conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know a plot for a book about Kicking, Horse, Hobart entitled Kicking a Dead Horse?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Kicking a Dead Horse: Hobart Struther's voyage is interrupted by the death of his horse in a desert.\nOut of frustration, he kicks it.\nHe stands trying to figure out what to do.\nStruther made millions by buying cheap paintings and reselling them.\nIn a midlife crisis, he has abandoned his wife and rich life for a trip to understand himself.\nThe former art dealer laments his condition.\nHe must bury the horse.\nThis proves to be very difficult.\nNext he debates different facets of his personality and life, looking as he mentions several times for authenticity, until every angle seems doomed to failure.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first four paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Kicking a Dead Horse
  I do not understand why I'm having so much trouble taming the wild. I've done this already. Haven't I already been through all of this? We closed the frontier in 1890-something, didn't we? Didn't we already accomplish that? The Iron Horse—coast to coast. Blasted all the buffalo out of here. An ocean of bones from Sea to Shining Sea. Trails of tears. Chased the heathen red man down to Florida. Paid the niggers off in mules and rich black dirt. Whupped the Chinese and strung them up with their own damn ponytails. Decapitated the Mexicans. Erected steel walls to keep the riffraff out. Sucked these hills barren of gold. Ripped the topsoil as far as the eye can see. Drained the aquifers. Dammed up all the rivers and flooded the valleys for recreational purposes! Run off all the pathetic small farmers and transformed agriculture into "Agribusiness"! Destroyed education. Turned our children into criminals. Demolished art! Invaded sovereign nations! What more can we possibly do?
  Well, there've been other sunny days I never deserved. Gratuitous sunny days where I woke up and they just happened to be there. Beams of light streaming through the window. Her golden hair.
  So this is it, I guess, huh? "Prominent New York Art Dealer Found Dead in Badlands with Dead Horse. There were no apparent signs of a struggle."
  In this newly revised edition of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Buried Child, a scene of madness greets Vince and his girlfriend when they arrive at the farmhouse of his hard-drinking grandparents, who seem to have no idea who he is. Nor does his father, Tilden, a hulking former All-American football player, or his uncle who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Only the memory of an unwanted child, buried in an undisclosed location, can hope to deliver this family from its sin.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'Well, there've been other sunny days I never deserved'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Well, there've been other sunny days I never deserved. Gratuitous sunny days where I woke up and they just happened to be there. Beams of light streaming through the window. Her golden hair.
  So this is it, I guess, huh? "Prominent New York Art Dealer Found Dead in Badlands with Dead Horse. There were no apparent signs of a struggle."
  In this newly revised edition of the Pulitzer Prize–winning play Buried Child, a scene of madness greets Vince and his girlfriend when they arrive at the farmhouse of his hard-drinking grandparents, who seem to have no idea who he is. Nor does his father, Tilden, a hulking former All-American football player, or his uncle who has lost one of his legs to a chain saw. Only the memory of an unwanted child, buried in an undisclosed location, can hope to deliver this family from its sin.
  A boy travels to a roadside inn to retrieve the mattress on which his drunken father burned to death. A mortified actor bulldozes his way through the Mexican border bureaucracy by pretending to be Spencer Tracy. A man and a woman quarrel desperately in a South Dakota motel room and part company for reasons neither can understand. The stories in Cruising Paradise map the places where our culture is defined, from a writer who has become synonymous with the recklessness, stoicism, and solitude of American manhood.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A woman driving her mother's ashes across the country has a strangely transcendent run-in with an injured hawk. Two aging widowers, in Stetsons and bolo ties, together make a daily pilgrimage to the local Denny's, only to be divided by the attentions of their favorite waitress. A boy watches a "remedy man" tame a wild stallion, a contest that mirrors his own struggle with his father. Peering unblinkingly into the chasms that separate fathers and sons, husbands and wives, friends and strangers, these lyrical tales bear the unmistakable signature of an American master.
  Carter ought to be managing his thoroughbred business in Kentucky. Instead, he is in a room in Cucamonga, Nowheresville, U.S.A., trying to get back in the good graces of Vinnie, the one man who has the power to destroy him. From the beginning, Sam Shepard's Simpatico launches us into the world of horse racing, where high society meets the low life and the line between winners and losers is as treacherously thin as a razor blade.
  In The Late Henry Moss, two estranged brothers confront the past as they piece together the drunken fishing expedition that preceded their father's death. In Eyes for Consuela, a vacationing American encounters a knife-toting Mexican bandit on a gruesome quest. And in When the World Was Green, a journalist in search of her father interviews an old man who resolved a vendetta by murdering the wrong man.
  Sam Shepard's writing tears through the envelope between prose and poetry and between pop culture and myth. In the play States of Shock, a nostalgic colonel and his mutilated guest celebrate a bizarre anniversary–and in the process reopen the wounds of war, sexuality, and familial betrayal. The screenplay Far North looks fondly and sadly across the gap of gender and generation. And in his screenplay Silent Tongue, Shepard turns the history of the white presence on the frontier into something resembling Greek tragedy.
  If you visit Sam Shepard country, expect to find bayous, deserts, and junkyards where dreams rust alongside abandoned Chevys. Prepare to meet broken gunmen, refugees from distant galaxies, slavering swamp things, and California highway patrolmen. Sam Shepard does nothing less than renew America's myths–and sometimes he invents them from scratch. In these fourteen works for the theater, our most audacious living playwright sets genres and archetypes spinning, with utterly mesmerizing results.