conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about WWII, Korea with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Literature & Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Warriors'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a book about WWII, Korea with the genre: Christian Books & Bibles, Literature & Fiction.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Warriors (Yurick novel): The novel begins with a quote from Anabasis (upon which the novel is based).\nThroughout the novel, the character Junior reads a comic book version of the story.\nIt is the evening of July 4.\nIsmael Rivera, leader of the Delancey Thrones, the largest gang in New York City, calls a grand assembly of street gangs to the Bronx.\nGangs from all over the city, signaled by a Beatles song on the radio, head to the meeting place at Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx.\nAs per instructions, none of them carries weapons, except for a handgun – a peace-offering to Ismael.\nAmong the gangs are the Coney Island Dominators, an African American/Hispanic gang who are the central characters of the novel.\nThe Dominators are Papa Arnold, the leader, Hector, second-in-command, Lunkface, the strongest and most dangerous member, Bimbo, the advisor, Hinton, the gang\'s artist and central character of the novel, Dewey, the most level-headed member and The Junior, the youngest of the group and the gang\'s mascot.\nAt the meeting, Ismael announces his plan, with other Thrones relaying the message to the ones in back who cannot hear.\nHe proposes a grand truce designed to challenge "The Man" (society, otherwise called "The Others").\nAfter a stirring speech, the assembly dissolves into chaos as several dissident gangs begin fighting.\nWhen the police arrive, having been tipped off about a big "rumble", many gangs, believing Ismael has set them up, turn their peace-offering handgun on Ismael, killing him.\nWhen Arnold disappears amidst the rage of Ismael\'s gang members, it is up to Hector, the new leader of the Coney Island Dominators, to lead the remaining delegates from the Bronx back to Coney Island, passing through enemy-ridden gang turfs.\nWhen Hinton suggests removing their gang insignia – Mercedes symbols stolen off cars and converted into stick-pins from shop class at school which the gang wears on their hats – he is severely chastised.\nAs Hinton is more familiar with the neighborhood, having lived there before, he is given the task of leading the gang out of Woodlawn Cemetery, where they have escaped the cops in the chaos.\nThe gang decides to call Wallie, the youth board worker assigned to their case, to come and drive them home.\nWhile waiting for him to arrive, the gang gets restless and jumps the subway.\nAfter a while, the train is stopped due to track work and the gang must take a different route.\nEn route to the other subway station, the gang encounters the Borinquen Blazers, a Puerto Rican immigrant gang.\nHector meets the leader to parley for safe passage and all goes well until a girl, one of the Blazers\' debs, desires one of the Dominators\' insignia pins.\nWhen they refuse, the girl chastises the Blazers\' leader, challenging his manhood.\nThe leader then demands that the Dominators remove their pins in exchange for safe passage.\nThings escalate into an argument with the Dominators heading off to their destination and the Blazers not retaliating because their reinforcements have not arrived.\nAngry, Hector riles up the gang into a violent mood, deciding to spite the Blazers by going through their turf as a "war party" – an act performed by a gang ritual of changing the positions of the cigarettes in their hat brims.\nThe Dominators realize they\'re being tailed by the deb and a scout from the Blazers.\nThey ambush them, taking away the scout\'s switchblade, then chasing him off.\nLunkface convinces the girl to stick around on the promise of a pin and a rank (of "sister") in the gang.\nThe Dominators then encounter an individual and start a fight, the girl cheering them on while they take turns stabbing the man with the stolen blade.\nThe Dominators turn on the girl and gang-rape her, abandoning her in the street as they rush off to the subway.\nThroughout the novel, the gang plays games of "manhood", either to relieve boredom or to settle disputes: waiting for the train, the Dominators have a contest as to who can urinate the farthest.\nLater, on the train, Hector passes out pieces of candy bars he has bought to the gang.\nWhen they start teasing Lunkface with a piece that\'s fallen on the floor, he gets so angry he quits the gang right there.\nHector eases the situation by selecting a member for punishment – Hinton – and Lunkface "insults" him by puffing on Hinton\'s "war cigarette".\nThen Hector holds another "manhood" game involving the gang sticking their heads out the train window until it passes into the subway tunnel.\nHinton wins, nearly killing himself in the process.\nArriving at the 96th Street and Broadway station, the Dominators encounter a transit cop eyeing them suspiciously.\nAware that the police are trying to round up all the gangs in the city, and that they are still holding the knife they used to stab the (possibly) dead man, The Dominators evade the transit cop by jumping off the train just as he boards, but more police show up and they flee: Hinton jumps onto the tracks and runs into the subway tunnel, Dewey and Junior jump a train that\'s going uptown and Hector, Lunkface, and Bimbo run out of the station.\nHector, Lunkface and Bimbo run into Riverside Park.\nNow, without the other gang members to see them, the trio removes their insignia pins so to avoid arrest.\nThey encounter a large, fat, alcoholic nurse sitting on a bench and Lunkface takes an interest in her.\nThe woman is only interested in Hector, referring to Lunkface and Bimbo as "niggers".\nHector lures her to a secluded spot where they jump her and she accepts them willingly.\nWhen Bimbo starts rifling through her purse, she reacts angrily.\nWhen Lunkface, frustrated, hits her to keep her still, the woman retaliates with unexpected strength and starts screaming "Rape.\n".\nThe trio, unable to overpower her, flee but are promptly caught by the police.\nHinton, inside the subway tunnel, takes time for reflection.\nFeeling like an outsider and resenting the gang, he unleashes his contempt by writing on the wall, putting the gang down.\nFeeling guilty, he rubs out his insults and replaces them with the gang\'s "tag" (he has been doing this throughout the novel).\nHinton arrives at Times Square station, the meeting place.\nWhile waiting for the gang he enters a public bathroom (unknown to him) re-purposed as a sort of brothel and is forced into sex with a teenage prostitute, shakes off a homosexual and a young junkie offering sexual favors for money, travels back and forth on the shuttle to Grand Central and, overcome with an inexplicable hunger, eats incessantly.\nWhen he comes to an arcade, he plays a shootout game with a dummy sheriff, winning twice, reflecting his resentment of authority.\nBefore he knows it, he has achieved everything he usually does with the gang, and wonders why he needs them.\nDewey and Junior meet up with Hinton and the trio head off to complete their journey.\nAlthough Dewey outranks Hinton, Hinton takes over the role of leader as he has an unexpected knack for the job.\nA pair of jocks, returning home from their senior prom with their dates, eye the trio challengingly but Hinton doesn\'t back down, feeling a sense of moral victory as he does, and the jocks depart.\nHinton, Dewey and Junior finally arrive in Coney Island.\nAfter a brief moment of celebration, Hinton, all riled up with anger and the sense of victory, impulsively calls out a rumble against the Lords, the rival gang to the Dominators.\nRushing to the Lords\' regular hangout, Hinton calls them out.\nThey don\'t respond and Hinton celebrates this victory by drawing a huge mural on the hangout wall, insulting the Lords and celebrating the Dominators.\nThe trio then venture back to where the Dominators\' debs have been waiting.\nLearning from the girls that Papa Arnold made it back hours ago, Hinton regretfully tells the girlfriends of Hector, Lunkface and Bimbo that they didn\'t make it back and Dewey and Junior walk off with their girlfriends.\nHinton, not having a girlfriend, goes home.\nThere his mother, Minnie, is in the midst of sex with her boyfriend, Norbert.\nHinton tends to the baby who was being neglected, then has a futile talk with his junkie older half-brother Alonso about life in general and the future.\nHinton then crawls out onto the fire escape and falls asleep with his thumb in his mouth.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Warriors
  The Fertigs' marriage begins to fall apart. Fertig tries to decide who is responsible for his son's death. Gradually it dawns on him that while there were "whos," the three people, a petty-minded intake worker, a nurse, and a resident, there is a "not-who"; he is in the presence of a larger system of mutually shared responsibility (or, rather, guilt). He wants revenge. But how, after all, does any individual kill a system? He selects exemplary victims... seven people, the three who were in the emergency room and four directors of the hospital and decides to kill them and, because his life has fallen apart, he wants to be caught and to have his day in court, perhaps envisioning making a stirring speech..
  Further researching the project, I went into several hospitals and walked through them various times during daylight hours and at night to see if I could have access to the personnel so that I, like Fertig, might, if I wanted to, kill them. I found it was quite easy.
  But Fertig, naive, becomes a victim of his own illusions. He finds that the criminal justice system, as I found it really to be, and given the complex interaction of the media, is bizarre, surreal. He becomes the victim of half-senile and corrupt judges, ambitious journalists and lawyers, and mutually contradicting psychiatrists with certain stereotypical expectations.
  Of course Fertig could not be allowed to have his day in court. By definition, within the context of our society, he had to be a rational, malevolent criminal, possibly a left-wing crazy, or a seriously disturbed individual. If there was reason behind his motivation, it might be if not sympathized with, at least understood. But even to understand Fertig's motivation was to point at the inhuman in society: his complaints about the system that killed his son might fall on receptive ears. Others might take the law into their own hands and do likewise. Juries might choose not to convict. He must be considered psychotic.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I chose to tell the major part of the story from the perspective of, first, a small, insignificant gang and then from the point of view of one of its members, Hinton (I had already invented him in a short story). This gang would make the journey up from the projects in Coney Island to the meeting ground in the Bronx (Van Courtlandt Park, or call it Babylon) and then back. The representatives, after the whole venture had been broken up by the police, would seek refuge in Woodlawn Cemetery (where, incidentally, Melville was buried) and then they would have to, like the Greek ten thousand, fight their way through hostile territories ruled by other gangs to their home grounds. The escape from the cemetery is of course a kind of resurrectionary move. Like the Greeks, they would finally reach the "Black Sea," only, in this case, it was the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island. Thus also the sea, considering the hero's last position, curled up with his thumb in his mouth, to be a "return" to the womb, having gained much knowledge, and in the light shining on the sea, he has, indeed, returned to a grave again.
  And yet, since I wanted to fold in the mythic and ritual, to make this journey a rite of passage, I thought in terms of similar (anthropological and literary) rite-of-passage journeys. Yet, whatever I thought about rhetorical devices, parallels, literary references, I was determined to bury them in such a way that they would work subliminally on the minds of the literate reader. If you missed the references, then you had, I hoped, a good story.
  Gangs (of the time I was writing about) were quite different than the gangs of today. For one thing, automobiles were not available to them. For another, there were very few guns around. The gangs were neighborhood-bound and quite ignorant of the city outside their own territories; indeed, they were frightened of strange turf. Whatever contacts, alliances, conflicts, and permissions to travel through alien lands belonging to other gangs took place were conducted through their leaders. They practiced diplomacy from gang to gang, albeit in crude language, but, formally, just like the diplomacy conducted by nations. It's fascinating to see these social forms spring up among the "ignorant" "lower" social strata; no readers of Kissinger they... and yet they had the same sophisticated understanding.
  Economically the gangs of those times were totally marginal. They had just about no entreé into organized crime. The very need to form gangs was a product of their irrelevance. This situation has changed enormously, fueled by the drug trade, which brings neighborhood localities into contact with the global economy, requiring new, sophisticated modes of understanding and operation. And, as with all trade conflicts over control of markets from time immemorial, disputes require heavy weaponry, which is easily available.
  In planning, I employed a corporate management tool called PERT... Program Evaluation and Review Technique. Assembling a business enterprise or a story requires the same kind of planning. I made a grid. On the top of the grid, in each box, I placed the time plus each step of the plot. On the side of the grid I placed various things, which would serve as running, extended metaphors. I followed the progress of these things through the long night... such as the gradual disintegration of a shoe, the change in the weather, and so forth. These things also mirrored the psychic state of the characters as they were on their "long march" from the Bronx to Coney Island.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I chose to tell the major part of the story from the perspective of, first, a small, insignificant gang and then from the point of view of one of its members, Hinton (I had already invented him in a short story). This gang would make the journey up from the projects in Coney Island to the meeting ground in the Bronx (Van Courtlandt Park, or call it Babylon) and then back. The representatives, after the whole venture had been broken up by the police, would seek refuge in Woodlawn Cemetery (where, incidentally, Melville was buried) and then they would have to, like the Greek ten thousand, fight their way through hostile territories ruled by other gangs to their home grounds. The escape from the cemetery is of course a kind of resurrectionary move. Like the Greeks, they would finally reach the "Black Sea," only, in this case, it was the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island. Thus also the sea, considering the hero's last position, curled up with his thumb in his mouth, to be a "return" to the womb, having gained much knowledge, and in the light shining on the sea, he has, indeed, returned to a grave again.
  And yet, since I wanted to fold in the mythic and ritual, to make this journey a rite of passage, I thought in terms of similar (anthropological and literary) rite-of-passage journeys. Yet, whatever I thought about rhetorical devices, parallels, literary references, I was determined to bury them in such a way that they would work subliminally on the minds of the literate reader. If you missed the references, then you had, I hoped, a good story.
  Gangs (of the time I was writing about) were quite different than the gangs of today. For one thing, automobiles were not available to them. For another, there were very few guns around. The gangs were neighborhood-bound and quite ignorant of the city outside their own territories; indeed, they were frightened of strange turf. Whatever contacts, alliances, conflicts, and permissions to travel through alien lands belonging to other gangs took place were conducted through their leaders. They practiced diplomacy from gang to gang, albeit in crude language, but, formally, just like the diplomacy conducted by nations. It's fascinating to see these social forms spring up among the "ignorant" "lower" social strata; no readers of Kissinger they... and yet they had the same sophisticated understanding.
  Economically the gangs of those times were totally marginal. They had just about no entreé into organized crime. The very need to form gangs was a product of their irrelevance. This situation has changed enormously, fueled by the drug trade, which brings neighborhood localities into contact with the global economy, requiring new, sophisticated modes of understanding and operation. And, as with all trade conflicts over control of markets from time immemorial, disputes require heavy weaponry, which is easily available.
  In planning, I employed a corporate management tool called PERT... Program Evaluation and Review Technique. Assembling a business enterprise or a story requires the same kind of planning. I made a grid. On the top of the grid, in each box, I placed the time plus each step of the plot. On the side of the grid I placed various things, which would serve as running, extended metaphors. I followed the progress of these things through the long night... such as the gradual disintegration of a shoe, the change in the weather, and so forth.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I went home, disappointed. The next day, opening day, I was invited to Paramount's publicity department. There were a number of journalists there. One of them asked me what I thought about the movie. I disliked it but I didn't want to say that. I said instead that I found it "interesting." I was immediately taken aside by one of the publicity people who told me that the word "interesting," was the kiss of death. I tried to avoid talking to anyone else.
  In the meantime, the actors were being interviewed. I detected a kind of party line. All of them denied that the movie was about violence for violence's sake.
  But outside the professional-intellectual level, the movie had already captured the imaginations of the kids, including many gang members, in a different way. Many young men, now in their thirties and forties, have told me that seeing the movie (again and again and again) had been a defining moment in their young lives.
  As far as the media was concerned, the events led it to create a climate of alarm. There were reports that various gangs had begun to copy the style of the Warriors. Graffiti bearing the name of Warriors began to appear (some of the graffiti had of course been spray-painted by the filmmakers). Some theaters refused to show the movie as well as the other gang movies when they were released.
  It was clear that nothing could be cut from the movie; it was already too tight to take out anything. It was decided to drop all advertising. It seemed as though the movie had disappeared from the screen, although it was still showing all over the country. Of course the audience numbers dropped.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Rather.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I went home, disappointed. The next day, opening day, I was invited to Paramount's publicity department. There were a number of journalists there. One of them asked me what I thought about the movie. I disliked it but I didn't want to say that. I said instead that I found it "interesting. " I was immediately taken aside by one of the publicity people who told me that the word "interesting," was the kiss of death. I tried to avoid talking to anyone else. 
  In the meantime, the actors were being interviewed. I detected a kind of party line. All of them denied that the movie was about violence for violence's sake. Rather, they said, one and all, that it was a movie about family. 
  But outside the professional-intellectual level, the movie had already captured the imaginations of the kids, including many gang members, in a different way. Many young men, now in their thirties and forties, have told me that seeing the movie (again and again and again) had been a defining moment in their young lives. 
  As far as the media was concerned, the events led it to create a climate of alarm. There were reports that various gangs had begun to copy the style of the Warriors. Graffiti bearing the name of Warriors began to appear (some of the graffiti had of course been spray-painted by the filmmakers). Some theaters refused to show the movie as well as the other gang movies when they were released. 
  It was clear that nothing could be cut from the movie; it was already too tight to take out anything. It was decided to drop all advertising. It seemed as though the movie had disappeared from the screen, although it was still showing all over the country. Of course the audience numbers dropped.