Thinking of Don DeLillo

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.

At some juncture, 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.

* “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.”

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