Adventures of Barnaby Sandwich

2007-09-11T09:21:00.000-04:00

Remembering how much he had enjoyed his high school French class, Barnaby recently bought a copy of Du côté de chez Swann. Feeling very well satisfied with himself, he slipped the unopened book into his pocket and went downstairs to Two Boots.

As he stood in line, his eyes affixed themselves like ancient stars to one particular red wedge: it was covered in tiny shrimps that promised the languor of New Orleans leavened by the sere romantic malice of the sea. His mouth began to water, as it had when, as a child, he had reverently watched his mother pour a can of Progresso minestrone soup into a saucepan on the stove. But the red of that soup, in his memory, at least, had been simple and wholesome, while the mottled color of the pizza, ranging from orange to crimson to almost yellow, was impossibly complex. What strange colony of spices combined in its alluring sauce? Suddenly he felt a tapping at his side.

Barnaby looked up and saw a beautiful, dark-eyed woman with her hair in a braid, simply dressed, pleasant, discreet. There was a single strand of pearls around her throat. Pointing seriously at the book in his pocket, she said, “This is the best book ever written.”

“Yes,” Barnaby coughed, “I haven’t quite finished it yet, but so far I agree.”

“Tell me,” she said, “what was your favorite line?”

“No,” he replied, placing two plump fingers upon her delicate, porcelain arm, “I refuse to read that way. To isolate a single line would be, so to speak, like admiring the butterfly’s dizzying flight while dismissing the beauty of its wings. I prefer to let the author’s pen speak to the harmony of my soul without division.”

“That’s beautiful,” she murmurred, gazing deeply into his eyes. Barnaby’s own gaze dropped down to her neckline and he felt himself deeply in love. But before he could gather the courage to speak—to ask her name, to venture his own, to remark that he kept a room in a nearby hotel—she had collected her Sicilian end piece and walked out.

All his life Barnaby had been afflicted by a stutter in the presence of beautiful women. It was an ongoing pain to him to think that the mellifluous tongue that served him so well at stag parties, always ready with an incisive analogy or vulgar joke—how often had he not cried, “He’s the motherfucker that killed my frog!” and been rewarded with hearty laughter—should consistently fail him just at the critical, infantine beginnings of so many a great romance. But this thought had never pained him so terribly as it did tonight: tonight, when kindly or capricious fate had placed before him the plump, dark, pretentious sexpot of his dreams! Tonight, when all he had wanted—or needed—to say was, “Allow me to lend you a thousand francs!”

“Buddy!” shouted the counterman, a red-faced teenager with his hair in a topknot. “What’ll you have?”

Desparing of the world and of himself, Barnaby ordered five slices and a gallon of root beer. Later that night, kept from the healing oblivion of sleep by mysterious pains in his belly, Barnaby remembered the book. He brewed himself a cup of tisane à verveine, lit a single candle, and climbed into bed.

“Longtemps,” he read, “je me suis couché de bonne heure. Parfois, à peine ma bougie éteinte, mes yeux se fermaient si vite que je n’avais pas le temps de me dire: 'Je m'endors.'”

Barnaby stared at these lines for several minutes, lost in thought; at last, as he extinguished the candle, he remarked to himself, “On second thought, I think I took Spanish.”

2007-05-09T16:03:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday night Barnaby got drunk and woke up in Montreal. Calmly he got out of bed, washed his face, put on his corduroy suit, and tiptoed out of what turned out to be a bed-and-breakfast in the neighborhood Montrealers call “the gay village.” He found a diner nearby in which to have a croissant and cafe au lait, and after the waitress had asked for his order in what sounded like French, and he had replied likewise, he looked out the window and considered his options.

He saw a city with many pretty churches and parks, with excellent restaurants and a few good museums and universities, and the best baklava in North America; but a city, also, that was not entirely thriving, that had thousands of people struggling and begging on the street, a city that, its pockets of rich comfort notwithstanding, did not entirely keep out the cold. But his memories of youthful trips to Montreal were rosy and sweet, and he had nowhere else to be—he decided to call up a friend and make a weekend of it.

“After all,” he said to the waitress as she set down his croissant, “quand la vie te donne de citrons, il faut que tu fasses de citron pressé.”

“That’s all right, sir,” the waitress replied. “I speak English.”

After calling his friend and asking to sleep on his floor that night, the first thing Barnaby did was stroll over to the Gallimard bookstore on Boulevard St.-Laurent. There he spent a happy hour browsing through elegantly designed French books that were, for the most part, not at all expensive. He chose a Voltaire, a Camus, and a Perec, and then, in the box of Editions Allia next to the cash register, between a book by Werner Heisenberg and a paperback collection of dirty American comics, he found a short book of Antonio Vieira’s “Sermon of the Good Thief,” Le Sermon du Bon Larron. According to the book’s cover, Vieira was a 17th century Jesuit priest, alternately in and out with royals and bigshots, who fought the power of the Holy Inquisition and argued for the rights of “new Christians” (Marranos) and natives in the Americas, and was one of the great Portuguese prose stylists. Barnaby, who does not read, had never heard of him.

The next thing Barnaby did, all these books in hand, was stroll a few more blocks up St.-Laurent and join the enormous line of people waiting to get into Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, most of them, like Barnaby, tourists intending to eat “smoked meat” sandwiches. (Smoked meat is like Canadian pastrami.) Barnaby leaned against the building and opened the Vieira book, discovering a brilliant and thrilling writer.

Christ, as we know from Peanuts Christmas specials, was crucified between two thieves; and he, the king of kings, took the thieves with him to Paradise, but in this world it is usually the other way around—it is thieves that lead kings to hell.

In order to attack corruption among colonial governors, Vieira begins by demonstrating, with scriptural references, that thefts cannot be forgiven if the thieves have the power to repay them, but do not. Then he argues that kings are responsible for the thievery of men they appoint—thus do the thieves carry their kings to hell. For even God himself was crucified—Vieira says—to repay the sin of Adam in Eden, because it was he who had put him there. God foresaw that Adam would sin, but placed him in Eden as he was, before he sinned, and likewise chose Judas as a disciple judging him only as he was at that time. So similarly, if kings appoint men they know to be good when they are appointed, they might be forgiven their subsequent crimes; but they do not. Do kings wish to know whether the men they appoint are honest? Vieira asks. Let them refer to the words of Christ:

“Qui non intrat per ostium,” Barnaby sang out, startling several old women from Idaho, waiting for their sandwiches, “fur est et latro!” He who does not enter through the front door is a brigand and a thief. In other words, Vieira explains, government officials appointed through favoritism, nepotism, cronyism, or anything else other than the strictest and most impartial weighing of merit are ipso facto thieves, because they have stolen their positions. No one can claim to be surprised when they go on to commit further crimes.

Vieira ends his sermon by calling the bluff of institutional hypocrisy so brilliantly and forcefully that Barnaby almost wept. Surely no one can disagree, he says, with his suggestion that corrupt governors be dismissed and made to repay what they have stolen. Their victims, of course, will agree; and the king, too, who will thereby save his own soul and theirs from eternal hellfire, surely he must agree; and even the thieves themselves, who might be expected to resist—surely they value their eternal souls more than transient goods that one way or the other they will lose when they die? Surely they prefer being punished briefly on earth to being punished eternally in hell? Or do our Christian leaders not, in fact, believe in the Final Judgment they claim to believe in?

“The problem,” Barnaby said to the waiter, once he had been seated in long and narrow Schwartz’s, “is that our Christian leaders, unlike those of seventeenth century Portugal, are Protestants who believe in justification by faith alone, and who think that they can do whatever they want so long as they believe in Jesus. Perhaps if Bush were a Portuguese Roman Catholic, he would fire Alberto Gonzales—and Condi Rice—and Dick Cheney—and Karl Rove—and himself. But no, I shouldn’t say that—a Bush of any other denomination would still find a way to be an asshole. One smoked-meat sandwich, medium, a half sour pickle, and a can of cherry soda.”

“You got it,” replied the waiter, and from there the day went downhill. First Barnaby lost his appetite watching the men at the next table, a stag party who had come to Montreal for its famous strip clubs. They each ate an enormous smoked meat sandwich, two whole handfuls of pastrami with extra fat, and then the fattest of them ordered a grilled steak bigger than a plate. To go with this all, a tiny dish of coleslaw, diet soda, and hot peppers, the last of which the fattest one rejected: “I don’t need no hot peppers, B,” he said to the waiter.

“Excuse me,” Barnaby said, leaning over and tapping him on the meaty biceps. “Forgive me for being nosy, but how many weeks has it been since you had a bowel movement?”

As Barnaby strolled up seedy St.-Laurent Boulevard, holding a wad of napkins against his bloody nose, toward Avenue Mont-Royal, and then down Mont-Royal toward the park, he considered the question further. Certainly the “born again” types like Bush had pledged themselves to an illiterate and contrary understanding of their own theology; surely mainline Protestantism—ephemeral antinomian movements excluded—does not mean to preach that you can do whatever you want so long as you believe in Jesus. But it does seem particularly liable to that misreading, and Barnaby asked himself whether subtle ideas that, when misunderstood, have catastrophic consequences, are not better off left unpromulgated. It is nothing, necessarily, to do with Christianity—in Japan, for example, Shinran Shonin came up with his own salvation-entirely-by-grace doctrine as an Amidist Buddhist. Indeed, perhaps it is not necessarily to do with anything—perhaps religious doctrines, cultural values, and all the rest of it are only so much window dressing, endlessly flexible, that can always be adapted one way or another to camouflage man’s basest instincts. Perhaps the meat-watching, meat-eating fraternity men at Schwartz’s were not “subscribing” to a peculiarly American ideal of machismo—perhaps they were just assholes.

Later that afternoon, after a wheezing hike up and down Mont Royal, Barnaby made his way to a gallery deep within the Art Department of Concordia University, where his friend Patrick was asleep in a chair, looking like a young Dylan Thomas in bluejeans. He was showing a piece called “Skyline.” He had built a computer program that was slowly but steadily erasing all the MP3 files in one particular music-sharing network; as the files were erased, their lengths altered another program which projected a series of pulsing white rectangles on the floor and played an eery, wave-like soundtrack. Patrick rubbed his eyes and stood up, and together they stared down into the terrifying, beautiful void he had constructed, a wolf-like face of nihilistic perfection.

Patrick taught Barnaby everything he knows about boosting crudité, and both on principle and for practical reasons refuses to spend money on food; so Barnaby, grateful for his hospitality (and under the impression that every one of his American dollars would buy him two Canadian) offered to take him out to dinner. They had a long, raucous, wine-besozzled dinner, arguing about art and bragging about sexual conquests, or vice versa, and stumbled into Patrick’s basement on St.-Viateur well after three in the morning.

The following day, as Barnaby stared at his credit card receipts and reckoned out the cost of a train ticket home, and he and his friend both sipped beef boullion and chewed aspirin tablets, Barnaby casually asked Patrick the exchange rate. Pat replied that it was almost to par. Barnaby clutched his head.

“You mean those forty-dollar bottles of wine actually cost me forty dollars?” he screamed.

“I guess so,” Patrick said.

“And the panhandling young men,” Barnaby said, “and the half-dead, staggering businesses, and the large immigrant ghettoes, and the oblivious cream of rich people traipsing along like butterflies, and the panhandling old men, and the thriving prostitution, and the quasi-fascist cultural controls, and the increasing rapaciousness on top and desperation on the bottom, and the seediness everywhere that no longer seems so picturesque—that’s not all just someone else’s problem anymore?”

Patrick turned and padded into the kitchen to make coffee.

“Welcome to Earth, America,” he said.

[Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen can be found at schwartzsdeli.com. The Gallimard bookstore in Montreal can be found at gallimardmontreal.com. Patrick Valiquet can be found at fragm.net. Barnaby Sandwich can be found lying on his couch with a cold washcloth on his forehead.]

