conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Waiting for the Barbarians about BRAND, BOOK.WE, PROVIDE with the genre: Literature & Fiction, World Literature.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: THIS IS BRAND NEW BOOK.WE PROVIDE 100% CUSTOMER SATISFACTION.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Waiting for the Barbarians about ldquo;Edward, Said&rsquo;s, Khoury with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: &ldquo;Edward Said&rsquo;s anger against injustice must become ours, and his pen that challenged the sword must become our weapon in the battle for human values.&rdquo;&#8212;Elias Khoury
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book titled Waiting for the Barbarians.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Waiting for the Barbarians: The story is narrated in the first person by the unnamed magistrate of a small colonial town that exists as the territorial frontier of "the Empire".\nThe Magistrate\'s rather peaceful existence comes to an end with the Empire\'s declaration of a state of emergency and with the deployment of the Third Bureau—special forces of the Empire—due to rumours that the area\'s indigenous people, called "barbarians" by the colonists, might be preparing to attack the town.\nConsequently, the Third Bureau conducts an expedition into the land beyond the frontier.\nLed by a sinister Colonel Joll, the Third Bureau captures a number of barbarians, brings them back to town, tortures them, kills some of them, and leaves for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign.\nIn the meantime, the Magistrate begins to question the legitimacy of imperialism and personally nurses a barbarian girl who was left crippled and partly blinded by the Third Bureau\'s torturers.\nThe Magistrate has an intimate yet uncertain relationship with the girl.\nEventually, he decides to take her back to her people.\nAfter a life-threatening trip through the barren land, during which they have sex, he succeeds in returning her—finally asking, to no avail, if she will stay with him—and returns to his own town.\nThe Third Bureau soldiers have reappeared there and now arrest the Magistrate for having deserted his post and consorting with "the enemy".\nWithout much possibility of a trial during such emergency circumstances, the Magistrate remains in a locked cellar for an indefinite period, experiencing for the first time a near-complete lack of basic freedoms.\nHe finally acquires a key that allows him to leave the makeshift jail, but finds that he has no place to escape to and only spends his time outside the jail scavenging for scraps of food.\nLater, Colonel Joll triumphantly returns from the wilderness with several barbarian captives and makes a public spectacle of their torture.\nAlthough the crowd is encouraged to participate in their beatings, the Magistrate bursts onto the scene to stop it, but is subdued.\nTaking the Magistrate, a group of soldiers hangs him up by his arms, culminating his understanding of imperialistic violence in a personal experience of torture.\nWith the Magistrate\'s spirit clearly crushed, the soldiers mockingly let him roam freely through the town, knowing he has nowhere to go and no longer poses a threat to their mission.\nThe soldiers, however, begin to flee the town as winter approaches and their campaign against the barbarians collapses.\nThe Magistrate tries to confront Joll on his final return from the wild, but the colonel refuses to speak to him, hastily abandoning the town with the last of the soldiers.\nThe predominant belief in the town is that the barbarians intend to invade soon, and although the soldiers and many civilians have now departed, the Magistrate helps encourage the remaining townspeople to continue their lives and to prepare for the winter.\nThere is no sign of the barbarians by the time the season\'s first snow falls on the town.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the first sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nThe Magistrate\'s rather peaceful existence comes to an end with the Empire\'s declaration of a state of emergency and with the deployment of the Third Bureau—special forces of the Empire—due to rumours that the area\'s indigenous people, called "barbarians" by the colonists, might be preparing to attack the town.\nConsequently, the Third Bureau conducts an expedition into the land beyond the frontier.\nLed by a sinister Colonel Joll, the Third Bureau captures a number of barbarians, brings them back to town, tortures them, kills some of them, and leaves for the capital in order to prepare a larger campaign.\nIn the meantime, the Magistrate begins to question the legitimacy of imperialism and personally nurses a barbarian girl who was left crippled and partly blinded by the Third Bureau\'s torturers.\nThe Magistrate has an intimate yet uncertain relationship with the girl.\nEventually, he decides to take her back to her people.\nAfter a life-threatening trip through the barren land, during which they have sex, he succeeds in returning her—finally asking, to no avail, if she will stay with him—and returns to his own town.\nThe Third Bureau soldiers have reappeared there and now arrest the Magistrate for having deserted his post and consorting with "the enemy".