conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about AudioFile, Portland, Maine with the genre: Biographies & Memoirs, Arts & Literature?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first three paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations
  As a result, Ms Gobat, you'll be pleased to know that, in a fit of anxiety, I sold my child to a passing Romanian couple who took a fancy to her. She is, I understand, making a sort of life for herself in Bucharest. I, meanwhile, have taken to riding fast motorbikes again, smoking heavily and flirting dangerously with Take That fans. I can only hope you're very pleased with yourself.
  An experimental subject, J, was invited to place a pair of expensive spectacles on his nose, which were repeatedly removed by the experimental staff and allowed to fall to the floor. Each time, the experimenter noted carefully the subject's subsequent action. The experimenter also giggled a lot. In some 98 per cent of cases – based on a sample of 563 – the subject replaced the spectacles on his nose, disproving all past behavioural studies regarding the learning abilities of the major primates. Demonstrated: that the behaviour of rats in previous laboratory experiments bears no obvious relation to that of humans, given that rats would have switched to contact lenses after the first half-dozen experiments.
  Having done much research on the major extremities and discovered that under all experimental conditions – beneath blanket, behind cot, in bath water, with bath water all over bathroom floor – there remain two hands and two feet, we attempted to demonstrate that the inside of a subject's lower lip remained constantly bruised when scraped with a fingernail ten times a day.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: four more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I could work out who a couple of the panelists were, given how often their voices turn up on the sort of shows where you have to solve crossword clues, or know what Clem Attlee so famously said to Bessie Braddock on Derby Day in 1948, or for two points per ingredient, guess the contents of this medieval recipe for quince syllabub, but I couldn't put a name to the others – even though one seemed vaguely familiar. His was a deepish voice, southern, with a very slight cynical lisp and a...
  Hold on, though. It was me. It was a programme I recorded, what? Six months ago? Nine? It was recorded in a pre-operative era when I still had all of a tongue and could rent it out for lisping and cynical purposes. Coming unexpectedly upon my pre-cancerous self like that was like looking from the cold station platform into a brightly lit and crowded train and seeing the twin brother I'd forgotten I had idly turning the pages of his paper. Twin, but not identically so, because the other odd thing was the potency of my sense of the me listening being a different me from the me on the radio.
  I wrote the other week about the possibility of my being different now from then, and a lot of readers got the stick's wrong end and sent me sweet and encouraging letters to tell me that no, no I'm just the same old me, and maybe I am, because I came home from the mall just as the children came in with Cosima bearing news about some cakes she'd just made, 'made' being demotic three-year-old for having banged the flour sieve around a bit and stuck cherries on top.
  I promised here when they were born that I'd never repeat to you the precocious things my children would, I was sure, say, and thus I offer merely as reported speech her assurance that while she understood I couldn't eat the cakes now, she'd make me more when I was better. And it was so cheering to hear, as I always hear from Cosima, the promise of a time when I am well again.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I could work out who a couple of the panelists were, given how often their voices turn up on the sort of shows where you have to solve crossword clues, or know what Clem Attlee so famously said to Bessie Braddock on Derby Day in 1948, or for two points per ingredient, guess the contents of this medieval recipe for quince syllabub, but I couldn't put a name to the others – even though one seemed vaguely familiar. His was a deepish voice, southern, with a very slight cynical lisp and a...
  Hold on, though. It was me. It was a programme I recorded, what? Six months ago? Nine? It was recorded in a pre-operative era when I still had all of a tongue and could rent it out for lisping and cynical purposes. Coming unexpectedly upon my pre-cancerous self like that was like looking from the cold station platform into a brightly lit and crowded train and seeing the twin brother I'd forgotten I had idly turning the pages of his paper. Twin, but not identically so, because the other odd thing was the potency of my sense of the me listening being a different me from the me on the radio.
  I wrote the other week about the possibility of my being different now from then, and a lot of readers got the stick's wrong end and sent me sweet and encouraging letters to tell me that no, no I'm just the same old me, and maybe I am, because I came home from the mall just as the children came in with Cosima bearing news about some cakes she'd just made, 'made' being demotic three-year-old for having banged the flour sieve around a bit and stuck cherries on top.
  I promised here when they were born that I'd never repeat to you the precocious things my children would, I was sure, say, and thus I offer merely as reported speech her assurance that while she understood I couldn't eat the cakes now, she'd make me more when I was better.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Believe me, I've had them all. And the best is my oncologist. I mean it. He'd just given me the news the other day and I found that the only thing I could write down in response was 'God, but you did that so well.' Which sounds sarcastic, but it absolutely isn't intended as such. After all, as I told you the other week, I was pretty certain what the news would be. We sat in the room, and the door swung open and he looked straight at me with no artfully composed face, and said, 'We're going to have to start treatment again,' as he walked in and sat down.
  No messing. And especially no, 'How are you, then?' Why do doctors ask that? They've got the damned case-notes in front of them and they know how you are with rather more accuracy than you do. Sometimes they vary this: 'How are you feeling then?', to which the only answer is, 'Tell me whether the cancer's back and I'll tell you how I'm feeling.'
  The cancer is back, of course. Small volume, slow-growing. Slow-ish, at least. It's here in the lung, and there in the lung too, and back in the neck as well. But I responded well – hah! – to chemotherapy last time, so next week I start chemotherapy again. Three lots of it at three-weekly intervals as a puking outpatient, and this time my hair will fall out, just like a real cancer patient's, and I'll have to start wearing one of those jokey baseball caps that child leukemia patients always wear when they have their pictures taken by the local paper.
  When all this started coming up four years ago, a medically literate friend sat with me as I checked through the details of my cancer on the Internet. In those days it was going to be a titchy, low-grade sort of cancer, which would be scared off by its first sight of the radiotherapy machine. 'The great thing is', he said, 'you'll get just as much sympathy as if it were real cancer!' Oh, but how we chuckle at such small ironies these days.
  But baldness is one of the standard icons of real cancer, and the Marsden is always full of people in big hats and bad NHS wigs. When the oncologist told me about the hair loss, I thought of it only in terms of being bald (or, more honestly, balder), but as I write it occurs to me that the chemo won't distinguish between head hair and eyebrow hair or chest hair or in general reducing me to the state of an alopecic ten-year-old. Strangely, I don't much mind about losing the hair on my head for a while, but I'm annoyed that I'll be bald-chested. I know the modern vogue is for smooth men, and that a hairy chest is what you have if you wear a medallion and drive a Ford Capri, but I am of an era when chest hair spelt masculinity, and those associations stay in the mind long after rational consideration has kicked in. As emasculating as have been most of the treatments I've had, this will be the one, I think, which most adds insult to injury.