnesota writer Will Weaver's short story "A Gravestone Made of Wheat," "Sweet Land" celebrates a gutsy, old-fashioned sort of love, one born of backbreaking work and shared difficulties.
He added that some companies have assumed the name means he's wealthy and have called him trying to sell "very expensive things like a Rolls Royce covered with diamonds" or "a gravestone made of gold".
And in an age where we're finally coming to terms with the fact that, hey, maybe everything really is just a remix, of sorts, most of us view the rampant piracy and mashing up of content as less a death toll marking the decline of creativity, a gravestone marking the demise of original thought as we know it, but rather a new kind of creative renaissance.
At one stage, in the programme for his play Single Spies, the writer Alan Bennett printed a claim that my dad – John – had turned up late to his own father's funeral, straight from the airport, and stood swaying behind a gravestone clutching bags of booze.
In a particularly grim experiment, they offered each subject the opportunity to see his or her own name and birth date on a gravestone, as part of an ad for a newspaper (tagline: "How long do you want to wait? Take a trial subscription to X now for only 9.95 per month").
