conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Men and Cartoons about Book, York, Brooklyn with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary.. End with the sentence ' He lives in Brooklyn, New York.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author was born in New York and attended Bennington College. He is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger. He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine. His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Men and Cartoons
  We were married two years later, on the Italian island itself. The ceremony was deferentially Catholic; I didn't care. The wider circle of my acquaintances learned the happy details in a mass e-mail. Then Angela and I returned to our quiet rented bungalow in New Brunswick, New Jersey. I was at Rutgers then, on a second postdoc, and hungry for a tenure-track position. My job interviews were hardly unsuccessful: I was never summarily dismissed, instead always called back for second and third visits, always asked to teach a sample class. Afterward, polite notes flew back and forth, candidate and committee reassuring one another of how fine the experience had been, how glad we both were to have met. Only I never got a job.
  So by the time I got the invitation to interview for a position at Corcoran, the New England pastures of my alma mater didn't appear such a poor fate. It was the week of Halloween, the weather glorious, so at the very least the day of the interview would be a nice jaunt. We left early, to roam a few New Hampshire back roads, then ate a picnic lunch beside Corcoran Pond before I checked in for an afternoon of meetings.
  Corcoran looked implacable, though I knew it was changed. The school had been through financial shake-ups and tenure scandals; those had, in turn, purged most of the administrators and faculty I'd known. But the grounds, the crab apple trees and white clapboard, were eternal as a country-store calendar. While Angela took a memory tour, heading for her old dorm, I turned up for my scheduled tribunal. There, I was debriefed by peers, a couple of them younger than myself. The room was full of the usual tensions: some of these people had an investment in my candidacy, some had bets on other tables. No one was in the least sentimental about my status as alumnus—that was reserved, I supposed, for the dinner tonight, arranged in my honor at the president's house. After a finishing round of polite handclasps I was ferried to the president's office. On top of tonight's dinner, she'd also wanted to meet me alone. I figured it was a good sign.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: No one took notice of this. The guests, the other faculty, were inured, polite. In this halting manner Super Goat Man made his way past us, to the dining room. Apparently he wasn't capable of mingling, or even necessarily of speech. He took a seat at the long table, his bunched face, his squinting eyes and wrinkled horns, nearly at the level of his place setting. So Super Goat Man's arrival curtailed cocktail hour, as we began drifting in behind him, almost guiltily. The president's husband showed us to our places, which had been carefully designated, though an accommodation was evidently being made for Super Goat Man, who'd plopped down where he liked and wasn't to be budged. I was at the right hand of the president, and the left of the chair of the hiring committee. Again, a good sign. Angela sat across from me, Super Goat Man many places away, at the other end of the table.
  I actually managed to forget him for the duration of the meal. He was, so far as I could tell, silent at his feed, and the women on either side of him turned to their other partners, or conversed across the width of the table. Some of the women fled their chairs to avoid the smoke; other guests rose and mingled again in the corners of the room. It was in this interval of disarrangement that Super Goat Man pushed himself off his chair and made his way to the seat at my left, which the president had vacated. He had to collapse to his knees only once on the way, and he offered no evidence of sacrificed dignity as he rose from the floor.
  Angela remained in her seat. Unlike any of the American women, she'd accepted a cigar, and now leaned it into the flame of a lighter proffered by an older professor she'd been entertaining throughout the meal. Her eyes found mine as Super Goat Man approached. Her expression was curious, and not unsympathetic.
  Super Goat Man prodded my arm with a finger. I turned and considered him. Black pupils gleamed behind a hedge of eyebrows. His resplendent tufts had thinned and spread—the hair of his face had been redistributed, to form a merciful gauze across his withered features.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Toward, Cuban, served, passed, bragged.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: No one took notice of this. The guests, the other faculty, were inured, polite. In this halting manner Super Goat Man made his way past us, to the dining room. Apparently he wasn't capable of mingling, or even necessarily of speech. He took a seat at the long table, his bunched face, his squinting eyes and wrinkled horns, nearly at the level of his place setting. So Super Goat Man's arrival curtailed cocktail hour, as we began drifting in behind him, almost guiltily. The president's husband showed us to our places, which had been carefully designated, though an accommodation was evidently being made for Super Goat Man, who'd plopped down where he liked and wasn't to be budged. I was at the right hand of the president, and the left of the chair of the hiring committee. Again, a good sign. Angela sat across from me, Super Goat Man many places away, at the other end of the table. 
