Category: walkabout / local

Today, another library day.

The local public library has to be just about my favorite (and arguably the most-effective and best-managed) of our local government services. I discover that Josh Tillman (aka Father John Misty), for me a current favorite on the music scene, makes the cover of Revenant magazine, which I find to be a Christian publication for twenty and thirtysomethings. Then I settle down with the current issue of T Magazine — the New York Times Style Magazine, always an eye-opener, not just for the quality of its photography, including its advertising (the first 92 pages were ads, but mostly with stunning photography), but for the visual sense of everything that pervades its coverage. As I looked up from my reading, I saw an unexpected and striking sense of style displayed by a nearby patron. And I wandered throughout the Library, always finding something new. Finally, I happened into the men’s room and, being mindful of the literary, I thought of Don DeLillo and his remarkable 1971 short story “In the Men’s Room of the Sixteenth Century” *, so I did a commemorative selfie.

RELATED:

https://relevantmagazine.com/magazines/septoct-2017/

* “In the Men’s Room of the Sixteenth Century”

First published in Esquire, Dec. 1971, pp. 174-177, 243, 246.

A very baroque tale of a police officer who dresses in women’s clothing and is on the streets of Times Square from midnight to six am, on the anniversary of St. Thomas More’s beheading. While on his rounds, he is known as Lady Madonna, and he runs into such characters as “Burgo Swinney, the eunuchoid pornographer,” and “Longjaw Ed Jolly, a man who claimed to be the last living member of the Castrated Priests of Cybele, a self-mutilation cult.”