2007-04-30T12:10:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Barnaby attended a lovely tribute to the great writer and reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski in the equally lovely Celeste Bartos Room in the New York Public Library. (The one sour point was when the writers toasted Kapuscinski with vodka on stage. At the Believer event, too, participants drank on stage, and the audience laughed delightedly, as if at a charming transgression, and Barnaby, himself no teetotaller, squirmed—he cannot help thinking it augurs badly for the Republic when people are willing to applaud other people drinking.) Salman Rushdie talked of being forced by Sonny Mehta to concede the excellence of Kapuscinski's book The Emperor; and he recounted that he had once asked Kapuscinski how he had escaped from so many life-threatening situations, how he had waded into innumerable violent, murderous anarchies and walked out again. "I made myself unimportant," was Kapuscinski's reply—he conducted himself in such an unprepossessing manner that it would not have seemed worth anyone's time to shoot him. Later Philip Gourevitch expanded on this point, or rather recast it: in the violent anarchies into which Mr. Kapuscinski went, as a writer, he was unimportant, Gourevitch said—life was cheap; but being unimportant did not bother Kapuscinski.

Barnaby did not know Kapuscinski, although he, like many of the panelists, was greatly impressed and influenced by his book The Emperor, which he came to through a friend's recommendation and an unrelated interest in Ethiopia. But judging from the recollections of his friends and from the brief video clips shown, he seemed to have been, indeed, a charming and wonderful man—a good and humble man. Polish newspaper editor Adam Michnik told another story: He was going to Mexico, and Kapuscinski asked him to say hello to another Polish journalist who worked there. But when Michnik did so, this reporter replied, "Oh! Kapuscinski! I'd love to meet him." Michnik said, "But Kapuscinski says you have met!" The reporter denied it and denied it, but finally remembered that he had once met a skinny young Communist reporter named Riszek. "But he was not yet Kapuscinski then!"

It seemed to Barnaby that this humility was important not only because, as Rushdie said, it allowed Kapuscinski to survive the dangerous places that his work took him to; it was important also because it was only his humility that allowed him to really see those places. He may have been terrified, but he was not preoccupied with his own fear—and so because he had no distracting idea of his own importance, of the significance of his fear or the importance of his safety, he was able, even when afraid, to look with interest and attention at what was going on around him. Such humility, moreover, enabled him to find beauty even in what terrified, disgusted, and appalled—only the addition of a humble and disinterested faculty of wonder could have made something beautiful of Haile Selassie's corruption.

Barnaby, as it happens, spent all of the PEN World Voices festival wrestling with the question of humility and self-importance. He has listened to writers from a dozen nations boast and preen; and he has watched other writers, on the same panels, tacitly allow the boasting and preening because they did not like to combat it with boasting or preening of their own. No one likes to listen to boasting; but at the same time, writing does not take place in a vacuum, and it is no one else's responsibility to investigate whether you might be doing something wonderful—you must tell them. How to go about it? Over the course of the week, Barnaby observed several approaches. There is the Bugs Bunny Defense—tell the audience how many hundreds of thousands of books you have sold in France, but say it with a smile, as when Bugs Bunny turns to the camera and says, "Ain't I a stinker?" (This one works quite well; only the more sophisticated listeners will shudder at the artifice.) There is the Modest Screenwriter Defense—mention a successful movie you have written and modestly suggest that the audience may or may not have heard of it. (This one works perfectly; but it breaks down if you casually but not-quite-apropos-of-anything mention half a dozen famous actors who appeared in the movie.) There is the Shoot Yourself in the Foot Defense, which Barnaby practices, like so:

Pretty Danish woman: "Are you a writer, also?"
Barnaby: "Yes."
Pretty Danish woman: "What do you write?"
Barnaby: "Novels."
Pretty Danish woman: "What kind of novels?"
Barnaby: "Good ones."
(Barnaby looks at his watch and turns away.)

And then, we suppose, there is the Kapuscinski Defense, which can be learned either from the man, or from his books. In The Emperor we see, by a sort of reductio ad nauseam, what is the necessary, horrifying end of the elevation of human personality; in the author's life, as eulogized by his friends, and as highlighted by the interviews shown in the Bartos Room yesterday, we see the contrary, what can be achieved by diligence and self effacement. The Kapuscinski Defense works like this: Respect the interests of the person you are talking to enough to answer his questions, even when they are about your work—but not if they are about your person; respect your work enough to recognize that its merits are not your merits, so that you can talk about its virtues without becoming self important or self satisfied; and recognize, finally, that no man is his own judge, and that the best course is simply to pursue your work quietly and honestly, and let the question of its value, excellence, and importance be indefinitely deferred. Perhaps they will drink to you after your death, or perhaps they will forget you, but you were already immortal, because you lived not in yourself, but in the world.

2007-04-29T01:58:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-04-27T11:41:00.000-04:00

Barnaby, if you’ll recall, himself attended Columbia College but was kicked out five hours before commencement; and though his better sense tells him that everyone who, in the course of his exuberant senior-year prank, was covered with chicken blood or otherwise molested, must by now have forgiven, or forgotten, or at least satisfied his vengeance by contemplating the state of Barnaby’s life; still, Barnaby took no chances—he walked into Columbia’s Faculty House in a false mustache, fedora, and trench coat, and in a thick coat of a cologne that he normally doesn’t wear. (To throw them off the scent, if you will.)

The name of the talk he attended was “English: An Invasive Species?” It was moderated by David Damrosch. After a series of introductory remarks by various personages and the usual listing of prizes, Catalan writer Francesc Parcerisas began. He read a speech that mentioned briefly his own introduction to translation—being asked to translate a book from French into Spanish—and talked, among other things, about the danger of English translations squeezing out other translations, which is a danger Barnaby had not thought of before. If a Hungarian novel has already been translated into English, who will bother translating it into Dutch? It is a fair point. He also said, “We must be careful translation does not become a mark of submission,” also a fair point. (Barnaby would like to mention that the Catalan cultural ministry seems to be doing a hell of a job.)

Then Chinese writer Ma Jian spoke, through a visibly nervous translator sitting beside him, without notes. He made the fascinating point that the Chinese Communist decision to reform the written language—to abandon, that is, instruction in Classical Chinese, and to write in the vernacular instead—put the body of China’s own traditional literature beyond the reach of the average reader, and so the examples that he and other novelists of his generation looked to were translations of European books. This is quite in accord with Barnaby’s experience: on a visit to a Chinese elementary school, he found that none of the children had any but the most banal views of the ancient Taoist classics; he also noted that the two most commonly displayed books in train station bookstores in northern China were Who Moved My Cheese? and former GE CEO Jack Welch’s volume of autobiographical braggadocio. (Of course, Barnaby only noticed these books in particular because he cannot read Chinese.)

Ma Jian also noted that Shakespeare’s plays were first translated into Chinese as novels, and remarked that the history of translation in China was only one hundred years old—that before that the languages of foreigners were held to be like the language of birds. Barnaby suspected that Mr. Ma’s remark about translation had itself been simplified in translation—there were Chinese monks, after all, translating sutras from the Sanskrit in the first millennium, not to mention all the translating into and out of Manchu that must have gone on under the Qing—but he could not stay to ask a question about it, nor even to hear more than three words from the third speaker, Siri Hustvedt, because he had to run out to pursue his own exercise in translation by taking his visiting Japanese friend Mr. Ogura to a Yankees game.

Several years ago, due to an unlikely and implausible set of circumstances, Barnaby spent more than six weeks sleeping on the floor with the Ogura family above their restaurant in a suburb of Tokyo. They graciously took him in and made him at home. This week, Mr. and Mrs. Ogura had come to New York to visit their daughter, who lives here, and Mr. Ogura, a great fan of New York Yankee Hideki Matsui, had asked Barnaby to accompany him to a game. So Barnaby ran out of Faculty House at five-thirty, stripping off his trench coat and false mustache (but not, unfortunately, his terrible cologne), and hurried down to pick up his friend on 44th street and then ride back up to the stadium. Suddenly he was forced to make use of his rusty and desiccated Japanese.

They rode up on a crowded 4 train and poured out—with all the other white people—at 161st street in the Bronx. They filtered through security; when the security guard asked Mr. Ogura if he had a cell phone, and if so, to open it, he turned around to look at Barnaby, and Barnaby said, “Keitai—keitai denwa o misete.” They wondered why this was required, and Barnaby laboriously constructed a sentence about building a bomb from separate pieces. They stopped at the information booth to ask where their seats were, and the woman behind the counter—who seemed to speak perfect English—slowly read aloud to Barnaby the numbers on his ticket. “Yes,” Barnaby, “I can read the numbers; my question is—” “Zis ticket,” Mr. Ogura said, “whear?” and the woman pointed.

As they watched the Yankees get slaughtered by the Blue Jays, they explained things to each other: Mr. Ogura explained to Barnaby that Derek Jeter had hurt his elbow, and Barnaby—by the third inning covered like a baby duck with a fine down of cotton candy—explained what Crackerjack is. “You know the song,” Barnaby said, singing, “Take me out to the ball game,” and Mr. Ogura assented—they play it in the seventh inning; “buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack,” Barnaby said, and a glorious light of comprehension lit up Mr. Ogura’s face. “Aaah!” he said. “Sore wa Crackerjack?” That’s Crackerjack? Then he wanted to know whether they sold it elsewhere, or only at Yankee Stadium.

It was a beautiful moment, and it set Barnaby thinking. (The game certainly was not very interesting—it would be hard to describe the Yankees’ performance without resorting to violent sexual metaphors.) Certainly if he had not studied Japanese, it would have been difficult for him to become friends with a Japanese man who spoke nearly no English; and more directly, if he had not studied Japanese, he would not have traveled to Japan and found himself without anywhere to sleep, and forced to take advantage of a brief acquaintance. This is the obvious virtue of translation: it expands our experience, it broadens our world, it renders more complex and beautiful our notions of humanity. But more than this, it occurred to him, there was a benefit precisely in the imperfection of his Japanese. Mr. Ogura, nearly 59 years old, runs a small restaurant in the suburbs, and has three children; Barnaby is not yet thirty, pretends to be a bohemian, and has no real responsibilities apart from a dead goldfish in his room at his parents’ house. It occurred to him that in the normal course of events, two such men might find some awkwardness in talking or spending time together; but they are preserved from this by the constraints of their linguistic situation. Mr. Ogura speaks slowly and carefully, repeating each phrase until he sees Barnaby nod; and Barnaby, freed for the time from the tyranny of his all-too-conscious English-language mind, falls into no dreamy, deadly complexities; and their shared project of communicating offers a broad and fertile scope for the expression of their friendship. Barnaby was gratefully reminded that such ideas and sentiments as “where is our section,” “do I have to tip the beer guy,” and “the Yankees certainly suck tonight” really are the fundamental building blocks of human life; he was reminded that without empathy and imagination, there can be no communication, but just as certainly, perfect understanding would be not communication but communion—that it is the shared struggle towards mutual understanding that itself constitutes the magnificent human project.

In sum, they had several beers at the game, and then went to the East Village to introduce Mr. Ogura to borscht and have some more beer, and, to make a long story short, Barnaby will not be attending any more PEN events until this evening.

2007-04-25T18:20:00.000-04:00

Barnaby Sandwich rolled out of bed this morning at the crack of dawn—not literally, but for him—and traveled uptown to speak to some high school students about a book he had written. These dozen teenagers, up, like Barnaby, since before any merciful God could have intended, and in receipt of their college acceptance letters, nevertheless managed to keep their eyes open, which is one eye more than Barnaby managed. One of the young men asked Barnaby what year he had graduated from their shared high school, and then noted that he had been in kindergarten in the year named. So do the young flowers dislodge the corpses of their forebears—before falling from the stalk in their turn.

In the afternoon, fortified by an omelet, a brisk walk, and one gill of wheatgrass juice, Barnaby wandered quite by accident into “History and the Truth of Fiction,” a panel in NYU’s Hemmerdinger Hall. Colum McCann began the discussion with several quotations on the fictionality of truth—and Brecht’s remark that “Art is not a mirror to reflect reality, but a hammer with which to shape it,” and which Barnaby wheezily shouted, “Hear, hear!”—and then the participants were off and running. Arthur Japin read from his novel about an African prince raised in Holland, leaning back his head at one point to shout “Kwame Bobo,” the prince’s name. (We think the “Bobo” is for “Boachi,” his second name, but that is only a guess.) Imma Monsó, a Catalan writer who described herself as having moved in her own work from fantasy to autobiography, said—in reference to her most recent and most autobiographical book—“If I changed a little detail, all the story could be false.” But she nonetheless called the book a novel, because it was the product of “a very intensive choice among real facts,” an “interpretation of real facts,” and suggested that it is “an effort with the language” which distinguishes fiction.

