So I’ve got this decades old VHS tape of a PEN conference taped off of PBS ages ago.
It’s got some nice readings from John Updike, Woody Allen and Alice Walker. It’s got John Irving reading an excerpt from his memoirs about the death of his old classmate Russell in Vietnam after Russell “lied about his height” to get into the Army (that story eventually was embellished into my favorite Irving novel).
But the real treasure on that VHS tape — the reason I’ve held on to it even though I no longer have a VCR capable of playing it — is a short lecture/comedy routine by the late Kurt Vonnegut in which he explains how computers will soon be programmed to write our stories for us.
To demonstrate, he graphs out the story of “Cinderella” on a blackboard. The vertical axis is happiness-unhappiness, the horizontal axis goes from B to E. (“B for beginning,” Vonnegut says, “and E for electricity.”)
It’s brilliant and wise and very funny and yet, sadly, inexplicably, indefensibly, not on YouTube.
Can anyone recommend a good VHS-digital service so I can try to remedy that?
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