On Tuesday, Barnaby Sandwich wandered into a reading at Columbia University’s Miller Theater, sponsored by The New Yorker, a local magazine. Under an enormous New Yorker banner in the colors of Communist China sat writers A. M. Homes and Jonathan Lethem, and fiction editor Deborah Triesman, as well as some bottled water and an aspidistra plant. Barnaby sat in the front row, in a turquoise suit and green eyeshade, with a stenographer’s pad for notes, and a bottle of ink balanced on his knee, and a steel-nib pen, and his peanut-butter-and-celeries lined up carefully in his pocket. During the introductions, he drew himself a PRESS card on the back of his ticket and stuck it behind his ear.

Ms. Homes read first, a condensed version of the first chapter of her new novel This Book Will Save Your Life. A rich and empty man in Los Angeles realizes, despite his native lack of self-consciousness, that he is having a heart attack, literally as well as metaphorically, that he is alone and empty, that his life has been wasted on the purposeless purpose of accumulating money, and that despite, or else because of, abundant electronic media of communication, no one can hear him at all. (Homes later explained apologetically that the book was not conceived of as an indictment of America, but only turned out that way.) To Barnaby’s ear, the piece seemed to have the sort of sympathetic neutrality that would leave his own lurid schadenfreude plenty of room to operate. He carefully noted down the title: This Book Will Save Your Life.

Then Mr. Lethem read his short story “Vivian Relf,” which struck Barnaby, who has Vienna on the brain, as a very entertaining reworking of “Letter from an Unknown Woman” by Stefan Zweig. Lethem was a fine reader, and he wore a bright orange shirt, but Barnaby did not get around to asking him if he had read Stefan Zweig. (Dear Mr. Lethem, Have you read “Letter from an Unknown Woman” by Stefan Zweig? Please reply to Barnaby Sandwich, Poste Restante, Vienna.)

After the readings came questions, first from the editor, on behalf of the people, and then from the people themselves; and Barnaby carefully noted down that it is best to write in the morning, not the evening, and at Yaddo, if possible, but certainly not in New York or near telephones. Writing at the Yaddo colony struck Barnaby as something of a catch-22, since you have to submit writing to be admitted—where to begin? He decided, in the end, that this must have been a deliberate instructional paradox—the Yaddo koan, very similar to “it takes money to make money.”

He was glad to hear Mr. Lethem say that he did not write to please an audience, but only to please himself, or else to impress himself as he was at fifteen or sixteen; this writer concurs exactly. He was also glad to hear A. M. Homes say that autobiography does not interest her: God bless her! We could use more like her. Lethem said that the hero of his story “flirts like a Nabokovian ass.” Homes described researching stab wounds in the back of Barnes & Noble. Barnaby broke wind like a tuba and then glared at an elderly librarian, hoping to mislead Ms. Triesman into thinking that the noise had come from her; Triesman did not seem convinced.

Finally, as the red-and-gold New Yorker banner was rolled up, and the elves sang the New Yorker theme song, after Homes and Lethem had signed books and shaken hands, Barnaby slipped out onto the street and took himself out for some pork tamales. Over his tamales, he fell into conversation with a Macintosh computer tech who had a scar or birthmark on his cheek that looked like the long trail of a bloody tear. For the first three or four sentences this amiable tech attempted to explain what he meant, but quickly he began talking about his work at full speed, and became, to Barnaby, who still writes with a chisel, completely impenetrable; Barnaby wondered if he sounds equally impenetrable when he discusses books.

“I mean, come on! You’re talking about putting a thirty gigahertz psychology into the antagonist of a fin-de-siècle bildungsroman with sixteen RTF nozzles integrated into the media convection! For under a thousand bucks! Are you kidding me? This guy’s a genius!”

And then Barnaby Sandwich drank three pints of delicious horchata, went home, flossed his teeth, cursed wildly, and lay in a sugar fit tossing and turning almost until dawn.

(This Book Will Save Your Life by A.M. Homes comes out in April. Men and Cartoons by Jonathan Lethem contains “Vivian Relf.” You may also wish to consider picking up The Latin Sexual Vocabulary by J. N. Adams. It has a bright orange cover and explains the difference between fellatio and irrumatio, which may save you some embarrassment, depending on what kind of day you’re having.)