Michael Wallner, a German writer, mentioned the German word for literature, dichtung, and defined it literally as a “making dense,” and suggested that a writer who has made his subject dense enough—perhaps a better translation would be “compressed” or “compact” enough—has done well, whether it is truth or fiction. Barnaby, who has not been to the gym in several cosmic cycles, leaned over to the woman next to him and said, “My suit is making a dichtung of me!” She shushed him. Mr. Wallner also remarked that Thomas Mann had not shrunk from killing his beloved grandchild in Doctor Faustus, because it was artistically necessary. Mr. Japin professed himself uninterested in the difference between truth and fiction, while Laila Lalami, a journalist as well as a novelist, exclaimed that it was very important, indeed. “But what,” Barnaby exclaimed to the woman next to him, “do they mean by these terms, exactly? How can we have this conversation without a rigorous definition of terms?” Now the woman beside him poked Barnaby sharply in the belly with a nail file, and that certainly shut him up. Colum McCann mentioned “fatwas” at 2:12 pm, by Barnaby’s watch—in fear of the nail file, Barnaby forbore from pointing out that “fatwa” is a broad category of religious judgment, not only a death threat—and Arthur Japin countered with a reference to Auschwitz at 2:15. The afternoon was a success!

Barnaby hurried up, then, to the event he had meant to attend, a reading at 192 Books called “The World is a Book.” He arrived forty-five minutes early, more or less as Carlo Lucarelli, one of the readers, arrived. The small, shelf-lined, beautiful bookstore was filled with folding chairs arranged in concentric circles around a table with a microphone. Barnaby carefully chose a chair that had a direct sight line to the microphone and was also near the door, so that he could slip out for a very important dermatologist’s appointment without causing a disruption. But as Francine Prose read a list of the readers’ prizes, and then the readers read, more and more people came in, and the bookstore’s owner thoughtfully unfolded more and more chairs, until Barnaby was trapped, with no sight line, and no exit path. He tried to ignore his impending embarrassment and listen.

Lluís-Anton Baulenas began, in slow but steady English first and then in fluid and distinctly beautiful Catalan, a passage about a character’s leaving fascist Spain. It seemed all too relevant—Barnaby broke out in hives, which he began to scratch. Baulenas called Franco’s a “dictatorship run by the meek and irresolute,” a very perceptive remark—what can better explain the fetishizing of violence and dogmatic decisiveness than inner softness and turmoil? He also said, “the dictatorship is hypocritical, and this hypocrisy infects every aspect of life.”

Then Moses Isegawa, whom Barnaby had noticed in his red Yankees cap fending off well-wishers with a reflexive hand before his face, read from his novel Abyssinian Chronicles. He read a section in which his narrator, like him a Ugandan relocated to Holland, described the mostly black ghetto that he first moved into; Isegawa looked attentively at the book that he read from, as if he the words might change if he looked away. (The book was published first in Dutch; Isegawa read in English.) One good line: “The only lesson my landlady seemed to have learned from life was never to turn anyone away.” Barnaby noted this down with the intention of reading it to his own landlady, as dramatically as possible.

Carlo Lucarelli read a short passage of a book in Italian, and then sat beside an American friend who read a longer passage in English. Barnaby enjoyed the Italian, but so far it is Catalan that has caught his fancy: he had never heard it before. Ms. Monsó at NYU had a fascinating accent that Barnaby could not quite make out; and as Mr. Baulenas read, he tried to decide whether Catalan sounded more like Italian or Portuguese—it certainly sounded to his ears more like either of these than like Spanish.

Per Petterson read a passage in which a ten-year-old named Lars accidentally shoots his twin brother Od in the heart; it was careful but strong and very affecting. Barnaby cleared his throat and raised his hand. “Od,” he said. “Wasn’t that the name of the Norse god of skiing, who married the Vanir goddess, what’s-her-name—no, I’m sorry, I mean, whom she wanted to marry, but they told her she could only choose by looking at their legs, and so they all stood behind a curtain—”

“Sir,” Mr. Petterson said politely, “your face seems to be covered with custard,” and this disarmed Barnaby altogether. Mr. Petterson had also bobbed his head with good nature when a woman’s cell phone had rung.

Finally, as Francine Prose was reading an imaginary love letter from Kafka’s fiancée, Barnaby looked at his watch, gritted his teeth, scratched the hives that were still broken out from hearing about fascism, and stood up. “Excuse me,” he muttered, “I’m sorry, pardon me—this guy’s really hard to get an appointment with—pardon me, excuse me.” As he knocked and tripped and tiptoed his way between, through, and around, he knocked over two old women, knocked a beautiful Danish girl in the head with his backpack, pulled off a man’s jacket, and stepped on a small dog, all while Ms. Prose’s voice got louder and louder. Finally when he reached the door he broke the handle, and he may have to attend subsequent events in a false mustache.

2007-04-24T14:27:00.000-04:00

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.

2007-01-28T15:50:00.001-05:00

Barnaby Sandwich has a system. Whenever he is confronted with a terror that nothing really divides him from any other obsessive-compulsive counting beads, or paranoid looking for radio transmitters in his vacuum cleaner; whenever he feels awash in guilt over his fickle moods, which cause him to cry desperately to a friend in one moment and deprecate that friend’s sympathy the next; whenever he begins to think that despite the social graces which allow him to crest invisibly the cocktail party of bourgeois life and hide his teeming dementia under gentle smiles and smart, self-deprecating humor, he might as well panhandle with a cardboard sign around his neck; whenever he fails in avoiding sight of the reality that he spends most of his life working hard to produce books that make no difference to anyone, he invokes his “parallel audience fantasy.” This is how it works.

Normally, when sitting at his writing desk with a can of sardines in his pocket and a coffee-with-tea in an Oakland Raiders mug, Barnaby does his best to transport himself into whatever fantasy he is attempting to transcribe, and to ward off all other distractions. But when his “parallel audience fantasy” is invoked, he bounces back and forth between the matter at hand and the picture of an ancient Greek stadium full of dead souls, watching him. He cannot see them; but in the truer spiritual world—according to this fantasy—his writing desk, with its golden lion statue, incense brazier, and pin-up calendar, sits at the center of a stadium of the illustrious assembled well-lettered dead.

As he walks into the stadium—that is, across his tiny, unheated bedroom—the audience respectfully stands. They do not applaud, because it would distract him; but he is aware of their standing presence, and grateful. Though he must work alone, he knows their thoughts are with him. For a moment he, too, stands, staring down at the desk, steeling himself to leap—as the idea of Joseph ben Shalom of Barcelona has it—to leap over the primordial abyss of nothingness which serves as the well of all being and the underlying reality of all change. He is gathering his concentration, and around him, tens of thousands of readers and believers from the entire span of human history pray with him, because they know the importance of what is to be accomplished. And then, most often, he leaps; and succeeds in leaping, landing on the other side; and on that far, unknown shore he sits down and begins to write.

Around him he can hear the murmuring of the watching crowd, who whisper in appreciation at all his leaps and turns, at his tricks and triumphs, the murmuring of the crowd that can see into his very soul, that see as if projected above him the workings of his mind, so that they admire the force with which he rejects his own despair, sloth, and folly; so that they see the pain it causes him to block open the door into his own dream life; so that they see shimmering past like flying computer code the million, million calculations necessary to point properly any one metaphor—this crowd, indeed, can see the entirety of creation as being pointed and directed into Barnaby’s fingers, that type these words. They can see the process leading to his work in far greater detail than he can himself. If he knew it, it would distract him and confuse him, and so part of his work, therefore, is to accept and even work to maintain an almost total blindness to the method, meaning, and import of what he himself is doing. Barnaby can hear the murmuring, but he ignores it—he can ignore it, because he has perfect faith that this audience will wait and watch patiently until he is done.

And when he is done—in the "parallel audience fantasy"—Barnaby stands up, takes a breath, and turns to face the crowd. They are roaring. He raises his arms in the air, and as he does, he looks from face to face: there is George Eliot; there is Joseph Roth; there is Orwell and Somerset Maugham and all his other friends, in the first row—they are admiring and impressed. Beyond them are ancestors and heroes and martyrs, there are angels and guiding lights, who look down with approval; simply from the cast of their eyes Barnaby can be assured that what he has just done is important and to the good. He bows. They roar loader.

They continue roaring as several attendants surround him: one to place a laurel wreath on his head; one to throw a tarp over his desk; two to take him by the arms, and guide him gently out, to the spa beneath the stadium, where he will lie down in a sauna, or a mint-flavored steam room, and then eat a large meal, and possibly watch a movie, and then fall deeply, deeply asleep, with plenty of time to rest before he is called upon again. In the morning he will put on a silk bathrobe and sift leisurely through the thousands and thousands of letters written overnight in response to his day’s work: comments, questions, arguments, paeans, attacks. It will be impossible to imagine the world without him.

Thus goes the fantasy. In the real world, he spends as long as he can in this “parallel audience fantasy,” but finally he must always let it go. It has served its purpose: he has finished another stroke of his useless work. He has written eight hundred or a thousand words of yet another novel. When he has finished it, three or four friends and relatives will ask him for copies of the manuscript, which he will duly provide, and which they will not read. One or two editors may relay to him, through his agent, that the book is wonderful, and that they cannot publish it. All his labor will recede silently into the mist whille Barnaby shackles himself to the next one.

2006-12-04T17:00:00.000-05:00

Recently Barnaby was dozing through a performance of Japanese imperial court music when he had a dream. In the dream he opened a steel pocketwatch to see the time and noticed that the hands were mounted on the back of an empty case—but still worked, without any gears—and that surrounding the hands, all along the interior circumference, were small houses and other buildings in sandy colors. Then, before he knew it, he was awake and riding the subway home, eating a Häagen-Dazs bar.

The following day, he went to see a show at the Metropolitan Museum. The show was organized around the work of some French pimp—all of the paintings had passed through his hands one way or another. All of the wall labels described the paintings’ relationships to this M. Vollard’s fortunes. One label, for example, mentioned that he had bought a twenty-six room house in the seventh arrondissement of Paris after selling for very high prices two paintings that Paul Cézanne had lent him for a party. No, that is not right—it wasn’t that Cézanne had lent them for a party, it was that Vollard had drugged Cézanne and stolen them from his house. Or had he kidnaped Cézanne’s son, and exacted the paintings as a ransom? No, that isn’t exactly right, either, but you get the idea. But according to the wall labels, Cézanne came from a wealthy family and had no business sense, and he had absolute faith in M. Vollard, and he did not mind that Vollard was getting rich.

But speaking of Cézanne, there was one large room of his paintings, and Barnaby stood in the middle, turning in a slow circle, looking at each one in turn. First he thought about the fact that most paintings are more profitably viewed from across the room, and he pitied all the neophytes edging around the circumference, two feet from every picture, and he lamented the many years he had spent doing the same thing. Why had no one told him? But then he congratulated himself for having done this himself, first, in this room, before moving back, so that he could know that “The Orgy,” while garish and horrible from close up, becomes complex and serene with as little as twelve feet of additional viewing distance. Then Barnaby—still turning, of course—thought about the way Cézanne used color, particularly in his still lifes and portraits. He managed to restrict himself almost entirely to the point of meeting between harmony and discord, so that the paintings have a sort of vibrating tension that persists at any distance. They shock you, they strike the eyes. The tension never resolves. And then turning Barnaby marveled at Cézanne’s range. All of the paintings in that room were clearly the work of one man, the product of a unitary style—but what a man, and what a capacious style! The trees boring up out of the earth and across canvas in the landscapes; the hurricane-like destruction of all obscurity and pretense in the portraits; and then the smooth, lush colors on the other wall! The bodies made like flakes of stone on the one hand, and the bodies like Michelangelo, on the other! The blacks here, the yellow there! In short—Barnaby, still spinning and by now quite dizzy, fell down.

Then there is Gauguin. Gauguin, with his flatness, with his coloring-book black lines, with his sickly, jaundiced palette—Barnaby has a secret weak spot for his green and yellow Christs, but the Tahitian scenes almost without exception make him queasy and nervous. He discussed this with a fellow he met in the museum, an enormously tall man in a black leather vest and wearing a black cowboy hat.

“What is it,” asked Barnaby, “about Gauguin’s paintings that make me want to sit down, close my eyes, and drink a glass of very cold seltzer?”

“Nah, brother, I like them,” said the man in the cowboy hat. “He had a unique vision—look at this one, the women bathing in the river. Don’t you think he captures some sort of ancient, primal otherness?”

“I guess so,” Barnaby answered. Then he actually did sit down, on the floor, steadying himself with one hand. “But I find that primal otherness very narrow and claustrophobic. You know?”

“Yeah,” said his friend, “it is kind of one-note. But what about that rolling grass over their, with the two Breton farmers?”

Barnaby looked over his shoulder and nodded.

“It’s excellent grass,” he agreed. “Very lush. But still, man, with all due respect, there’s something about this guy’s work that seems to me kind of mendacious and fake. Also, I think he was crazy.”

“Oh,” replied the man in the cowboy hat, “dude, I like his stuff, but he was definitely crazy. I mean, look at that!” he said, pointing at the standing yellow figure in Gauguin’s long, mural-like masterwork. “You only need to glance at that chick to tell that the guy was completely fucking froot-loops!”

Barnaby nodded. He was beginning to feel ill.

“Why is that?” he asked. “What is it exactly that we are seeing? How can we—uh—” Barnaby clenched his teeth; sweat poured down his brow. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said. The enormous man in the cowboy hat scooped him up to his feet and led him into the following room.

“I’ve never been in a whole room full of Gauguins before,” Barnaby muttered.

“It’s not the Gauguins, friend,” said the man in the vest. “It was all that Thelonious dancing you were doing in the Cézannes. What are you, autistic?”

“Maybe,” Barnaby allowed, as his benefactor set him down in a chair at the center of the portrait room. Here he wiped his brow, and took deep breaths, and contemplated half a dozen portraits of Ambroise Vollard with his beloved little dog. He thought about the position of the artist in society, and about his rent, and about his friends getting rich in advertising, and law—not to mention as art dealers—and the ones ensconced cozily if unremuneratively in warm, stable graduate schools. He thought about Gauguin chucking his life over to devote himself to painting flat, yellow people. He thought about Van Gogh writing desperate letters to his brother, preaching to miners, and talking to trees. He thought about Ambroise Vollard’s twenty-six room mansion and his famous dinner parties where he served out chicken curry. (Author’s note: I’m not making that up, either—it was in a fucking wall label.) Barnaby felt lower and lower and lower. But then he stood up, bracing himself to go out and walk through a cold wind across Central Park, and he caught sight of a wall label that proved three things: 1., that curators sometimes have a sense of humor; 2., that there is a God; and 3., that sometimes virtue is rewarded. The label was beside Cézanne’s portrait of Vollard—that’s the Cézanne, remember, who came from a wealthy family, and had no business sense—and it said this:

“Vollard was in his mid-thirties when he commissioned this portrait. He reported having to endure more than one hundred sittings for it. On occasion, he allegedly modeled from eight in the morning until eleven thirty at night and was instructed by the artist to remain silent and completely still, ‘like an apple.’ Although Cézanne did not complete the portrait, he claimed to be ‘not dissatisfied with the shirt front.’”

2006-11-21T15:32:00.000-05:00

Last week Barnaby’s friend Giovanni invited him to attend a concert at Carnegie Hall. Enjoying his friend’s company, and remembering fondly many young adult evenings spent dozing next to his father on a red velvet seat, Barnaby accepted. (Barnaby and his father used to sit in Box 21 and fall asleep together to gentle chamber music.) Then, all of a sudden, through what he could only classify as a Fundamental Confusion in the Mechanics of the Universe, Barnaby found himself hunched up under the concert hall’s ceiling, his legs folded into some arcane and dangerous yoga posture, wishing for an oxygen tank—and, more to the point, for a very loud white noise machine—as he stared down into the premier performance of a new chorale by Sir Paul McCartney. God save us! God save us all!

It is hard to know where to begin. Reader—dear, gentle reader—please understand that Barnaby is a man of at once violent and tender feelings. I don’t mean like a cowboy, who divides the world into two moral phratries, one containing bad guys and the other little ladies, and assigns his feelings accordingly; he is not double and confusing like a charismatic sociopath, who knocks you down and then tenderly helps you up, and then knocks you down again; he is not even violent and tender like those saints and ideologues who ruthlessly condemn all confusion and evil for the very protection of tenderness itself. No; I mean that Barnaby treats art with the sort of fully-committed gravity that Semitic shepherds once reserved for their high and mysterious God, but at the same time, like some fat, marzipan-loving country priest, who lies awake at night fearing hellfire but rarely mentions it to his parishioners lest he hurt somebody’s feelings, he quails at the thought of condemning anyone’s innocent amusements. And so therefore when he found himself, the other day, in the nosebleed section of Carnegie Hall, looking down on several hundred people who, for all he knew, were heartily enjoying Sir Paul’s relentless cavalcade of self-important banality—not to mention his friend Giovanni, who had suggested the outing in the first place—Barnaby did his best to contain his feelings.

He sat quietly through half a dozen pop songs arranged for tenor, soprano, and strings—an inappropriate use of both the material and the instruments, to be sure, but it was no skin off his nose. If the pretentious but culturally insecure want some easy entree into orchestral music—fine, good enough, good for them. It may be fundamentally dishonest, and ultimately useless; it may be a profoundly misguided confusion of style and substance, the cultural equivalent of building castles on sand—but fine, fair enough, tous les goûts sont dans la nature.

He sat through four short nothings—pleasant, competent, and completely unmemorable sections of orchestrated fluff. They were entirely unexceptionable—good music for getting a massage, even. Something like Corn Pops in a silver tureen.

At intermission, he and Giovanni went into the hallway for a couple of sixteen dollar beers.

“It’s interesting,” said Barnaby, “but not my cup of tea.” God bless Barnaby Sandwich! He had no idea what was in store.

They went back in and crammed themselves into their seats, and in the minutes before the beginning of “Ecce Cor Meum,” Barnaby read this statement in the program:

“One night I was travelling back from a concert with the rest of The Beatles. We were in a terrible blizzard going back to Liverpool and our van skidded off the motorway and down a slope. There was no way we could get back up, and someone said, ‘What’s going to happen now?’ And someone else said, ‘I dunno. Something will happen.’ That became a phrase for us. And sure enough, a lorry driver saw us, stopped, and we all crammed into his cab. It shaped my philosophy: the faith in a benevolent spirit that, I hope, lives in the words and music of Ecce Cor Meum.”

Barnaby bit his lip and said to himself, “Well, gee, if it didn’t betray a vision of the world of such breathtaking and well-nigh blasphemous superficiality, this would be almost sweet.” A projector mounted on the ceiling projected onto the wall behind the choir an intertwined “E C M” that Barnaby recognized from the program as Ecce Cor Meum’s album cover. He bit his lip and drew blood.

Then the music began. And reader—dear, gentle reader—I tell you again, it is hard to know where to begin. Shall I begin with the music itself? With the monotonously unsophisticated music that would probably earn a B+ from most high school composition teachers, but would surely fail in college? Or with the words—which, thanks to a benevolent and merciful God, were hard to make out, but which distinctly included such gems as “Spiritus! Spiritus! Teach us to love!” and “Musica! Musica! Fill us with joy!” Or with the scraps of Latin window dressing? Through all of it, Barnaby contained himself—through “Spiritus,” through “Gratia,” through “Interlude (Lament),” through “Musica.” By the end of the last movement, the eponymous “Ecce Cor Meum,” Sandwich was only a hair's breadth away from an explosion into hysterical fury—this movement began with the lines “Ecce cor meum, behold my heart/ Though in the future we may be apart/ Here in my music, I show you my heart,” and proceeded to end with a bang, and a tarum-tum-tum, and a solemn minor third, and another bang, and another tarum-tum-tum, and another solemn minor third, and so on and so on, again and again and again, until Barnaby was trembling and growling and only preserving such stillness as he did by promising himself, “One more fucking note and I’m going to murder every motherfucker in here.”

And then—praise the assembled firmaments and powers—it ended. Barnaby trembled, coughed, and ran down the stairs and out of the building, and up two blocks and into Central Park, and he threw himself at full length into the cold, wet grass to wait for Giovanni. Shortly afterwards, while walking through the park, the two of them discussed whether McCartney was to blame for his vanity, and they decided that in fact the lion’s share of blame must rest with the culture that provides a forum for a man’s work, regardless of its inherent merit, simply because he is already famous. Then they went to the Pierre bar and had a couple of very expensive drinks, and there the whole thing would have ended, if Barnaby had not heard Sir Paul being interviewed on National Public Radio the following day.

Barnaby learned from this interview that the “Lament” movement made reference to the death of McCartney’s first wife. He learned that McCartney’s friends had warned him that the critics would “sharpen their pencils” for him, but he didn’t mind; he could very easily write the sort of “atonal stuff” that would make the critics think he was “really far out,” but that simply wouldn’t be him. And Barnaby learned about the absurd outer limits of Anglophone anti-intellectualism, as a fantastically wealthy Englishman and a vacuous American radio interviewer competed to see who could most completely disavow all knowledge of Latin.

“The title of the piece,” said the interviewer, “is—well, I’d better let you pronounce it.” McCartney had no choice but to do it: “ECK-ay CORE MAY-um,” he said. Score one for Dumb America! Wham! But Dumb England always comes back from behind to win it—McCartney proceeded to explain at length how he had come by his title:

“I was in this church, you see, and there was a picture of Jesus, and beneath it it said, ‘Ecce Cor Meum.’ So I went back to my schoolboy Latin, and I remembered ‘ecce’ meant ‘behold,’ as in ‘Ecce caesar.’ All right, ‘Ecce—behold.’ And then ‘cor,’ I thought it must be like in ‘corona,’ or ‘coronary’—heart! And ‘meum,’ well, that’s pretty simple, ‘mine’—so, ‘Ecce Cor Meum,’ ‘Behold heart mine.’”

Needless to say, this was the part that sent Barnaby out on a ledge to begin carving deep gashes into his “Yellow Submarine” album with a fish knife.

“All these educated people blather on so much about what the world needs,” Barnaby growled at the record, “when it’s all so simple, really, innit? All we need is love! Yes, quite right, you pusillanimous, honey-fed maggot—you know what’s more difficult than producing treacly generalities? Fucking well putting them into practice!” Barnaby wiped his sweaty brow and took a deep breath, and then set at the record again. “And all those nerds laboring away to learn Latin?” he spat. Two pigeons with white wingtips set down on the ledge to listen. “Are they doing it to lend moldy ancient dignity to such banalities as in vino veritas? Surely some of them are. Or to make people less fortunate than they are feel stupid? Yes, surely sometimes. That is indefensible. But are some of them, perhaps, simply doing it to improve themselves? Or because they’re interested? Yes, they must be. And do you know what some of them are doing, Sir Paul? Some of them are trying to learn about the world in order to get outside themselves—because however full you may be of vague benevolence, however happy and grateful you are, however compelled you feel to prattle about love, love, love, if you have no real conception of the world beyond yourself, then all your vague benevolence cannot end in anything but self worship. All your high aspirations and unimpeachable intentions can end in nothing but paeans to the wonder not of the world, not of humanity, not of all men, but of one man—you. If this takes the form of catchy, beautiful three-minute pop songs, then more power to you. But when you express this self-satisfaction and self-regard with an orchestra and a choir of eighty voices, for a full hour, then frankly, sir, the spectacle is nauseating.”

On this note, the pigeons took wing and flew away. The real shame of the whole thing is that “All You Need Is Love” is—or had been—one of Barnaby’s favorite songs.

2006-11-10T17:07:00.000-05:00

The other night, Barnaby Sandwich decided to attend a mixer in a bookstore on Maple Street. After he had checked his coat, filled his pockets with broccoli, and loaded up on Portuguese shiraz, he found himself being addressed by a beautiful woman who kept looking over his shoulder for someone else to talk to. Every time she looked over his shoulder, he turned around—which, for a gentleman of Barnaby’s girth, is no small thing. But he saw nothing in particular except dozens of other beautiful women looking over dozens of other men’s shoulders. Glabber glabber glabber—one hundred gazes on the prowl.

“Barnaby,” muttered this woman confidentially, leaning in and whispering, “I am worried about you. You clearly expend enormous energy on your work, but I’m afraid that there’s something missing. Why are you so afraid of emotional committment? Why can’t you be kinder to the women in your life? Why can’t you engage with the problems of the people? You’re—well, you’re moderately—that is, you have a certain sort of rough talent, Barnaby, that’s undeniable, but as it stands now you’re essentially wasting it. Is it a question of laziness, or of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement? I don’t know what the problem is. You see, if I were you, I would be traveling in North Africa, selling trinkets to Bedouins and starving to death. That would be a real experience. Or else maybe working in the post office, or selling Avon door to door. That would get you in touch with the real world. That would allow you to grow as an artist. My goodness, what could be more obvious? What on earth is preventing you? Instead of moving to Appalachia and working in a Wal-Mart for ten years and doing something worthwhile, you insist on trying to make hay out of your overprivileged, phony, artificial, bullshit, unfair, son-of-a-bitch bourgeois little, silly little, ridiculous little life. What good is that? I mean, seriously, Barnaby, it’s awfully condescending, don’t you think? If you won’t take the trouble to go out and rub shoulders with the meatloaf-eating plebeians, why on earth should you expect them to be interested in what you do? My goodness! Stand up straight, man! Look at you! All of your chakras are out of alignment, and this one—” here she jabbed him in the belly with four well-trained karate fingers “—is totally dead. You’re passionless! You’re an ice cube! You’re all locked up! How do you expect to be an artist if you haven’t got any passion? I mean, my God, Barnaby, commit yourself to something! Open yourself to the winds of change! Take some criticism! Look reality in the face! Stop masturbating into a phone booth and get out and do something in the world!”

Barnaby listened to this monologue in slack-jawed shock; when she jabbed him in the belly, he choked on a mouthful of shiraz; and at the words “do something in the world,” the damn broke, and he began to blubber.

“Oh, God, you’re right!” cried Barnaby into the glabber glabber glabber of the crowded cocktail party. “Who am I trying to fool? My entire life has been a misdirected waste! I’m a fraud! I’m a joker! I’m worse than Pol Pot! I—uh—I—uh . . . I’m sorry, who did you say you were?”

“Oh!” the woman said and broke into a magnificent smile that made Barnaby’s heart flutter. “Justine Prune. We went to nursery school together! Isn’t it incredible? It must be twenty years since the last time I saw you!”

“Uh—oh,” said Barnaby, coughing, furrowing his brow, and smearing half a pint of mucus across the sleeve of his corduroy Norfolk jacket. “Well, it’s—yes, it certainly has been—I mean, of course it’s wonderful to see you, Justine, but if you don’t mind my asking—forgive me, I don’t mean to be presumptuous, or ungrateful, but if you don’t mind my asking, if we haven’t seen each other in twenty years—the time sure does fly, doesn’t it—well, but if we haven’t seen each other, the advice you just gave me, well . . .”

Justine Prune shook her head in a brisk, businesslike fashion.

“Barnaby,” she said, “your problems are obvious simply from the way you cut your hair and handle crudité. Even if I hadn’t spent two years after college working as a receptionist in a psychoanalyst’s office, your life would still be as clear to me as day.”

Barnaby excused himself from the lovely Ms. Prune and pushed and clattered his way through the mating young men and women toward the bar. He was politely, supplicantly, desperately asking for another glass of shiraz when a fellow he knew named Antonio pulled him by the sleeve. They both got their drinks, moved into a small empty corner, and made small talk for a few moments. Then Antonio said this:

“I ran into a girl who knows you, Barnaby. I mean, she doesn’t know you, really, but she says she’s been admiring you from afar. Christ, she was fucking gorgeous, too. She’s a brilliant photographer, unattached, comes from money, and is kind to children and animals. Anyway, that’s the impression I got. I might be wrong.”

“What?” Barnaby said. “Who? Who are you talking about?”

“I met her at a bar and for some reason I mentioned that I knew you,” said Antonio.

“What?” said Barnaby. “Why did you mention that?”

“I can’t remember,” said Antonio. “Anyway, she said to tell you that she had sent you several letters—”

“Letters? What letters?”

“—but they might have gotten lost in the mail. But it doesn’t matter. She only wanted to tell you that her uncle Mortimer Nadelbrawn is a big fan of yours, and hopes you keep up the good work.”

“A big fan of—what? Who’s Mortimer Nadelbrawn? What’s the girl’s name?”

“You know,” said Antonio. “He works with Ben Hessel at Schechter & Plotz.”

“Schechter & Plotz?”

“You know,” said Antonio. “They handle Tony Blaffit and the Levine Sisters. They represented Captain Santa’s Snowman Explosion, and I don’t have to tell you, they really cleaned up on that shit. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The point is, the guys over at Schechter & Plotz are rooting for you, and so’s the whole team down at Henderson, Raditz, and this girl said to tell you that if you want to have a drink sometime, she’s there every Friday.”

“She’s where every Friday?”

At this point, Antonio spotted Justine and lit up into a smile.

“Justine!” he called out.

“She’s where every Friday?” cried Barnaby.

Antonio called out “Justine!” again and dove away into the crowd. Barnaby smelled his shiraz, winced, and decided to leave. As he pushed his way out through the glabber glabber glabber, past a blonde yoga teacher who had once taught him to say “lick my ass” in German, Antonio gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up, and Justine waved, winked, and carefully mouthed the words “Wal-Mart.”

2006-10-09T12:26:00.000-04:00

The other night, a cool but pleasant Sunday, Barnaby found himself struck in the afternoon by a numb wave either of caffeine overdose or profound melancholy, he couldn’t say which, and so he leaped up out of his easy chair—scattering dried sardines all over the floor—put his underpants back on, tied his shoes, and went out for a walk. After a brisk thirty or forty minutes of sweaty, twitching speed-walking, during which he muttered to himself about North Korea and the Congo and scratched more than was strictly necessary, Barnaby happened upon the Film Forum, on Houston Street, and noticed that a movie was beginning in only two minutes.

“A movie!” he said to himself. “Just the thing to calm my frazzled nerves, worn as they are by the strain in living in a sick, sick culture that teeters on the yawning precipice. One, please!”

“The line begins over there, fatso,” someone said in reply, and Barnaby sheepishly took his place. Two pretty, trashy blonde girls approached the ticket window.

“Are you playing Employee of the Month?” the slightly less trashy girl asked, naming a comedy—a vehicle for another trashy blonde girl with big bazooms—currently in wide release. The young man in the AC/DC t-shirt in the ticket window explained to this slightly less trashy girl that the Film Forum only plays independent films. The two girls walked out the door and had the following conversation:

Slightly less trashy girl: “Oh, yeah, I forgot. They only play independent films.”

Slightly more trashy girl: “What does that mean?”

Slightly less trashy girl: “It means they’re shitty.”

A bit shaken, but still manfully holding onto his faith in the transformative and cathartic power of art and, to a lesser extent, cinema, Barnaby approached the ticket window when his turn came and asked for one ticket to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie; he handed over his money, and then his ticket, in turn, and walked into the darkened theater and found a seat on the aisle as the opening credits were beginning.

Buñuel’s movie about three empty, corrupt, hateful couples who have dinner together, commit adultery, smuggle cocaine, and dress ever so nicely, about people so vapid and so completely hostage to their various lusts that they do not—with the possible exception of the bishop—rise even to the dignity of hypocrisy, amounts to nothing so much as an enormous “fuck you!” to the sort of people—not exactly the sort of people, but more or less the sort of people—who attend foreign films at the Film Forum. It could not be much more direct if it had been a two-hour film of the director himself, sitting on a stool in front of a brick wall, and saying over and over, “Your culture is simultaneously disgusting and absurd; and please do not deceive yourself, gentle audience—I am talking to you!”

But did the accused and condemned audience protest? Mutter? Walk out? Certainly not—they behaved as they would have at any screening in that theater. That is, between a quarter and a third of them made a loud point of laughing whenever possible, to spread the news far and wide that they “got it,” and, when the end credits rolled and the lights came up, several men said, “Hm,” very emphatically, as if the director of the movie, not to mention two film critics from the New Yorker, were waiting in the wings, peering out nervously to see what each of these stalwart men had thought. And then, as they filed out, the audience discussed the previous occasions on which they had seen the movie, one older man remarking that he had seen it with Swedish subtitles, and one very pretty girl telling her somewhat less pretty friend that she had tried to listen to the French and not read the subtitles. Barnaby, for his part, stalked into the bathroom, took a loud piss, and then careened off down Varick Street, once again muttering to himself and scratching.

At first he muttered angrily, despairingly, and at length about the hopeless position of the artist in a bourgeois society: they cannot win, Barnaby declared, because the bourgeois audience possesses an absolutely insurmountable power of being infinitely unreflective. “You could walk right up to one of those moviegoers,” Barnaby railed angrily at a black SUV speeding down Varick Street and blaring out the Ying-Yang Twins, “deliver a long, impassioned, point-by-point indictment of all the basic premises of his life, and end by screaming at the top of your lungs that his mother was a dirty syphilitic whore, and he would grimace, look thoughtful, tap his nose and say, ‘Yes, I get it, but will it play in Peoria?’ Money, the sons of bitches! They eat, breathe, shit, fart, and make love in greenback American dollars!”

Later, when Barnaby got home and had calmed himself down with a nice tisane of verbena (just like Mme. Sénéchal tries to order in the Buñuel movie!), he realized that he had been confused. He had been yelling into the night about the position of the artist in bourgeois society, but after all, he had not been in a gallery, or a bookstore, or a political action meeting—he had been in a movie theater, and movies, whatever their pretensions or high intent, are collaborative efforts that cost millions and millions of dollars to make. They are all indissolubly entangled with the status quo—at best they may aspire to be windows looking out, but mere windows they remain, lodged solidly in the firmament. Buñuel is no Wat Tyler—he is, rather, a bourgeois moviegoer like the rest of them; and the audience was right to laugh and take no notice, because why should a group of dirty birds wallowing in the mud be upset when one of their very own number points out how dirty they are? On the contrary, taking amoral pleasure in the very hollowness of your privilege is the icing on the foie gras, so to speak, and Barnaby’s mistake was buying a ticket in the first place. He should have stayed on the sidewalk with a bottle of hooch.

2006-10-04T14:22:00.000-04:00

On the one hand, Barnaby Sandwich believes that we will all face a terrible judgment someday for the modern methods of pig farming; on the other hand, bacon gives him an erection. When he feels more than usually torn between the twin horns of this dilemma, he takes his breakfast at the B & H Dairy Restaurant on Second Avenue, where he can enjoy his feta omelette and pineapple juice safe from the alluring, satanic smell of frying meat.

Another thing about Barnaby is that he believes, in common with most great men, that conversation is disturbing to the digestion, and he therefore takes his meals alone; and when he takes his lonely meal at a counter, sitting cheek by jowl with an East Village tattooist—or slummer from Scarsdale, or tourist from Orkney, or whoever it might be—he wields a book to shield him from conversation. But sometimes his shield fails him.

On a recent Sunday, Barnaby was in B & H, halfway through his omelette, enjoying his regular Sunday morning fantasy of dressing down the President (“No, I don’t think you’re doing a swell job, you crackpot, incompetent son of a bitch, and let me tell you why!”), when he heard the words “Excuse me.” They seemed to have been spoken very nearby.

Barnaby continued eating.