\nWithout much possibility of a trial during such emergency circumstances, the Magistrate remains in a locked cellar for an indefinite period, experiencing for the first time a near-complete lack of basic freedoms.\nHe finally acquires a key that allows him to leave the makeshift jail, but finds that he has no place to escape to and only spends his time outside the jail scavenging for scraps of food.\nLater, Colonel Joll triumphantly returns from the wilderness with several barbarian captives and makes a public spectacle of their torture.\nAlthough the crowd is encouraged to participate in their beatings, the Magistrate bursts onto the scene to stop it, but is subdued.\nTaking the Magistrate, a group of soldiers hangs him up by his arms, culminating his understanding of imperialistic violence in a personal experience of torture.\nWith the Magistrate\'s spirit clearly crushed, the soldiers mockingly let him roam freely through the town, knowing he has nowhere to go and no longer poses a threat to their mission.\nThe soldiers, however, begin to flee the town as winter approaches and their campaign against the barbarians collapses.\nThe Magistrate tries to confront Joll on his final return from the wild, but the colonel refuses to speak to him, hastily abandoning the town with the last of the soldiers.\nThe predominant belief in the town is that the barbarians intend to invade soon, and although the soldiers and many civilians have now departed, the Magistrate helps encourage the remaining townspeople to continue their lives and to prepare for the winter.\nThere is no sign of the barbarians by the time the season\'s first snow falls on the town.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Waiting for the Barbarians
  I have read it and think it a very good and appealing way of dealing with the subject. Although the ship is lost, the spirit which animates the Royal Navy is clearly brought out....
  Coward was never to get over feeling slighted by the way his hard work during the war was continually misrepresented by the English press—among other things, much was made of a quite innocent tax mistake early on in the war, which gave Churchill grounds for blocking a knighthood. These feelings, along with the devastatingly onerous tax strictures after the war, led this most English of entertainers into tax exile, first in Jamaica and then in Switzerland.
  This is not to say that he ever lost his sense of humor, which glints and flashes through virtually every page of Day's collection, from its descriptions of the many exotic places his travels took him—a letter he sent while on a government-sponsored intelligence-gathering trip to Russia before the war describes the country as being "exactly like a whole world composed of the Whitechapel Road on August Bank Holiday"—to the sly signatures he'd append to his letters from Paris, where he worked in 1940 for the British propaganda service: "DREYFUS," say, or "GERMAINE DE STAEL." What's remarkable here is how innocent the humor most often is; Coward's letters are strikingly free of backbiting or bitchiness, and when he sharpens his pen, it's hardly with the intent to kill:
  So there is much to dazzle here, in just the way we expect from a very Noël Coward sort of person. As the years and pages go by, it's often amusing to see Coward smoothly dealing with the great—in 1938 he writes that he is taking "the [Anthony] Edens and the Gary Coopers out to dinner" after Eden was forced to recite a public apologia for Chamberlain's "Peace in Our Time" (to his credit, Coward had a lifelong loathing of Chamberlain)—and the merely glitzy: "We dined with Mike Todd and Liz [Taylor] who was hung with rubies and diamonds and looked like a pregnant Pagoda." Of particular note is his correspondence with his close friend Marlene Dietrich, particularly during her tortured love affair, during the 1950s, with Yul Brynner—an exchange that sheds sympathetic light not only on Coward's loyalty but on Dietrich as well. "I long so for intelligence and brain food," the worldly star managed to sigh even in the midst of being humiliated by the younger, married Brynner.
  What is striking about this volume of correspondence by the twentieth century's archetype of urbane elegance, however, is the degree to which it's devoted to family and the intimate friends to whom Coward would remain so impressively loyal: his secretary Lorn Lorraine, his great friend Gladys Calthrop, the actress Joyce Carey, the inner circle on whom he liked to heap the improbable nicknames of which he was so fond ("Snig," "Snog," "Poj"). To them particularly he loved to address epistles composed in light verse, a form of which he was a master and which, as his letter home for Christmas 1939 indicates, was not necessarily limited to martinis and cigarette holders:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: If I had written what I should have written these years, even failing at it—but no one is to blame. I am the only one—having written and published millions of words for some twenty-three or so years and to no deep, abiding avail.... What wrongs I have done to such talents as I have (had). What self-indulgence and waste.... I lack all discipline. This comes of wanting to be loved and admired and be made much of.
