The Bubble Lounge: Despite growing up one block away, Barnaby had never before set foot inside this particular obscene tumor of New Tribeca tackiness. Tonight, however, a friend had a book party. Barnaby was the first to arrive; after confirming with a short officious personage that there would be free liquor—and ignoring this personage’s suggestion that he take a walk and come back in twenty minutes—Barnaby walked directly to the bar, past champagne bottles, foofy chairs, and bad art, and had this exchange with a French bartender dressed all in black:

“Vodka gimlet, please.”

The bartender nods.

“Grey Goose,” says Barnaby, concerned to avoid Absolut, which tastes to him like circus dwarf lubricant.

The bartender nods again, mixes the drink, and puts it on the bar.

“Are you with the party?”

“Yes,” says Barnaby, “I am.”

“Would you like to open a tab?”

“Isn’t this on the party?”

“No,” said the bartender, “not Grey Goose,” and then presented Barnaby with a bill for thirteen dollars.

Barnaby made such a scene that, in the end, the manager let him pay with Canadian money.

Cooper Union: After this Bubble Lounge brouhaha—and please, if you are going to charge us thirteen dollars for a vodka gimlet, for the love of Christ, use fresh lime juice!—Barnaby rushed up to the “Arthur Miller Freedom to Write” lecture, given this year by Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Using a press pass that he had forged on a piece of old bologna, Barnaby sailed past the line snaking around the block and walked right in, experiencing, as he did so, an enormous wave of ecstatic self importance. Once inside, however, he met with what John Lennon called instant karma: he was informed that the press, in keeping with their position as the fourth (and last) estate, would be standing in the back. Normally Barnaby wouldn’t mind, but on this particular evening he was suffering from a recent judo injury of a personal nature. No matter—he had a thermos full of beer and orange juice and a couple of old opium cigarettes to see him through.

First Salman Rushdie offered an introduction, and drew fervent applause for the observation that America is very important, but the rest of the world is even more important. And then Mr. Pamuk delivered a charming and thoughtful if somewhat free-associative speech about the importance of free expression. “If many nations outside the west suffer from poverty and shame,” he said, “it is not because they have freedom of expression, but because they don’t.”

Barnaby was most interested in Pamuk’s description of being drawn by accident and half reluctantly into the world of political action: “I felt drawn to the world of politics by guilt,” he said, “but at the same time I wanted to do nothing but write beautiful novels.” The way he intoned the second clause made it into a self deprecation, as if to imply that he had been childishly idealistic in thinking that beauty for beauty’s sake was enough. But I would quarrel with the contrast of political action and art for art’s sake: it is precisely because believing in and pursuing art for art’s sake is an inherently political action that it needs defending in the more literal political world; and this writer, for his part, remains committed to only writing beautiful novels.

Then Margaret Atwood joined Mr. Pamuk onstage, and they sat down in perpendicular chairs to talk past each other about whatever was on their minds. At this point Barnaby’s judo injury began to disturb him, and he squatted down behind a low wall to drink his beer and orange juice. (Budweiser and orange juice, by the way, will make you feel very funny indeed, particularly after vigorous exercise.) Everything proceeded along on an even keel until Ms. Atwood remarked that she had always liked country and western music, even as a child, because it told stories, albeit sad ones, unlike most of the music today. This was too much for orange-beer-addled, rap-music-loving Barnaby to accept, and so he leaped to his feet and began bellowing “Underwater Rimes” from the Digital Underground album Sex Packets:

Now, last night underwater, I saw a French mermaid/ Treated her to caviar, wine over shrimp brain/ In the raw, on the ocean floor—need I say more?/ You never heard nobody kick it like this before

Who knew that a PEN event would have so many plainclothes security officers? No matter—Barnaby, after executing a beautiful judo fall on the concrete, walked over to Second Avenue and had some Belgian frites. Then he came back and managed to sneak into the after party, in the room behind the clockface, where a writer named Allison gripped him tightly by his amply-padded arm and insisted that he try the twice-baked fingerling potatoes.

The Guggenheim Museum: What put Barnaby’s mind on the narrative powers of rap music in the first place was a morning at the Guggenheim Museum, where, until May 14th, there is an anniversary show of the work of sculptor David Smith. Barnaby was so powerfully impressed by Smith’s brilliant, coherent, joyful work that at one point he was actually knocked onto his back and rolled all the way down the twisty Guggenheim ramp to the bottom. “The Royal Bird” made him choke on his orange-beer, “Cockfight-Variation” sent him into cascades of giggles, and by the time he got to the top, under the bright white light of Platonic reality and the skylight, and stood before the Voltri sculptures, he was in another world. But the middle aged women decoding the work—“Is this a leg? No, that’s a back”—distracted him, and so he put in his earphones and listened to the Lords of the Underground, which was, perhaps, a bit incongruous, but not nearly as incongruous as the time he spent a day wandering around the cemetery in Qufu where Confucius is buried while listening to a bootleg Eminem CD. But that is another story for another time.