conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Greece, Parthenon, Mediterranean with the genre: Travel, Europe?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Dinner with Persephone'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first three paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Dinner with Persephone
  We drive past a damaged tax office on the way to one of them—the government is promising tax crackdowns in the new year, since a recent study estimated that the combined income from Greece's black market and envelopes-under-the-table economy and widely practiced tax evasion equals some thirty-one percent of the country's gross domestic product. In the past few weeks, four city tax offices have been bombed, partly, I suppose, to destroy records as well as to help subvert the stricter policy the government wants to put in place. "It will be difficult to enforce tax collection," Kostas says. "We have a well-rooted double economy, in which people are used to being paid twice, once the official taxable salary, and again in the envelope under the table. We even have a patron saint of tax evasion, you know."
  I think to myself that some of this hostility to the state-sponsored religion may have crept into the portraits of the saints, some of whom behave very much like household demons—like Saint Spyridion, who if you don't celebrate his holiday will give you acne. He will also spoil sewing and weaving, as a legendary lady who wanted to finish her weaving found out. "Little Saint Spyridion doesn't need a holiday," she said, finished her task, and went to bed. There she dreamed of an angry monk, who said to her, "Since I am so little, you will see how many little holes I can make," and when she woke up, she found her work motheaten. And there is my own favorite holy mischief-maker, Saint Andrew the Frying Pan Piercer, who will make holes in your frying pan if you don't make him pancakes in it on his day.
  After the cake is cut, the guests return to their pursuits of their fortunes, playing their preferred games of chance, or hearing their fortunes, while one of the myriad holiday music programs plays on television. Linked-arm dancing breaks out in one corner and winds its way from room to room when a favorite song in the sexy melancholy voice of the singer Mitropanos is overheard: "I love you like sin, I hate you like prison..." I brave the coffee-cup reading, which is meaninglessly general. To compare, I draw tarot cards, for a woman with a muse's name to read. They envision something so specific, and so ridiculous, that I dismiss it, so by the time it happens the following September, I have completely forgotten about the prediction.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: four more paragraphs. Start with the sentence 'On Saturday morning, I wake up to the sound of crashing dishes; they are being thrown out of windows onto the street, even from the hotel windows'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: On Saturday morning, I wake up to the sound of crashing dishes; they are being thrown out of windows onto the street, even from the hotel windows. I want a quiet day, since tonight and tomorrow might be grueling, filled with pentathlons of Greek hospitality. I walk to the center of town to take a bus to a tiny harbor, where boats are moored like dreamed fragments of the sea, all painted in colors drawn from the sea, pale blue, a blue mixed with emerald, blues tinged with blacks and dark crimsons. On the way to the bus, I notice that the black and white lamb that was grazing yesterday outside the hotel has disappeared.
  Saint Spyridion is the patron saint of Corfu, with a reputation for healing skin diseases. His body is kept in a case in a church dedicated to him, except when it is carried in procession for festivals, and crowds of people file past to petition him and pay their respects before the Resurrection service chanted over loudspeakers in Corfu's central square. The church is a strange amalgam of Catholic and Orthodox decoration—no Pantokrator or Theotokos overhead, but a bad Italianate painted ceiling with scenes of Christ's life encased in gold, and patterned floors marked with light tinted by stained glass that looks exactly like drops of blood staining the floor, which is strewn with bay leaves, the botany of victory celebrating Christ's resurrection like an ancient Olympic athlete's feat.
  On Easter Sunday, a couple named Stratis and Jocasta who are invited to the same Easter dinner in the country have offered me a ride. While I am waiting for them, I watch a harangue by an Orthodox monk on an independent TV channel. He accuses the Vatican and the EEC of a covert agreement to divide Greece among the rest of Europe, and shows a map he claims has been secretly produced to show how "the former Greece" will look, comparing it to the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. He invokes the Asia Minor catastrophe, Cyprus, the civil war, gripped by imaginings of disintegration, shrieking in a feverish rhapsody that the Orthodox Church hates no one, it is filled only with love. Part of what makes Greek politics so undecipherable is its tangle of paranoia and lived experience, the one adhering to the other like a tumor on a healthy organ.
  Her husband sips a beer, and makes the dog do a favorite trick, calling to it "Dig for potatoes." The dog acts out scrabbling for potatoes, and is rewarded with a chunk of lamb. "It is a very clever dog," they say proudly. They insist on our staying for a first bite of lamb, which they announce is done. The wife runs into the house and brings out a sheet; together they remove the lamb from the spit and wrap it in the sheet, and the wife repeatedly slams the lamb onto the ground, bashing it against the earth with all her strength, so that the lamb will fall off the bone, she explains, and will not need to be carved. Again and again, she raises her arms and hurls the animal violently to the ground, until her husband says, "All right, all right, you've killed it." They carry it to a picnic table, and invite us to take a piece with our fingers, but since they forgot to take the lamb's head off at the end, the carcass is slathered with brains.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I look again at the images of the little girl Virgin, looking up trustingly at Joseph, who looks down at her, utterly safe in the divinely ordained procession of these mosaics, not to be raped by this bearded man, not to be sterile, but to be the mother of a divine child. And I think there is a lesson here in Balkan politics, in the utter separation of this sacred dream of the world from the real events Metochites presided over, in this divorce of history and art, of the imagination and time. For when legend extinguishes history, when the imagination is not allowed to play over the world in time, the events on earth that might have no consequences in legend destroy and entrap generations of human life. In legend, when time does not pass, the marriage of a child is a miracle, and death is not death. In history, when time does not pass, there is blood vendetta, the feud that never ends, that begins again in the next generation the feud that never ends. As Mary can never be truly harmed, Simonis can never stop being raped. If we value the great poem of Christianity, we cannot reject one meaning of Christ's incarnation, that while God's relationship to humans may not change, humans' relationship to God must, as Christ's did, even on the cross, ranging from the certainty with which he promises the thieves on their crosses that they will see paradise together, to the mournful cry to God in the question "Why have you forsaken me?", experiencing in death both despair and hope.
  I made myself look out the window as the plane took off, leaping over the cliffs and the Aegean Sea like a champion horse clearing a jump, as we moved away from the adamantine glitter of the sun on the white buildings and the Saronic Gulf to skies of a more diaphanous blue, the plane ascending delicately, securely, as if on a current of breath, a breath calibrated with precisely enough force to blow a candle out.
  A remarkable woman's clear-sighted memoir of growing up Australian; from the vastness of a sheep station in the outback to the stifling propriety of postwar Sydney; from an untutored childhood to a life in academia; and from the shelter of a protective family to the lessons of independence.
  When Tracy Johnston signed up for a rafting expedition down Borneo's Boh River, she had no idea that it had never been fully navigated, nor did she know about the local wildlife, which included swimming cobras and swarms of sweat-eating bees. But perhaps the most revealing discovery was what she learned about herself: about what it means to be an adventurer—a woman adventurer—in a world that seems to be made exclusively for the young.
  Whether it is Edith Wharton, marveling at the magical beauty of a Marrakech palace garden, or Mildred Cable, wondering at dust demons and phantom voices in the Gobi Desert, the women gathered in this generous and delightful anthology show as much of themselves as they show of the strange and wonderful places they visit.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Whether it is Edith Wharton, marveling at the magical beauty of a Marrakech palace garden, or Mildred Cable, wondering at dust demons and phantom voices in the Gobi Desert, the women gathered in this generous and delightful anthology show as much of themselves as they show of the strange and wonderful places they visit.. But perhaps the most revealing discovery was what she learned about herself: about what it means to be an adventurer—a woman adventurer—in a world that seems to be made exclusively for the young.
  When Tracy Johnston signed up for a rafting expedition down Borneo's Boh River, she had no idea that it had never been fully navigated, nor did she know about the local wildlife, which included swimming cobras and swarms of sweat-eating bees.
  A remarkable woman's clear-sighted memoir of growing up Australian; from the vastness of a sheep station in the outback to the stifling propriety of postwar Sydney; from an untutored childhood to a life in academia; and from the shelter of a protective family to the lessons of independence.
  I made myself look out the window as the plane took off, leaping over the cliffs and the Aegean Sea like a champion horse clearing a jump, as we moved away from the adamantine glitter of the sun on the white buildings and the Saronic Gulf to skies of a more diaphanous blue, the plane ascending delicately, securely, as if on a current of breath, a breath calibrated with precisely enough force to blow a candle out. If we value the great poem of Christianity, we cannot reject one meaning of Christ's incarnation, that while God's relationship to humans may not change, humans' relationship to God must, as Christ's did, even on the cross, ranging from the certainty with which he promises the thieves on their crosses that they will see paradise together, to the mournful cry to God in the question "Why have you forsaken me?", experiencing in death both despair and hope. As Mary can never be truly harmed, Simonis can never stop being raped. In history, when time does not pass, there is blood vendetta, the feud that never ends, that begins again in the next generation the feud that never ends. In legend, when time does not pass, the marriage of a child is a miracle, and death is not death. For when legend extinguishes history, when the imagination is not allowed to play over the world in time, the events on earth that might have no consequences in legend destroy and entrap generations of human life. And I think there is a lesson here in Balkan politics, in the utter separation of this sacred dream of the world from the real events Metochites presided over, in this divorce of history and art, of the imagination and time.I look again at the images of the little girl Virgin, looking up trustingly at Joseph, who looks down at her, utterly safe in the divinely ordained procession of these mosaics, not to be raped by this bearded man, not to be sterile, but to be the mother of a divine child