  Making people uncomfortable—and describing people who are uncomfortable in their own skin—are what Franzen has always been good at doing in his writing: discomfort, conflict, and a hopeless awkwardness have been his great subjects. That they are now the focus of his new collection raises interesting questions—questions very much on readers' minds these days, when the divide between truth and fiction seems increasingly to be blurred—about the relationship between a writer's real life and his fictional work.
  These voices echo throughout Franzen's thin and insubstantial new collection, whose greatest virtue, in the end, may be that the essays collected here clearly identify the real-life sources of the fiction, which is often so strong. The question that arises is: Do we really need to be this intimate with the inspiration for the novels?
  The problem here is not one of structure but of content—and, seriously, of tone. An inevitable danger of memoir is the necessary self-absorption of the writer—one that the best memoirists know how to leaven by means of either self-deprecation or humor, or both. But there's a grimness here, a bitterness, that is not only off-putting in large quantities but spoils the many vignettes in which Franzen seems to want to present himself as a nerd or a loser we can identify with. A wrong note always sounds. There's a narrative about a grade school "homonym bee," in which he recalls, of his youthful self, that he "was very much unaccustomed to considering the interior states of people other than myself"; this no doubt accounts for his apparent lack of feeling, at the time, on learning that his opponent in the bee was killed in a car crash. Such moments remind you a bit of what Franzen sounded like when he was making his apology to Oprah—there's a hard edge here, a sense of resentment masquerading as abjection.
  If these pronouncements seem calculated to offend, I suspect it's because Franzen wanted to be rigorous and ruthless with himself—wanted, that is, to write about the self without recourse to the glib narratives of redemption so characteristic of memoir just now, without romanticizing his faults. To strip away the layers of self-congratulation (to say nothing of flat-out lies) that we so often get in "personal histories," in other words, and to say, in effect, "I am an imperfect person and this is what it looks like to be that imperfect person—to insufficiently love one's fellow man, one's parents, one's spouse, even oneself." This in itself is admirable. Ideally, the memoirist's revelation of himself should seduce readers into a comparable willingness to examine themselves and their lives without vanity, without props. In this way, a literary experience can lead to a profound life experience.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'My point is not to correct Sontag politically; nor do I want to denigrate the significant positive effects of her political arguments and activities'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: My point is not to correct Sontag politically; nor do I want to denigrate the significant positive effects of her political arguments and activities. Everyone, after all, is self-interpreting and self-inventing—writers and artists more than most. Sontag was a true cosmopolitan, and that is an achievement not only of morality but also of imagination. But cosmopolitanism, too, is a set of choices, and Sontag's choices in the realm of politics strikingly resemble her choices in the realm of literature and culture. At a certain point you have to ask why there was this unquenchable need to comfort, this limitless sympathy, for Bosnians but not for lesbians.
  I'm checking on what's in the world. What's left. What's discarded. What's no longer cherished. What had to be sacrificed. What someone thought might interest someone else... there may be something valuable, there. Not valuable, exactly. But something I would want. Want to rescue. Something that speaks to me. To my longings.
  The metaphor of the collector is the perfect one for Sontag. Her impressive sympathy for Hamilton, with his great hunger for inanimate objects, explains so much about her—the unbelievable avidity, the impossibility of satiety, the need to possess it all, to know "everything." And it provides, too, another explanation for her incessant promotion, toward the end of her career, of "greatness": like all good collectors, she wanted you to know how precious her objects were, how much they were worth. Small wonder that some of her most intense aesthetic enthusiasms were inspired by collectors: William Hamilton; Walter Benjamin, in his library and in the arcades; Godard. She wrote feelingly about the latter's "hypertrophy of appetite for culture (though often more avid for cultural debris than for museum-consecrated achievements); they proceed by voraciously scavenging in culture, proclaiming that nothing is alien to their art." It would be hard to think of a better description of Sontag herself.
  And the novel's last lines make a final overt allusion to Sontag herself, one that suggests that she saw her political engagement as an expression of this "romantic" side:
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Waiting for the Barbarians
  From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura. In the dream I pass through the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before me, blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls, trees, houses have dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.
  As I glide across the square, dark figures separate out from the whiteness, children at play building a snowcastle on top of which they have planted a little red flag. They are mittened, booted, muffled against the cold. Handful after handful of snow they bring, plastering the walls of their castle, filling it out. Their breath departs from them in white puffs. The rampart around the castle is half built. I strain to pierce the queer floating gabble of their voices but can make out nothing.
