Stories about story-telling

The story that John Barth has to tell is that he had planned a book, to be entitled Ten Nights and a Night, in which he would reprint ten already published stories, interweaving them with a new story about his relations with his Muse. The purpose would have been to put these tales into a narrative frame, ‘connecting their dots to make a whole somewhat larger (and perhaps a bit friskier) than the mere sum of its parts’, on the model of The Thousand and One Nights and the Decameron. But before the book was completed there came the events of 9/11, which seemed to make story-telling hopelessly irrelevant. Still, the story-telling in the Decameron took place under the threat of the Black Death and hence was a studied gesture of irrelevance. Could this (just), he wondered, give him the warrant to do likewise?