“Pardon me,” the same voice said, in the broad, plum-edged accent of a man who has carefully read, re-read, and underlined his copy of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

Barnaby cleared his throat, and wished that whoever was being addressed would answer this persistent, plummy fellow, so that their conversation could be begun, conducted, and finished, and leave Barnaby to continue his fantasy dressing down. (“Have you any conception how blasphemous, sir, is your grandiose want of humility? God chose you, sir? Repent, you crypto-fascist lizard! You murderous toad—repent!”)

“I say,” the voice reiterated, and now it was accompanied by a tap on Barnaby’s shoulder. Barnaby glanced to his left from the corner of his eye, without stopping chewing, or turning his head, and saw that he was being addressed by none other than Salman Rushdie, president emeritus of the PEN American Center and all around toast of the town. Salman did not seem to have touched his kasha varnishkes.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” said Salman—a patent lie—“but I couldn’t help but notice the title of the book you’re reading, and I’ve always had a question.”

Barnaby glanced at the cover of the book he was not actually reading to remind himself of the title. It was Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, a collection of essays by Emmanuel Lévinas, a vertiginous mixture of the brilliant and obscure. Would Salman have a question about French phenomenology? A question about Lévinas’s bold contention that despite the many brave acts of many brave Christians, in toto the Holocaust had demonstrated the failure of Christianity in Europe? Or a question about the fundamental paradoxes and sublime mysteries of the concept of free will? No—of course not!

“In Jewish law,” said Mr. Rushdie, “is it true that you can get a divorce if one partner cheats?”

Something that has always perplexed Barnaby is how so many otherwise cosmopolitan men and women, who live in heavily Jewish New York City, never quite grasp the idea of the secular Jew. On 47th Street, a Jew in a beard, a hat, and a long black coat in the middle of August—he knows something about Jewish religious law! He can answer your questions! In B & H Dairy, on Second Avenue, hatless, and in a purple jumpsuit—and on Erev Yom Kippur, no less—Barnaby Sandwich cannot.

Nevertheless, Barnaby believes very strongly that even he, as a circumcised member of the tribe, albeit an assimilated one, is called to be a light unto the nations, and so when he is asked a question, however strange, even though he does not know the answer, he tries to come up with something.

“Uh, probably,” he said. “I guess so.” Mr. Rushdie stared at him hopefully for a moment, and then his face fell.

“No, no!” he said, punching himself in the stomach, and slapping his own cheeks, “that came out wrong! What I meant to say was, is it true that the woman can get a divorce if her husband can’t bring her to orgasm?”

Barnaby put down his book, removed his purple velvet handkerchief, mopped off his forehead, sighed, rubbed his eyes, and squeezed the bridge of his nose. He answered with his eyes closed.

“My understanding,” he muttered, “is that a Jewish man is mandated to ‘satisfy’ his wife, with a frequency inversely proportionate to the level of physical exertion of his employment; but what ‘satisfy’ means exactly, I don’t know, and how you would prove it is also . . . uh . . . I mean, no one’s going to go sit there and, uh, you know, so it comes down to a ‘he said, she said’ sort of a . . . except that, anyway, traditionally the woman has no recourse, which causes problems even today in the Orthodox community, because if a man won’t give a woman a bill of divorcement, then even though they’re separated, and divorced according to civil law, any subsequent relationship that she has will, uh . . . you know . . . but whether, uh . . .”

Barnaby trailed off; stopped dead; nodded his head firmly; picked up his book; and continued eating his omelette. So far as he is aware, Mr. Rushdie left without eating his kasha. And for the record, this is how Barnaby finishes his fantasy dressing down of the President: “And in sum, sir, I would pray for your sake that the Christian mercy you pretend to subscribe to does, in fact, exist, because I shudder to think of even a vile specimen such as yourself enduring the quantity and depth of suffering that any impartial cosmic justice would, according to your sins, be compelled to pour down upon you! Amen!”

Here’s to a peaceful 5767! L’Shana tova!

2006-06-13T15:00:00.000-04:00

Barnaby Sandwich recently attended the twelfth and last of his Summer `06 Weddings, this one in Memphis, Tennessee. (All of his friends are now married, including the priests and the eunuchs.) This wedding, like all the others, was an intensely moving expression of love and community; and it ended, like all the others, with Barnaby, intensely drunk and blubbering, stammering out at length his gratitude and best wishes, while holding onto something—in this case, a magnolia tree—for support. Fortunately there was plenty of seltzer to get the vomit out of his lapels.

Picture it: a pig roasting in the cinderblock pit, a bar set up on the lawn, a plywood dance floor built under the trees, the old folks sitting on the porch, and smiling down on everything the butter-yellow Southern moon. On the plywood floor, a dozen pretty girls in pretty white dresses danced in a circle and sang along to the latest popular songs: "I ain't saying she's a gold digger/ but she ain't messin' with no broke niggers." Memphis!

While in town, Barnaby felt obliged to pay his respects to the local heroes and dead. So he put on his most unmistakeable Canadian flag t-shirt, had breakfast near his hotel and a large lunch at Gus's World-Famous Hot and Spicy Fried Chicken, and took the bus to Graceland. Perhaps it was the eight delicious pieces of hot and spicy fried chicken with cole slaw on the side; or perhaps it was his earlier breakfast of scrambled eggs with biscuits and gravy and pancakes and fried green tomatoes; or perhaps it was the gallon of sugar-saturated sweet tea; or perhaps it was simply a hangover—whatever the reason, Barnaby arrived at Graceland in poor shape, sweating, trembling, and wishing to God that he were not too jittery to vomit.

A pale shade of green, Canadian Barnaby snaked through Elvis's house, smokehouse, shooting range, trophy room, and racketball court in a state of mystification. He listened to the down-home, honey-dripping voice on his audio tour for about ten minutes before slipping the headphones off, concerned that they would cross his eyes. He walked down rows of gold and platinum records, "Golden Boot" awards, and movie posters for "Elvis Meets Girls in Bikinis" and "Elvis Joins the Tongan Navy." He looked at the legions of other tourists, who seemed neither worshipful nor skeptical, but merely docile, filing around in order and looking at every exhibit in turn. Under glass were displayed Elvis's karate belts and boxing gloves. On his desk were displayed a few of his books: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, for example, and Gods from Outer Space by Erich von Däniken. Over the speakers played his mediocre music. Barnaby clutched his head and went outside to sit down.

After a few minutes he collected himself and went into the ice cream parlor, to restore himself with two scoops of black walnut ice cream in a large sugar cone. Feeling much better, he browsed in the gift shops, through souvenir lunch boxes, plastic sunglasses, and furry vests. In the second of the three shops, a fat grandmother from Tallahassee spent a hundred and twenty one dollars on badly-made tchotchkes and announced, to her granddaughter and to the cashier, that she was done shopping because her car was full. Barnaby restrained himself and bought nothing but two postcards: one showing a recipe for peanut butter and banana sandwiches, and the other showing Elvis shaking hands with Richard Nixon. He felt slightly ill, but he was exultant: he had figured the whole thing out.

This is how he explained it to the silent, annoyed bus driver: "You see," Barnaby said, "I couldn't understand it at first. I mean, if you judge Elvis as a musician, or even simply as a human being, then what in God's name is the fuss all about? And besides, the whole thing was so morbid—the emphasis of the whole place is on his personality, on the detritus of one sad and sordid human life, and the exhibits of records and movie posters merely serve to prop up his importance as a man. And as a man, who cares? But that's just the point! That's exactly the point! That's why he's more important now than ever before—he was the first 'American Idol!' He was the spearhead of the current cult of celebrity, the very first anointing of a commoner as a sacrificial god. He represents us and dies for us—we exalt him and love him, and then kill and contemn him, in a cathartic expression of our own collective malformed identity. That's why they talk so much about how many records he sold—it's not about money, it's about the numbers! The more people buy his records, the more famous he becomes, the realer he is, and at the same time, the more unreal; the higher he flies, the more dramatically tragic the fall! Especially if the poor shnook was taking phony karate lessons and reading Erich von Däniken books."

"This is your stop, asshole," the busdriver replied. Barnaby bounced on down to Beale Street to have a beer and listen to some tourist harmonica. Afterwards, on his way back to the hotel, through the dead-empty Memphis downtown, Barnaby discovered a graffito on a lamppost that seemed to prove his point so thoroughly that he shivered with delight. It said, no joke, "Trust Jesus & Elvis." And it said this several times.

The next day Barnaby had a couple of peanut butter and banana sandwiches and some fried pickles at the Blue Plate Café, read the paper in Confederate Park, and strolled south along the fragrant, gorgeously landscaped banks of the Mississippi River. After a little while he walked a few blocks east and went into the National Civil Rights Museum. There he followed the timeline through room after room and century after century, reading texts and looking at documents and pictures, from slavery to lynching, from lynching to segregation in the army, from segregation in the army to firehoses, from firehoses to sit-ins and freedom rides. The museum had as much good news as it did bad, but it was the bad, it turns out, that had the more vivid effect on Barnaby; because ultimately the timeline reached the nineteen sixties, past simulated jail cells and presidential telegrams, and suddenly Barnaby turned a corner onto two glassed-in motel rooms and realized for the first time that the museum had been built inside the very motel where Martin Luther King was murdered. Barnaby looked through the window at a wreath marking the very spot where the man had stood, and then, like a mummy with unbending knees, he walked out of the Lorraine Motel, across the yard, and into the second building, where he went into the restroom and cried. After he had finished and washed his face, he went up to the second floor, where he discovered a series of exhibits on the investigations into the murder; this was too much for him, and he hurried out, hyperventilating in the humid Memphis air, running through the empty downtown, finally sitting down by the Mississippi to hide his face and bawl one more time.

After he had collected himself, Barnaby went to get something to eat, and he addressed himself in a whisper to his hot and spicy fried chicken: "Obviously if anyone can ever be proven to have conspired, by all means lock them up," he said, "but it seems to me that the more important point is that whether or not anyone actually discussed it or made plans, enough people wanted him dead. It simply reached a critical mass. And why then? Because of the rotten underside of Elvis Presley shaking hands with Richard Nixon—a great reformer is allowed to orchestrate landmark changes in racial inequality, but if he starts talking about poverty in general and the Vietnam War, he turns up dead. Black people buy records, too, but there's a lot of money in bullets, and communism is bad for business."

"Sir," said the waiter awkwardly, not sure if Barnaby was talking to him, "do you want another sweet tea?"

"No," Barnaby said, "a beer, for the love of Christ, a beer."

2006-05-11T15:00:00.000-04:00

Barnaby began drinking coffee at the age of fourteen, when his morning schedule went like this: 6:45 a.m., out of bed and into shower; 7:00 a.m., watch The Jetsons; 7:30 a.m., walk to the subway drinking from enormous thermos of coffee while hair, still wet, freezes solid; 8:15, fly into English class like a hummingbird. Since then he has regarded the bitter brown bean as a friend of almost unmatched constancy, rivalled only by his Grandma Sylvia's cornucopia of stale cookies. When he is sluggish in the morning, he drinks coffee; when he is flatulent in the evening, he drinks coffee; when he is empaneled on a murder trial, or getting a pedicure, or waiting for a train, he drinks coffee. But recently he has discovered that the vinum amer apollonis is not the same the world round—on the contrary, European coffee is no more trustworthy than an actual European.

First it was Paris. After an obligatory hike up to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, wheezing all the way, Barnaby wandered into the Rue des Abbesses and found a Genuine Parisian Cafe, with little round tables and wicker chairs facing the street. He sat down to read the funny pages and watch the women go by—and the men, as far as that goes—and drank an espresso; and after fifteen minutes he stood up to be on his way. But he had hardly walked ten feet before he found another Genuine Parisian Cafe, with little round tables and wicker chairs, and, reasoning that such pleasures are hard to come by in New York, he sat down, opened his paper to the fashion section, and ordered himself a beer. He spent another delightful quarter of an hour, and then he got up to be on his way—and what do you think happened? To make a long story short, at the third cafe Barnaby had an espresso, because he had just had a beer, and at the fourth cafe a beer, because he had just had an espresso, and so on, and so on, until finally, almost eighty euros the lighter, and walking not at all straight but very, very fast, he escaped from the cafes of the Rue des Abbesses and very nearly drowned in the Seine.

Next was Florence, where he went into a tabacchi early in the morning, and a beautiful girl with curly brown hair and acne-scarred cheeks looked him in the eye, gave him a smile to which she seemed to have committed her entire soul, and said, in a throaty voice, "Di mi." Barnaby meant to reply, "Caffè normale," but instead he threw his bulk across the marble counter and shouted, "Ti amo! Ti amo! Ti amo!"

But the most dramatic betrayal was in Siena, medieval Siena, where the neighborhood bank is likely to predate Columbus. At the train station he had a caffè corretto—that is, espresso and sambuca in the same little cup--and, feeling just dandy, he walked up the winding streets to the Duomo. And when he went in, wiped his nose, and looked up, the entire cathedral was striped! Brilliant, majestic, ridiculous stripes, stripes on the columns and stripes on the walls, foot-high, horizontal, black and white stripes, rendered not in plaster or in paint, but in stone! Stripes! From fifty feet up there looked down at least a hundred Popes' heads; there were enormous paintings lining the walls—with stripes in between them—and allegorical scenes cut into the black and white floors, with accents of yellow and rose. In one of these scenes, there turned a Wheel of Fortune with God the Father enthroned at the top; in another, Hermes Trismegistus in a pointy hat delivered to Moses a tablet of cosmic truth. Altogether this church's interior presented Barnaby with the most amazing, far-out, unreal design he had ever seen. He fell to his knees and clutched his hair. What in God's name had they put in his coffee? Frantically he reached and grabbed until he caught someone by the arm. It was a middle-aged woman in an "Oregon" t-shirt.

"Excuse me," Barnaby said. "Am I hallucinating, or is this entire—cathedral—striped?"

"Yeah," the woman said, "it's really over the top, isn't it? And why does it have to be black and white? Couldn't they have done it in peach?"

Just as frantically as he had grabbed her, Barnaby now pushed this woman away. He was relieved that he was not hallucinating, of course; but at the same time he was a little disappointed that the stripes were not the product of his own imagination. "God damn it," he muttered, "why didn't they put anything in my coffee?" And then Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus rose up out of his marble panel and addressed Barnaby in ancient Egyptian. "Barnabos," he said, "you must remember that the world exists as a dynamic tension, of which sexual intercourse is one expression and a vibrating lyre string another. When you can see that these Columns of Santa Maria are neither black, nor white, but black and white at the same time, then you will have mastered the truth." The Popes did not like this. One called Hermes a pagan, one called him an antichrist, and one called him a Greek. The Wheel of Fortune floated up out of the floor and turned before Barnaby's eyes. Then the Popes began to argue about whether God is better conceived of as moving or still; and then the church filled up with the noise of marble horsemen and marble archers storming a marble castle in the floor. . . .

And to make, once again, a long story short, no mattter how Barnaby threatened and wept, the Siennese barmaid would never tell him what she had put in his caffè corretto, and so finally he got back on the train.

2006-04-28T03:00:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Mr. Sandwich returned to Columbia University for the first time since he was kicked out. It was six days before commencement, 1999, and Barnaby reasoned that the diplomas were already printed, but everyone was still on campus, and so it would be the perfect time to mix up a pot of wheat glue and post all over the walls a blistering attack on the undergraduate college in general and his department in particular. Alas, it did not occur to parsimonious Barnaby that the university would be willing to take two dollars worth of printing costs as a dead loss and simply throw his diploma away.

In any case, yesterday he snuck into Faculty House in a tan trench coat and enormous fedora. These were useful as he skulked around Ritu Menon, admiring her from afar. This Indian feminist publisher and essayist had won his devotion not only by her thrillingly passionate and cogent extemporaneous speaking at the panel on “Honor Killings” on Wednesday, but also because of how visibly uncomfortable she had been able to make the moderator, who came from the Wall Street Journal editorial board. He asked about head scarves out in foreign places, and she returned to him with a question about new attacks on Roe v. Wade in this country, and let me tell you, the idea that the United States might not be in every last respect a shining beacon of human rights entitled to lecture and look down on other countries stuck in the man’s throat like an enormous clamshell. Ms. Menon also remarked that “patriarchy is the first globalization.” At a different panel on Thursday, Mr. Calasso denied that the term globalization had any use, and said that his only question was whether it had begun in the late neolithic or the early neolithic.

Still in Faculty House at Columbia, Richard Howard explained that he had begun to learn French from the divorced wife of his grandmother’s first cousin, when he was five years old, while driving down to Miami Beach; and that he had been delighted to have occasion once, when asked by the French president how he had come to learn the language, to reply, “Dans une voiture, mon général, entre Cleveland, Ohio, et Miami Beach, Florida.”

Still further in Faculty House, after hopping back and forth between the PEN reception and a Columbia reception in the next room, drinking red wine, and trading a few Japanese remarks with Boris Akunin, Barnaby went back upstairs to the panel “Mixed Media: Writers on Their Languages.” Agi Mishol spoke about the poetic concentration of the Hebrew language, a result not only of thousands of years of layered connotation, but of the language’s syntax; Dubravka Ugresic talked about the political division of Serbo-Croatian into Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian, and maybe soon even Montenegrin; Boris Akunin spoke about the situation of the writer in Russia, where they respect literature; and Yiyun Li read a piece of fiction about being more comfortable expressing emotion in a second language. Barnaby was reminded of a long, painful, earnest conversation in his tiny freshman-year dormitory room, sitting on his bed with a girl, insisting on speaking in French because he was too uncomfortable in English. All that said, the high point was hearing the writers read their work in their respective languages: Mishol a poem in Hebrew; Bernardo Atxaga read poems in Spanish and in Basque, which indeed sounds like nothing else; Raymond Federman read a passage from a novel written in both French and English; and Hwang Sok-Yong read a passage from a novel in brilliant and exciting Korean.

“Here’s what we should do,” Barnaby said, standing on a chair after everyone had left. “Listen! Next year, let’s get together a reading where we try to read in as many languages as possible. Maybe everyone could read a translation of the same passage; or else maybe everyone could read from their national epics or scriptures or famous novels. A Finn from the Kalevala, a Japanese from the Genji, and so on. We could get someone from the Vatican to read the Aeneid in Latin and someone from Columbia to read from the Gilgamesh. It could go on all day, with people coming in and out, and a nice smoked fish platter in the back of the room.” Barnaby began to foam at the mouth a little bit. “It could go on for the whole festival! An endless marathon! There are enough people in New York. How many Polynesian languages could we get? What about co-sponsorship by the United Nations? No! No! I am an idiot! Obviously they have to read the biblical passage about the Tower of Babel! The Tower of Babel in two hundred and forty seven languages! Has the Bible been translated into Sanskrit? Or no—no! Someone will read the part in the Upanisads about the dismemberment of the primal cosmic man! Yes! And in Greek something about the language of Barbarians! And who’ll read in Old English? Beowulf, for the love of Christ! Nursery rhymes! Fairy tales! Proverbs! Holy mother of God, proverbs, proverbs in the world’s thousand languages!” Barnaby shut his eyes, turned red, screamed at the top of his voice his favorite Welsh proverb, and then fainted dead to the floor. Gorau chwedl gwirionedd!

2006-04-26T15:00:00.000-04:00

This morning Barnaby Sandwich, hungover and grimy, sat down to finish off the last of the Passover gefilte fish while writing his entry for the Diddlesworth College alumni magazine.

“Oh, Wednesday, Wednesday,” he belched into his DictaBelt, “you almost got me, you sneaky bastard. Last night at Town Hall, Roberto Calasso began his remarks by quoting Confucius on the importance of the rectification of names, and I was tempted to begin my letter to you with a brief comparison of Confucius and Chuang-tzu; make an incidental nod to Shankara (who said that if you see a rope and think it is a snake, it is not really a snake, but you did really think so); and then make a headlong dive into a pit of false dualities, attempting to do my part to straighten out the confusions that bedeviled yesterday’s conversations and panels on Faith and Reason.”

For the benefit of his cockatoo Lucille, Barnaby mimed digging himself out of quicksand with a plastic trowel.

“I was going to argue that we are all stupid believers in our own different ways,” he continued, “and that the idea of a contrast between religious faith and scientific reason is a deadly red herring with deadly consequences. The conflict in the world is between two different habits of mind, or styles of reading, and the clothing of ideology or cosmology that these two systems happen to wear has nothing to do with their primal conflict.”

Barnaby belched and pinched his nose, and then walked into the kitchen for a bottle of medicinal red wine.

“But I have faith,” he said, “that the truth will continue to exist and to multiply itself without my aid; that the world continues to exist behind me even as I walk forward; and that those that understand this, will understand this, and those that do not, will not. At the same time, reason—the cherished ideal of the Buddha, the Mahavira, and any number of God-fearing philosophers in the West—reminds me that you cannot hurry the process of understanding, and also, by the way, points out that there is something ridiculous about a man in his underwear, early in the morning, strapping on a DictaBelt and attempting with desperate urgency to displace what he perceives as the misapprehensions of others with his own much more compelling misapprehensions. And so, all of that not said, I am going to begin with a different interesting point raised by Mr. Calasso. In talking about Vedic rituals, he mentioned ‘the confidence implicit in every act that the visible may act on the invisible and the invisible on the visible,’ and described how the universe depends on the proper execution of Brahmanic ritual. But the rituals only work if we believe in them. To put it another way, the world would cease to exist if the children in the playground stopped their games; and we all play our different games; and merely by playing we manifest our belief. We can approach these games with different emphases—as Chinua Achebe put it last night, also at Town Hall, we can follow Julian of Norwich in saying that ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,’ or we can say, ‘For whom is it well? For whom is it well? There is no one for whom it is well,’ and be equally correct. But in the end the truth defies all reduction, and for my part, I think Yusef Komunyakaa spoke the day’s most living truth with his poem ‘Ode to the Maggot.’”

Barnaby scratched, had a drink of red wine, and then quoted from memory:

“No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.”

And then he threw his DictaBelt on the couch and went out to walk his cockatoo Lucille. Lucille is a bit high-strung, and she spooked a ferret that someone was walking the other way; and the ferret spooked a chihuahua; and the chihuahua spooked a pit bull; and the pit bull spooked a police horse; and, to make a long story short, Barnaby will finish his column when he gets out of jail.

2006-04-25T15:00:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-04-20T15:00:00.000-04:00

In the past week, the Israelites have gone up out of Egypt with signs and wonders; the risen Christ, returned from Hell, has conquered death; the murdered god Tammuz has been reborn from the dark earth; gentle Persephone has returned from Hades and his treacherous pomegranate seeds to her mother fertile Demeter; and the Callery Pears and other flowering trees of New York have begun turning from white to green.

Barnaby Sandwich drove up to Massachusetts for a seder. There his friends Maeve and Arthur—who, at the end of college, recognized each other as Romeo and Juliet through the crowded fog of a garden square in upper Manhattan, and pledged themselves, shortly after this recognition, with their hearts, and some time later, with their words, to reenact together forever the primal commingling of male and female, to exemplify and thereby conjure into being the sexual division-in-union and union-in-division that give rise to all creation, and, indeed, which all creation depicts and expresses—live in a wooden fisherman's house in a small town by the sea. Arthur, much excited by the recent publication of the Gospel of Judas, claimed to have found a Gnostic haggadah, whose ending read "This year we are enchained in gross material form; next year may our spirits return to the Pleroma. This year we are in Egypt—next year in the realm of Barbelo!" But it was only a joke. Instead they used a Reconstructionist haggadah, which expanded the traditional four questioning children in various and beautiful directions. (The simple child asks, "What is the Lord," but it is not a simple question.)