  I am aware of my bulk, my shadowiness, therefore I am not surprised that the children melt away on either side as I approach. All but one. Older than the others, perhaps not even a child, she sits in the snow with her hooded back to me working at the door of the castle, her legs splayed, burrowing, patting, moulding. I stand behind her and watch. She does not turn. I try to imagine the face between the petals of her peaked hood but cannot.
  The boy lies on his back, naked, asleep, breathing fast and shallow. His skin glistens with sweat. For the first time the bandage is off his arm and I see the angry open sore it hid. I bring the lantern closer. His belly and both groins are pocked with little scabs and bruises and cuts, some marked by trickles of blood.
  I kneel over the boy, bringing the light close to his face, and shake him. His eyes open languidly and close again. He sighs, his rapid breathing slows. "Listen!" I say to him. "You have been having a bad dream. You must wake up." He opens his eyes and squints past the light at me.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Waiting for the Barbarians
  From horizon to horizon the earth is white with snow. It falls from a sky in which the source of light is diffuse and everywhere present, as though the sun has dissolved into mist, become an aura. In the dream I pass through the barracks gate, pass the bare flagpole. The square extends before me, blending at its edges into the luminous sky. Walls, trees, houses have dwindled, lost their solidity, retired over the rim of the world.
  As I glide across the square, dark figures separate out from the whiteness, children at play building a snowcastle on top of which they have planted a little red flag. They are mittened, booted, muffled against the cold. Handful after handful of snow they bring, plastering the walls of their castle, filling it out. Their breath departs from them in white puffs. The rampart around the castle is half built. I strain to pierce the queer floating gabble of their voices but can make out nothing.
  I am aware of my bulk, my shadowiness, therefore I am not surprised that the children melt away on either side as I approach. All but one. Older than the others, perhaps not even a child, she sits in the snow with her hooded back to me working at the door of the castle, her legs splayed, burrowing, patting, moulding. I stand behind her and watch. She does not turn. I try to imagine the face between the petals of her peaked hood but cannot.
  The boy lies on his back, naked, asleep, breathing fast and shallow. His skin glistens with sweat. For the first time the bandage is off his arm and I see the angry open sore it hid. I bring the lantern closer. His belly and both groins are pocked with little scabs and bruises and cuts, some marked by trickles of blood.
  I kneel over the boy, bringing the light close to his face, and shake him. His eyes open languidly and close again. He sighs, his rapid breathing slows. "Listen!" I say to him. "You have been having a bad dream. You must wake up.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And worse. Under the monotonous regimen of soup and porridge and tea, it has become an agony for me to move my bowels. I hesitate for days feeling stiff and bloated before I can bring myself to squat over the pail and endure the stabs of pain, the tearing of tissues that accompany these evacuations.
  No one beats me, no one starves me, no one spits on me. How can I regard myself as a victim of persecution when my sufferings are so petty? Yet they are all the more degrading for their pettiness. I remember smiling when the door first closed behind me and the key turned in the lock. It seemed no great infliction to move from the solitariness of everyday existence to the solitude of a cell when I could bring with me a world of thoughts and memories. But now I begin to comprehend how rudimentary freedom is. What freedom has been left to me? The freedom to eat or go hungry; to keep my silence or gabble to myself or beat on the door or scream. If I was the object of an injustice, a minor injustice, when they locked me in here, I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy.
  My evening meal is brought by the cook's little grandson. I am sure it puzzles him that the old Magistrate has been shut up all alone in a dark room, but he asks no questions. He enters very erect and proud, bearing the tray, while the guard holds the door open. "Thank you," I say, "I'm so glad you have come, I was getting so hungry..." I rest my hand on his shoulder, filling the space between us with human words, while he waits gravely for me to taste and approve. "And how is your granny today?"
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'The wind has dropped, and now the snowflakes come floating down, the first fall of the year, flecking the rooftiles with white'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The wind has dropped, and now the snowflakes come floating down, the first fall of the year, flecking the rooftiles with white. All morning I stand at my window watching the snow fall. When I cross the barracks yard it is already inches deep and my footsteps crunch with an eerie lightness.
  In the middle of the square there are children at play building a snowman. Anxious not to alarm them, but inexplicably joyful, I approach them across the snow.
  They are not alarmed, they are too busy to cast me a glance. They have completed the great round body, now they are rolling a ball for the head.
  They settle the head on the shoulders and fill it out with pebbles for eyes, ears, nose and mouth. One of them crowns it with his cap.
  This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere.