When I moved to New York, Ben Sonnenberg was a merry old troll who lived, not in a den under a bridge, but at 19 Gramercy Park, in the former Stuyvesant Fish house. The place had a staircase by Stanford White, and Sonnenberg had filled it with Sickerts and Sargents. He had reached this eminence via a career in public relations. He was able, for a price, to guarantee the cover of Time magazine. (His son, in a perfect Buddenbrooks touch, founded a literary magazine.) Those days are past. The cover of Time would cost much less now, and besides, it’s always reserved for Obama. But publicity marches on, and the city is still the great mill of it.

Before publicity there were patrons: Maecenas, the church, Lord So and So. The milestone at the end of the patronage system was Samuel Johnson’s clash with Lord Chesterfield. Chesterfield had led Johnson to think that he would back his Dictionary, but then went MIA. Years later, as the work came down the home stretch, Chesterfield suddenly decided to puff it, in two letters to a weekly paper. Johnson, so long brushed off, wrote his immortal brushback: “Is not a Patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached the ground, encumbers him with help?” But writers and artists did not emerge from the patronage system into some unencumbered state. As free agents they had to seek their living in the marketplace, which means seeking it, in the first instance, from publicity.

Publicity, publicity, what we do in thy name. My wife has a phrase, painting your tuchus purple. I haven’t done that, but then no one has ever asked me.

Radio is an old medium — Marshall McLuhan thought it was “hot” — but Rush reminded us of its enduring power. Most radio gigs get bundled by middlemen and done over the phone from home. I remember one talk show in Philadelphia that ran for four hours, from 1:30 to 5:30 a.m. Just past my bedtime, I set myself up with a thermos and a lap rug. Much, much later I experienced the pain of seeing the first grayness, then hearing the uptick in traffic on Third Avenue, then seeing actual golden sunlight, laughing scornfully as I staggered to bed for the rind of a snooze. Then there were the oddball Christian and populist radio stations, which sounded, from the manifest inexperience of their hosts (who doubled as producers), as if they were being done out of farm kitchens in the Drought Belt. One youth kept me waiting for half an hour as he dickered with his sound man, until exasperation conquered shamelessness and I hung up. Then there were the commercials you listened to while waiting to go on, or during breaks — weather in Yakima, traffic in Akron, sales on Roto-Rooting services, convertible beds, insurance. Will listeners really go from their morning drive or their lunch break to Amazon or Barnes & Noble and buy you? God knows (publishers don’t).

Television can’t be phoned in, except spiritually. It is a trip to a whole other affect. There will be three hosts — a young woman, whose hemline as she sits I cannot look at without opening myself to a charge of sexual harassment, and two men trading jokes. They are all happy! because they have had so much work done that the corners of their eyes and lips are permanently tweaked! and because their face makeup is red as fire engines! The music is like arena rock! and the stage lights are bright as an interrogation! Churchill said that meeting FDR was like having a glass of champagne, and being a guest on TV is like having your head jjackckhammered! The networks around Rockefeller Center have street-level studios so the Morlocks from the Midwest can watch the process. Eat your hearts out, you’ll never be in here! (unless you win American Idol).

Finally there is print, which means the New York Times. Hate it, or hate it, it is the breviary of our class and generation. The macaronic carol In Dulci Jubilo says of heaven, “O that we were there.” That is what the publicity-hungry say of the Times. But how to arrange it? You cudgel your brain for pegs. What would put the Times in the right frame of mind for a piece on, say, Gouverneur Morris? Have there been any one-legged adulterers in the news recently? Massacres in France? Writing of new constitutions? Ours is continually rewritten, but the Times thinks that’s good — better stay away from that.

One of the great publicity coups in New York history was achieved by P. T. Barnum in the 1840s. His star performer at the time was a minstrel — a white man who did “Negro” dances and songs. But one day he took off on his own. Barnum managed to find a replacement who was even better, though there was a problem: the new performer was actually black — “and there was not an audience in America,” as one contemporary wrote, “that would not have resented, in a very energetic fashion, the insult of being asked to look at the dancing of a real negro.” Barnum greased the man’s face, blacked him with cork, painted his lips red, and stuck a wig on him, until he looked like a white man pretending to be a black man.

This story is dense as a koan with our racial fears and envies. But it also exemplifies the black magic of publicity. We go out into the world and turn ourselves into chattering boobs, something we hope we are not. Yet, with luck, skill, and the courtesy of our audiences, we put enough of our real selves out there to bring people in closer. And that was one of the goals of self-expression in the first place.

If publicity was good enough for Jesus and Buddha, it’s good enough for us.