The PEN World Voices Festival begins today, and, as Barnaby understands it, Paul Auster will be receiving a wet, rosy kiss from the ghost of Charles de Gaulle at precisely 8 pm, on top of the Chrysler Building. Also in the works, a reenactment of the Confusion of Tongues at Katz's Delicatessen, where delegates from one hundred and sixty seven countries, autonomous provinces, and crown colonies will all, at the sharp sound of a referee's whistle blown by a fully-qualified Viennese psychoanalyst, begin speaking as loudly as they can at the tops of their voices. Highlights are expected to include an argument about whether Chinese consists of "languages" or "dialects," conducted without translation in Fukkienese, Mandarin, Hakka, Cantonese, and Taiwanese; a debate about the historical effects on literature of the development of Norwegian Bokmal, conducted in Swedish by three Finns; and a lecture on the historical influences on and of the English language delivered by a Cambridge professor in Anglo-Saxon, and rebutted in Afrikaans. Barnaby Sandwich, however, your intrepid correspondent and pastrami devoté, will not attend. His corduroy suit is at the cleaners, he is suffering from an outbreak of athlete's foot, his Western and Chinese horoscopes for the day contradict each other in an extremely frightening and confusing fashion, and he thinks he may have stepped on a ladybug over the weekend. He will begin throwing his corpulent bulk into the festival on Wednesday.