Barnaby Sandwich has been kept up several nights running by what sounds like an orgy of rats in his sheet rock; and he recently learned the hard way that sauerkraut and sour cream do not mix; but despite sleeplessness and a stomach amok, he has pressed his way through half a dozen more PEN events, among them “Every Day in Africa,” “Voices from Today’s Iran,” “Humor Out of Context,” and “A Believer Nighttime Event.” The good people of PEN have worked hard to assemble a massive and impressive festival of dozens of events and hundreds of people, that must necessarily bridge a variety of tastes and sensibilities; and the same good people have been known, not incidentally, to stand Barnaby to a bowl of Ukrainian borscht when winter’s glistening teeth were piercing him to the bone; but unshaven, haggard, and clutching his belly in both hands, Barnaby was in a mood to stir up trouble.

It began at “Every Day in Africa,” which promised to “offer a glimpse into the richness of the literary voices of Africa.” The writers who were assembled for this glimpse were an Algerian, Yasmina Khadra, who made very strongly the point that Algeria is a Mediterranean—an Arab or Berber—country, not an African one (and who lives in France); an Ivoirienne, Marguerite Abouet, who wrote a graphic novel about everyday life in Côte d’Ivoire—and who also lives in France; a writer from Zanzibar, Abdulrazak Gurnah, who has lived for four decades in England; and a very young man from Harvard who, growing up, spent alternate summers in Nigeria. No doubt this is a problem of logistics: European governments and publishers must surely have more money to spend on sending writers to New York than do, for example, the government of Côte d’Ivoire or publishers in Zanzibar; nevertheless, it made Barnaby grumpy. (Mr. Khadra, the Algerian, did question the premise of the panel—“I was raised by writers,” he said, “and writers have no nationality, they have only talent”—but it was only in the nature of an aside.)

At the next panel, “Travel as Metaphor,” he tried to make a chart of percentages: what percentage of each answer supplied by a writer represented a personal anecdote or boasting, what percentage self promotion, and what percentage an honest attempt to achieve some mutuality and communication. He could not keep up. He grew frustrated with his limited arithmetical skills, and his stubby pencil, and began ripping his note paper, and finally he shot up out of his seat and announced to the auditorium in a loud, unmistakable voice, “My very favorite kind of pasta is spaghetti puttanesca!”

“Sir,” said the moderator, a poetry accountant from Marsh & McLennan, “no one cares what kind of pasta you like—you are not a novelist!”

“In point of fact,” Barnaby replied nasally, “I am—but you’re right, no one cares what kind of spaghetti I like, and I, for my part, don’t care what kind of spaghetti the panelists like. They’re not soap opera stars, and we are not at a cocktail party. For the love of Christ ask them a substantial question, or let them read from their work—I couldn’t give a fuck about their lives or feelings!”

You might like to hear that Barnaby was thrown out on his ear; but of course he wasn’t—he simply sat down again and the panel continued on as before. Five minutes from the end, Barnaby burst from the auditorium, rattled down the stairs, and tumbled into the men’s room for another sauerkraut-induced duel with his lower self.

At “Voices from Today’s Iran,” in the CUNY Graduate Center, Barnaby was interested to note that the panelists wore almost entirely black and white—the dark blue blazer on Robert Silvers, the moderator, was the most colorful touch. Barnaby listened as one writer after another talked about the alternately demoralizing and terrifying situation in Iran—noting, as he listened, that Farsi sounded to his anglophone ears less foreign than, for example, Catalan—and gradually felt his sleepy, dyspeptic grumpiness subside in the face of other people’s genuine problems. But then Mr. Silvers remarked, in his introduction of a writer named Shahriar Mandanipour, that the man was forced to make his living as a librarian because writing “is not lucrative in Iran.”

Once again Barnaby shot up from his seat; this time he raised one hand high up in the air, and the startled Mr. Silvers pointed to him.

“Yes?” said Silvers.

“Thank you,” Barnaby said. “I would like to know what city you live in, Mr. Silvers.”

Mr. Silvers—editor of the New York Review of Books—furrowed his brow.

“This one,” he said. “Of course.”

“Of course,” Barnaby repeated, and sat down.

Of course these writers had been brought here to talk about the situation in their own country, not the situation here; but Barnaby would have liked to hear some comparison of government versus economic censorship.

“You see,” he said later to the nice man behind the counter at Café Rakka, a falafel restaurant on St. Mark’s Place, “people get very excited about the power of the internet, about how anyone can blog about anything, but the fact is that the culture in general, and therefore most people’s mental landscapes—the room they have for new ideas—is still to a very large extent determined by enormous media corporations whose control is concentrated in a very small number of hands. I can put whatever I want on a blog, but no one will read it; or a few people will read it; but I’m shouting into a hurricane compared to the New York Post—or to whichever chick lit novel the Times best seller list thinks is hot this week. In this country you’re free to say whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean that anyone will listen. It doesn’t mean that anyone can hear you. Try going into a noisy dance club and talking to someone you don’t know about human papillomavirus—no one will stop you. We’re so fixated on the right to free speech in this country that we rarely talk about other distortions of the culture—we rarely consider what free speech is worth in the face of controlled and limited attention. Don’t get me wrong—free speech is worth fighting and dying for, and God bless those that do, and I would certainly rather wither in the face of benign or indifferent or even malign neglect than actually go to jail, or see books pulped; but we do our free culture no service by pretending that it is not deeply troubled and in danger itself. Two men stood outside the Graduate Center today handing out cards for a bookstore called ‘Revolution,’ and even I threw their card away.”

“Yes, my friend,” said the man behind the counter, with a smile that radiated pure humanitarian benevolence. “Hot sauce? Onions?”

“Just a little,” Barnaby replied. He had a Turkish coffee as well, and he wondered why he had seen so many dressed-up Sikh families walking north through Madison Square Park that afternoon.