  I actually managed to forget him for the duration of the meal. He was, so far as I could tell, silent at his feed, and the women on either side of him turned to their other partners, or conversed across the width of the table. Toward the end we were served a course of cognac and dessert, and the president's husband passed around cigars, which he bragged were Cuban. Some of the women fled their chairs to avoid the smoke; other guests rose and mingled again in the corners of the room. It was in this interval of disarrangement that Super Goat Man pushed himself off his chair and made his way to the seat at my left, which the president had vacated. He had to collapse to his knees only once on the way, and he offered no evidence of sacrificed dignity as he rose from the floor. 
  Angela remained in her seat. Unlike any of the American women, she'd accepted a cigar, and now leaned it into the flame of a lighter proffered by an older professor she'd been entertaining throughout the meal. Her eyes found mine as Super Goat Man approached. Her expression was curious, and not unsympathetic. 
  Super Goat Man prodded my arm with a finger. I turned and considered him. Black pupils gleamed behind a hedge of eyebrows. His resplendent tufts had thinned and spread—the hair of his face had been redistributed, to form a merciful gauze across his withered features.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'So my love wasn't damaged by August's return from jail (he'd never gone upstate, instead served his whole time in the Brooklyn House of Detention, on Atlantic Avenue)'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: So my love wasn't damaged by August's return from jail (he'd never gone upstate, instead served his whole time in the Brooklyn House of Detention, on Atlantic Avenue). I didn't even bother to resent his possession of Sincerely, which I saw as intrinsically flawed by grown-up sex and diffidence. August wasn't a worthy rival, and so I just went on secretly loving Sincerely with my childish idealism. The moron-genius of my young self felt it knew better than any adult how to love, felt certain it wouldn't blow the chance if it were given one. Not one day I've lived since has satisfied that standard. Of course, it is strange and sad for me now to see a shade of future triangulation in that emotional arrangement—I'd cast August as an early stand-in for R, a man I would pretend was irrelevant even as I fitted myself into his place in life.
  What I'd promised to hold on to then, M, is the same thing I'd raged against losing when you began to grow away from me, when I failed the test presented by your sultry new self that senior year. How ashamed that promiser would be to learn—had some malicious time traveler drifted back to whisper it in his ear—about the pointless ruin of my years with A. Those promises we make to ourselves when we are younger, about how we mean to conduct our adult lives, can it be true we break every last one of them? All except for one, I suppose: the promise to judge ourselves by those standards, the promise to remember the child who would be so appalled by compromise, the child who would find jadedness wicked.
  Well, I've failed. This whole letter is about A, I see that now. You wonder whether you can stand never to know the touch of a fresh hand, the trembling flavor of a new kiss, and I'm desperately trying to keep from telling you the little I know: it's sweeter than anything, for a moment. For just a moment, there's nothing else. As to all you're weighing it against, your wife and child, I know less than nothing. The wisdom of your ambivalence, the whimsical, faux-jaded wit you share in your letter, as you contemplate the beauties around you, all that poise will be shattered if you act—I can promise you that much. You're more innocent than you know. I speak to you from the dark end of the street, but it's a less informed place than you'd think. All I can do for you is frame the question I've framed for myself: Where to steer the speeding motorcycle of one's own innocence? How to make it a gift instead of a curse?
  I'm ending this letter without saying anything about your incredible tale of the salaryman masturbating on the subway. Well, there, I've mentioned it. I'm also grateful to know that Godzilla's not what he's cracked up to be, that he's just another mediocre slugger with a good agent and a memorable nickname. What a joy it would be to see the Yankees really take a pratfall on that move. Bad enough when they pillage the other American teams, but that the world is their oyster too has become unbearable. Of course, the Mets go on signing haggard veterans and I think there's no hope at all, but you can be certain Giuseppe and I will be out at Shea having our hearts broken this May, as always. In our hearts it's always spring, or 1969, or something like that. I only wish we had some outfielders who could catch the ball.
  Contents: The vision—Access fantasy—The spray—Vivian Relf—Planet big zero—The glasses—The dystopianist, thinking of his rival, is interrupted by a knock on the door—Super goat man—The national anthem.