This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
“There is no zeal like a convert's zeal,” goes an old truism. That is doubly true when it comes to the computer. Those over fifty who suddenly discover computers are soon long gone down the information highway.
I'm thinking specifically of the Professor—you've heard me talk about him before—the humanities teacher at a Rock Island college, whose ideas are so grand other minds will never catch up. Like many humanists, he shunned the new-fangled computers in favor of his old Royal standard typewriter. Then last October, he learned that computers were now able to determine the authorship of unsigned pieces of writing merely by comparing sentence structures and tricks of style. Yes, the computer could say, “that was a Hemingway story.”
The Professor was already thinking ahead of the crowd as he turned in his Royal for a personal computer. If the computer can identify the style of an existing work, it ought to be able to compose a new story in that same style. Programed to be Poe, the computer could write new Poe stories, could flood the world with them.
Of course, the Professor did not stop there. He realized that if the computer could plot how an author's style slowly developed and matured over a lifetime, there was no reason why the computer could not write a story that Poe might have written had he lived ten years longer—a better story than Poe had ever written. It could even produce works that would result, say, if Shakespeare and Steinbeck had collaborated on a book. The computer could add moral vision to degenerate writers and rewrite their existing works.
The Professor and his computer are currently producing a new edition of Huckleberry Finn with all the stylistic errors and political incorrectness-es written out. It's only the beginning. Within five years, all existing literature produced the old-fashioned way will be obsolete.
Meanwhile, don't worry about the Professor's classes. The computer is busy redoing all his yellow notes as if he had been carefully revising them all these years.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