Barney got kicked out of Zankel Hall the other night. The program was some tweedly-deedly Baroque music, and the ushers explained to Barnaby, as politely as could be expected under the circumstances, that, however moved he might be by the bassoon parts of Rebel’s "Les Elemens," he could not be permitted to stand up and sway. Picture it: Barnaby Sandwich, in gray sweater and brown corduroy suit, one hand on his prominent belly, eyes shut, head tilted back, other hand in his jacket pocket fondling lifted crudité, and muttering under his breath, as an expression of his deep emotional sympathy for all the reed instruments, "The Fair Flower of Northumberland," since it is the only song he knows. He thinks to himself that for all the much-discussed crises in classical music, it really can’t lose: the less popular it becomes, the better it will serve to demonstrate the culture and cultivation of the people who can still afford tickets. But anyway, he didn’t mind getting kicked out much, since the beautiful Czech mezzo-soprano’s pronunciation of French set his teeth on edge:

"Twah, qui vwah mon car éperdooooo!"

The next day he got kicked out of the Museum of Modern Art. Picture it: crowded onto the walls, every famous painting you know from napkins, notecards, and shower curtains; thronging the steaming galleries, jubilant crowds from France, Italy, Japan, and Long Island, with cell phones bristling and cameras snapping; drifting on the air, the heavy smell of overpriced food from the terrace restaurant. Two men who belong to some sort of Gnostic sect that forbids the use of wall labels speculate about what year "Trafalgar Square" was painted. Barnaby Sandwich, clad in the white painter’s overalls by which he contrives to enter free, and a pink wool hat, leaning in close to look for chisel marks on Brancusi’s "Blonde Negresse" while eating spaghetti marinara out of his bib pocket. And again, the arm of authority was as polite as one might hope, as it explained that in this country, Barnaby is perfectly free to think that Edvard Munch is a moody weirdo, and he is even free to say so, if he speaks at a conversational volume, but he cannot be permitted under any circumstances to write it on the paintings—not to mention the spaghetti. Oh, she had wavy blond ringlets and a silly red dress, the beautiful mezzo-soprano:

"Twah, qui vwah mon car éperdooooo!"

The third day, Tuesday, he went to the New York Public Library, where he worked quietly and unobtrusively for five hours, researching Spiderman, before he had to be dragged, weeping and sniveling, out of the Center for Scholars and Writers. "One stipend!" he cried, "one miserable stipend! One academic year in out of the cold! All I want to do is research for the betterment of mankind and the occasional plate of blintzes!" On this occasion, the agents of the bourgeois status quo did not remonstrate with him, but contented themselves with throwing him down the stairs, after which Barnaby righted himself, dusted off his monocle, and watched with fascination as a stonemason on a portable platform chiseled the names of new high-rollers into the library walls. What would they charge, he wondered, to carve in gold letters "In Memory of B. Mussolini"? On the flip side of bourgeois status quo respectability, Barnaby was once threatened with death by a schizophrenic in the Rose Main Reading Room when he asked him to turn off his radio. As the man muttered and gave Barnaby the stink eye, a middle aged woman sailed behind his chair and whispered in his ear, "Security is coming," but no one else looked up from their work. The man was shortly hustled out, and Barney wrote a poem about lemons. Oh, the program said she was born in Brno, the beautiful mezzo-soprano:

"Twah, qui vwah mon car éperdooooo!"

Finally, on Wednesday, to crown off his wonderful series of run-ins with art-related money and authority, Barnaby was thrown out of Humboldt-Dunkelstein Gallery on Tenth Avenue. "Mr. Ipswich," said the proprietor sternly, "Jeff Koons’s work is not pornography, and you may not jerk off to it!" As Barnaby sheepishly buttoned his coat, the proprietor sniffed, considered, and then delivered himself of an addendum: "That is, unless you buy a catalogue." Yes, the program said she was born in Brno, the beautiful mezzo-soprano!

O you who see my heart dismayed! O beautiful Phoebus Apollo!

("Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul" is up at MoMA till the 8th of May, and there are three restaurants and a gift shop for when you get bored of the paintings. The beautiful mezzo was Magdalena Kozena performing with Les Violons du Roy from Québec, conducted by Bernard Labadie. "Toi, qui vois mon coeur éperdu" is a line from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, text by Pierre-Joseph Bernard. As far as I know, there is no such gallery as the Humboldt-Dunkelstein, and Jeff Koons is, in fact, a pornographer.)