Historic Preservation Society

Bill Boyle and I have been hanging out at the City Grocery Bar a lot lately, mainly with an eye toward the preservation and documentation of the drawing of Kent Osborne's cat that Kent did on the men's room wall in March of 2011. As you can see from this updated photo, taken just last evening, there is a slight marring of the tip of one ear and a considerable slash through the shoulder (do cats have shoulders?) but these are incidental and appear to be made without malicious intent - rather as a byproduct of the hasty scrawling of some urgent message or another. But not too hasty! In fact, you could say that the other graffitists have shown remarkable respect for Kent's cat, apparently going out of their way to touch it as little as possible. By way of contrasting example, see the grotesquely obscene Spider-Man on the selfsame wall, his startling anatomical irregularities rendered by an artist unknown to us in meticulous, almost comic-book quality detail, now barely visible under a torrent of incoherent scratches and scribbles. The cat, meanwhile, continues to attract something we must define as veneration. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever!" In other happy news, Bill's first novel is going to be published soon, meaning that I can officially put GRAVESEND by Bill Boyle on my big long list of books with owls in them.