They did, however, get into an argument that has been repeated an infinite number of times over an infinite number of meals, as the Seed of Abraham has scattered through the nations, beginning with Joseph's argument with himself in the Land of Keme, the Black Land of Egypt, the Kingdom of Death. Arthur, whose Hebrew name is Abraham, played the part of all other Abrahams before him—or rather, he was the part, for he, no less than the particular Abram we consider to be the first, and no less than all the Abrahams stretching back behind that one into obscure mists of time, he was Abraham, and his wife, Maeve, as a Congregationalist and lukewarm defender of Easter, was forced into the life and voice of an idolater.

"What is interesting," said Arthur, or Abram, son of Terah the idol maker, "is that everyone is talking about the suppression of Gnostic heresies when mainstream Christianity as we know it is completely Gnostic anyway."

"That's ridiculous," said Maeve, worshiper of Osiris, the murdered and resurrected god, and his mother-wife Isis, or Mary, the vulture woman. "Eat your haroses."

"No," said Abraham, reluctant sacrificer of Isaac, "it's true. It's completely death-centered. It's all about the importance of the afterlife, the escape to heaven from a material realm which exists only to entrap the divine soul and drag it down further into hellish darkness. What could be more Gnostic than that?"

"Shut up," said Maeve, partisan of Amun and the dead gods of Egypt. "The difference between mainstream Christianity and Gnosticism is the difference between faith and knowledge, okay? That's fundamental. Eat your haroses. As we have done since the time of Hillel, who made a sandwich of haroses and bitter herbs, to follow literally the words of the scripture, as it is written—"

"Shut up!" said Arthur. "What's important isn't eating the haroses. What's important is discussing or, better yet, reenacting the story of the Exodus, when God led us out of Egypt, the land of tombs and stone gods, the underworld, where we were slaves in a land of death, through the empty desert, sustaining us for forty years with manna, and finally to Sinai, the mountain of revelation, to give to us eternally the living law—"

"Aha!" said Maeve, "what could be more Gnostic than that?"

Abram, her husband, vouchsafed himself in his faith in the Hidden One, and declined to answer, and Maeve declared time-out and began serving the vegan kishke, while dog-faced Milo, the dog, under the table, whimpered and sniffed at the gravity of the mystical incarnation. Meanwhile, under the table, Barnaby continued reading Thomas Mann's "mythological novel" Joseph and His Brothers, very much enjoying it, but also looking forward to finishing, so that he can think in single layers again. He considered accidentally spilling his third cup of wine on it, but decided against this, largely because the Modern Library edition cost him more than forty dollars. (Nine hundred pages down, six hundred to go.)

In the car on the way back, A.J. struggled for four hours to open a bag of Sour Skittles, and Barnaby, when he got home, was so full of love and emotion that a cassette tape of "Just a Friend" by Biz Markie reduced him to tears.

Barnaby and I wish you a Gut Pesach!

2006-03-24T03:00:00.000-05:00

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.)

2006-03-10T15:00:00.000-05:00

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.)

2006-02-23T03:00:00.000-05:00

Barnaby Sandwich was recently in San Francisco to see a girl about a thing. In Chinatown he ate roast goose for breakfast at a large communal table and listened to the reminiscences of an eighty-seven year old veteran of the Battle of the Bulge. In North Beach he had his morning coffee while eavesdropping on the complex social hierarchies of three generations of Beat poets. In the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art he saw a wonderful Diego Rivera painting, as well as more iterations of Chuck Close’s face than he had thought possible in a material universe bounded by natural law. All in all it was a wonderful time, with the exception of his visit to City Lights, the famous bookstore and publisher, on the afternoon of February 14th.

After browsing around the bookstore for a while, Barnaby decided to look for a book by Moses Isegawa, one of the writers scheduled to appear at the PEN “Foreign Writers Write English, Too” Festival. He did not see anything in Fiction under “I,” but, never being fully confident in his own mastery of the alphabet, Barnaby decided to ask the woman behind the counter, just to be sure. After he had spelled Mr. Isegawa’s name, and the woman had consulted her computer, he was directed to a room in the back with a black and white floor.

“Not in fiction?” asked Barnaby.

“No,” said the woman, “Third World Fiction.”

Steady, Barnaby, steady. He went to the back room and found three copies of Snakepit on the shelf. Next to it was a book by a writer called Yasushi Inoue. What goes on here? thought Barnaby. Is Japan the Third World? Well, he told himself judiciously, perhaps this fellow grew up in Indonesia. He took a copy of Snakepit and one of Inoue’s The Hunting Gun off the shelf to investigate.

Upon investigation it seemed that Inoue was as Japanese as Japanese can be, and that Isegawa, while Ugandan in origin, lives in the Netherlands and first published Snakepit in Dutch. Reader, you can see where this is going. Steady, Barnaby, steady. He looked for, and found, a number of other Japanese writers: Abe, Mishima, Kawabata. Even Kazuo Ishiguro, who, despite his outlandishly foreign name, and his admittedly poor choice in being born to Japanese parents, is an Englishman writing in English! And it goes on. All the Chinese writers; all the Indian writers; all the Arab writers; all the Latin American writers; and even Jorge Luis Borges, the single man whose work must be most opposed to any such compartmentalizing of writers, the single man whose writing most depended on a sincere belief in the existence and importance of a universal nation of literature, transcending national and cultural divisions and uniting human beings through and against time—even Borges was consigned to the special room in the back with the black and white parquet floor.

Just as Barnaby was suffering his first small heart attack, a man with a bristly mustache came in and briskly began putting books on the shelves. Barnaby asked if he worked there, and he said that he did, and asked what book Barnaby was looking for. Barnaby thrust his trembling hands into his pockets.

“No,” he stuttered, “I found the book I was looking for, but, uh, I was wondering, um—I was surprised to see so many Japanese writers in, uh—the woman behind the counter said that this was the—” steady, Barnaby, steady! “—the Third World Fiction section, and, uh—” What in God’s name is the matter with you people? “—uh, what exactly is the criterion for being ‘third world?’”

The man delivered his reply casually, business-like, without stopping his shelving.

“People of color is the shortest way to say it,” he said. “Yellow people, brown people, black people.”

Here Barnaby suffered his second small heart attack and charged out of the store to run madly down the street for several blocks, lest he do something rash. After he recovered, he returned to the store to investigate a bit further. It turned out that black people were not consigned to the little room if they happened to be American—James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, by virtue of their birth, Barnaby supposed, and disregarding any French intervals, got to be in regular Fiction. So too did Abraham Cahan, who was born in Lithuania and wrote in Yiddish, because, Barnaby supposed, he had the good sense to move to New York and switch to English. Elias Canetti, on the other hand, although he spent much of his life in London and claimed to have learned English earlier than the language he wrote in, German; and although he always superintended the English translations of his work—he was, after all, whatever he was (a Bulgarian?), and he was in European Fiction. Flann O’Brien, on the other hand, whose most famous novels were written in Irish, was in regular Fiction.

So what exactly is the system? Writers from the former British Empire are in Fiction—unless they are South Asian, in which case they’re Third World? And Western Europeans are European? And everyone else is the Third World? (Rack his mind as he might, Barnaby could not imagine any coherent system that included the categorization of Ishiguro, and finally concluded that it must have been a mistake.) And what is the purpose? To give these writers a leg up? To contest the canon of dead white men? To broaden my horizons by bringing my attention to the flavorful ethnic fiction of Kobo Abe and Jorge-Luis Borges? To make it easier for the customer with specific regional tastes, who reads Chinese and Bolivian writers exclusively?

Or is race a red herring? Borges, after all, was not very dark. Is the point simply that Fiction means English and American Fiction (with Ireland belonging to England), and everything else, regardless of the wealth of its country of origin, is, in cultural terms, the Third World? Wouldn’t it be better, dear City Lights, not to mention easier, to leave this sort of facile categorizing to the academy and the bar room cranks? Wouldn’t it be better simply to have a single fiction section organized by last name?

In short, City Lights—what the fuck are you smoking?

2006-02-17T03:00:00.000-05:00

Barnaby Sandwich is a Viennese Jew—that is, by sympathy. He likes to read his newspaper in the cafe. He likes whipped cream in his coffee. He likes to believe in truth, humanity, and the ultimate triumph of reason. But everything he knows about this schematic type of the Viennese Jew he learned from Elias Canetti and Joseph Roth—two great writers who were, to be sure, Jewish, and who did write in German, and who both, each in his own way, had something to do with the Habsburg Empire or its passing, but neither of whom, strictly speaking, was Viennese. So it was with great delight that Barnaby recently discovered Stefan Zweig, who was born, in 1881, actually in Vienna. (Zweig went to London in 1934, and then to New York, and then to Brazil, where he and his wife died in an apparent suicide in 1942.)

The first thing Barnaby read was the novella called Chess Story or The Royal Game, in which Dr. B., imprisoned alone for months, manages to steal a chess book during an interrogation and teaches himself to play, with himself as his only opponent. To Barnaby’s understanding, this is a book about the impossible situation of the sensitive person, or of civilization generally. Confronted with the world’s mindless and inexorable cruelty, we have two choices: we can surrender, and be crushed; or we can fight—but only with the world’s methods, which will themselves drive us insane. The only option, therefore, is simply to withdraw. To put it another way, sensitive anger at an insensitive evil can only go backwards, hurting the one who is angry, leaving the evil untouched. (Barnaby thinks that engagement with reality is highly overrated—he has a small private income, and he never wears a belt.)

The very next thing that Barnaby did—after a detour to the toilet and a short walk to buy a coconut bun—was to buy Fantastic Night & Other Stories, in which he read “Letter From an Unknown Woman.” In this long story, or novella, the unknown woman writes to a man whom she has known, and loved, since childhood; to whom she lost her virginity; to whom she bore a child; with whom she spent other nights; whom she encountered across Vienna over years; to whom she sent, every year on his birthday, white roses—but who never on any of these occasions recognized or remembered her. Every time she was new, and insignificant; every time he was unaware of her tremendous love, unaware of his significance to her. Only on her deathbed does she write to him to tell him all this—because however much unhappiness his failure to recognize her caused, she does not want to trouble him. In this story Barnaby—with his wine-besotted and mystical mind—found an almost perfect allegory. Is the woman God? or wealth and privilege? or society? or the very world itself, tremendously complex and full of meaning, deeper and more real than our minds can ever know? And the man—is he love, grace, beauty, success, art, happiness, peace? Self-delusion? They can be any of these, and more, almost everything—but not actually everything; their meaning is just sufficiently limited that it remains meaning. And meanwhile it remains simply an excellent story, regardless of its meaning, which is the way that Barnaby prefers to read. “Let the bowels of my mind worry about the bowels of the story,” he says, “while the surface makes love to the surface.”

Also meanwhile, last night, at the White Horse Tavern, another dowdy English major pointed out to Barnaby his resemblance to Dylan Thomas, and then, after another drink, explained that she meant a “late” Dylan Thomas. Barnaby resolved to get a haircut and do some sit-ups at the first opportunity.

(Chess Story is available in a nice edition from NYRB Classics, translated by Joel Rotenberg, and Fantastic Night & Other Stories from Pushkin Press, various translators. "Letter From an Unknown Woman" is translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. The personal information about Zweig is lifted directly from the author bio in the front of Fantastic Night. Dylan Thomas was Welsh.)

2006-02-06T15:00:00.000-05:00

Barnaby Sandwich has left New York three times: once to see fireworks at Grand Army Plaza, once to go to the Transit Museum in Downtown Brooklyn, and once on a school trip to the Bronx Botanic Garden. But despite his limited travel, he is very interested in foreigners—he knows a lot of them, and in fact, his own great-grandfather was one, who came all the way from White Russia. In tribute to this man’s natty ascot—and to the crumbs of hard-boiled egg that clung to the natty ascot—someone at Ellis Island nicknamed him “the Oil of Sandwich,” and Sandwich bequeathed this name to his patrilineal descendants.

Barney is particularly interested in foreign books because, as he understands it, they are not written in English, but in other languages altogether, and then have to be translated. The exact purpose of this complicated procedure remains occult to him; and it is partially in the hope of learning why everyone doesn’t write in English in the first place that Sandwich has decided to attend the PEN American Center’s Foreign Something-Whatever festival. (His other partial hope is of meeting a pretty foreign girl with uncorrected teeth who doesn’t buy into American standards of masculine fitness.)