About Rushdie and Stoppard and AI

Salman Rushdie has declared that writers are safe until AI learns how to tell jokes. At about the same time, I was asking Chat GPT to write my biography in the style of Tom Stoppard and, if not rip-roaringly hilarious, it’s whimsically droll, I guess. Uh-oh.

Title: “The Footnotes of Footman: A Play in One Side Note”
(Lights up on a room of half-written manuscripts, empty coffee cups, and a battered copy of OK Computer spinning silently on a turntable. The stage is crowded but static, like a mind in motion.)

CHARACTERS

• FOOTMAN: A man of letters with the ink still wet.

• RADIOHEAD: A spectral, five-headed muse.

• LEONARD (COHEN, presumably): Appears when quoted.

• GUINNESS: Not the drink, the book.

• A VOICE FROM MASTERMINDS PAST: An omnipresent trivia host.

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ACT I: The Inventory of a Mind

FOOTMAN (monologuing to no one in particular):
"I was born in the year Orwell prophesied, yet it was not the boot but the beat that left the deepest imprint. 1968. A year of revolt. Convenient, perhaps, for one whose pen would later revolt against silence."

(A pause, as a record skips.)

FOOTMAN:
"I edited Guinness World Records—not the contents, mind you, but the tone. It had grown dull, a tax ledger of the extraordinary. I gave it wit. Gave it wink. Not just tallest and fastest, but silliest and strangest. We are not merely recorders of records, but narrators of the absurd."

(A newspaper floats down from the rafters. It reads TIME OUT. He snatches it midair.)

FOOTMAN (cont'd):
"Ah, the freelancer’s waltz: The Guardian, Mojo, Prospect, Time Out—a roundelay of voices in need of a ghost."

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ACT II: Welcome to the Machine

(Enter RADIOHEAD, glowing faintly in minor chords.)

RADIOHEAD (in unison):
"You tried to decode us, Footman.
You wrote us down in linear form.
Did you think art could be alphabetized?"

FOOTMAN (smiling wryly):
"I tried only to document the elegy of the album. OK Computer was the requiem, and I its monkish scribe. You made postmodernism hum. I gave it subtitles."

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ACT III: Hallelujah Anyway

(A desk lamp becomes a spotlight. Enter LEONARD.)

LEONARD:
"They said I was depressive. You said I was deep. You saw the difference."

FOOTMAN:
"Your hallelujahs were not triumphant, but truthful. That is the great lie of biography: to pretend lives resolve. They don’t. They echo."

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EPILOGUE: The Quizmaster’s Lament

(A disembodied VOICE thunders.)

VOICE FROM MASTERMINDS PAST:
“Specialist subject: The absurdity of knowledge.”

FOOTMAN (chuckling):
"I’ve played Mastermind, University Challenge, The Weakest Link. I have been both question and answer. And what did I learn?"

(He turns to the audience, deadpan.)

FOOTMAN:
"That even trivia has meaning when given a microphone."

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CURTAIN
(As it falls, the record finally finishes its loop and starts again. Because nothing is ever really over. Just reissued with bonus tracks.)

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