Attention getting.(City Desk)

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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 ...