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.

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."

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."

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."

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."

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

Tracey Emin, quoted in Dylan Jones’s newish oral history of the Velvet Underground:

When I was at school, I used to imagine that I would go to New York by boat and when I walked down the gangplank Andy Warhol would be there waiting for me.

The thing is, I still believe that...

PS: From the same book, and in a similar vein, Jones himself gets in on the act:

...I even went through a phase of rolling up my drainpipe jeans – skinhead style – worn with pink socks and black Dr. Marten shoes, in the vain hope of trying to advertise the fact that I owned records by people who lived in New York.

Claire Dederer:

The problem is, we don’t get to control how much we know about someone’s life. It’s something that happens to us... There is no longer any escaping biography. Even within my own lifetime, I’ve seen a massive shift. Biography used to be something you sought out, yearned for, actively pursued. Now it falls on your head all day long.

Germaine Greer: 

I fucking hate biography. If you want to know about Charles Dickens, read his fucking books.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature – it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 per cent of the time. Still, it’s harmless, and can even have a certain marginal value. A young woman applying for a sales job at Céline or Hermès should naturally attend to her appearance above all; but a degree in literature can constitute a secondary asset, since it guarantees the employer, in the absence of any useful skills, a certain intellectual agility that could lead to professional development – besides which, literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods.

I suspect that if I were starting a blog today rather than 17 years ago, I’d take inspiration not from Murakami’s deadpan insouciance, but from Michel Houellebecq’s dead-eyed resignation. And you’d be reading (or, more probably, not reading), something called Basically Nowhere.

Dr Dickon Edwards, chanteur with 90s Romo outfit Orlando turned bohemian academic, identifies the problem with pretty much everything everywhere:

All job applications ask the same question: 'can you pretend to be normal'?

— Dr Dickon Edwards (@dickon_edwards) July 29, 2022

I’ve written before (here and here) about the strange back alleys into which self-Googling can take you. The problem seems to be that whole sites are based on data parsed from other sites, without a flesh-and-blood bullshit detector in the middle. I have no idea whether anyone but me has seen the page claiming that I was born in Chicago, and died in 2007, but it is there. (If a lie appears in the the digital forest and nobody reads it except its subject, might it just as well be true?)

Anyway, here’s a new one. Nobody knows what I weigh, which is a relief; but they have managed to calculate how rich I am, which comes as a pleasant surprise. It’s just a pity that I’m too dead to enjoy it.

It’s a frustrating experience, as not only is my computer slow, but I realise I am so much slower at tweeting than most. I manage about three questions before the 30 mins of questioning is up... I am a little unhappy about this, feeling forced into a new digital Darwinian era that favours only those who have fast computers and fast computer skills. I worry now that I have even less place in a pandemic-hit world than I did in the one before.

The only thing that makes this bearable for me, frankly, is at least I’m alone. A couple of people invited me to their houses in the country, houses much more lavish than mine. Some of them have the thing I would love to have, which is a cook, since I don’t know how to cook. And I thought, You know, Fran, you could go away and you could be in a very beautiful place with a cook, but then you’d have to be a good guest. I would much rather stay here and be a bad guest. And, believe me, I am being a bad guest. 

I was a sous-chef at a very fine two-star place on 39th, where I dimly recall preparing a four-course meal for Paul Bocuse; he thanked me in French, I think. My brain, at this point, was shriveled by cocaine, and I made the mistake of telling a garde-manger man that if he didn’t hurry up with an order I’d tear his eyes out and skull-fuck him, which did not endear me to the fussy owner manager.

I am not one of those Rolling Stone guys who rate their own importance. I am not an NME head. I am not a hack with delusions of literary grandeur. I am not a fucking music journalist. I am Everett True. Read my CV, it tells you right here – “Insurrectionary, tastemaker, loser”.

Within 20 seconds, there are thousands upon thousands of people chanting my name. “Everett True. Everett True.” What do they want from me? “Everett True. Everett True.” Why do they call my name? I cannot mend anything.

I’m on the plane and Seattle is twinkling and I want to stay circling the city forever… I’m wondering if anyone’s ever going to want to listen to my stories again.

This is me, at university, with unsafe hair. Photo by Susannah Davis

Some delegates are requesting that we move to jazz hands rather than clapping, as it's triggering anxiety. Please be mindful! #nuswomen15
— NUS Women's Campaign (@nuswomcam) March 24, 2015

White roses and red roses: those were beautiful colours to think of. And the cards for the first and second place and third place were beautiful colours too: pink and cream and lavender. Lavender and cream and pink roses were beautiful to think of. Perhaps a wild rose might be like those colours and he remembered the song about the wild rose blossoms on the little green place. But you could not have a green rose. But perhaps somewhere in the world you could.