conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a plot for a book about Watch, Mouth, Cynthia's entitled Watch Your Mouth?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Watch Your Mouth: The first part of the novel is laid out as an opera, with act and scene numbers as chapter titles and each of the characters being assigned a singing voice.\nJoseph quickly begins to suspect that Cynthia's entire family is engaging in incestuous behaviour, and that her mother Mimi is building a golem in the basement.\nThe first part of the novel ends (operatically) in death.\nThe second part is presented somewhat more conventionally, as Joseph attempts to recover from the events of the first part; this half of the book follows the form of a 12-step program.\nThe first section of the novel is printed in black ink, while the 12-step program is printed in dark red.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: \nThe first section of the novel is printed in black ink, while the 12-step program is printed in dark red..\nThe second part is presented somewhat more conventionally, as Joseph attempts to recover from the events of the first part; this half of the book follows the form of a 12-step program.\nThe first part of the novel ends (operatically) in death.\nJoseph quickly begins to suspect that Cynthia's entire family is engaging in incestuous behaviour, and that her mother Mimi is building a golem in the basement.Watch Your Mouth: The first part of the novel is laid out as an opera, with act and scene numbers as chapter titles and each of the characters being assigned a singing voice
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book? Start with the sentence 'Watch Your Mouth
  A typical day at Camp Shalom that summer went as follows: Cyn and I would leave the Glass home with the sticky stagger of people who are hot, tired and late'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Watch Your Mouth
  A typical day at Camp Shalom that summer went as follows: Cyn and I would leave the Glass home with the sticky stagger of people who are hot, tired and late. We'd be clutching identical plastic mugs emblazoned with Mather College's crest, Cyn's marked with a little red ribbon so we could tell them apart.
  She drove us to Shalom in the same automobile that had bumped and ground our way to Pittsburgh, the same automobile in which Cyn had fondled our pimply employer, the engine rumbling beneath my denim shorts. We usually both wore denim shorts—the weather too hot for long pants and the campers too messy for sensitive cloth—and, at least at first, one of the two official Camp Shalom Counselor T-shirts we'd been issued. As the summer dragged on we grew lazier and lazier about rinsing the T-shirts every night and despite the occasional griping of the pimply actor the shirts appeared with less and less frequency, like the electronically rendered heartbeat of somebody dying in the hospital.
  We never spoke, the whole way there, the whole summer long. We didn't need to. We never needed to. It was a mutual, unspoken agreement, like some family tradition that later requires extensive therapy. We didn't need to, but it meant that between Camp Shalom and the Glass dinner table the only private conversations that Cyn and I had were during or immediately following sex. The ride to camp would have been an ideal time for conversation, but never, the whole way there, the whole summer long. It was usually a twenty-two-minute drive, meaning that we could leave Byron Circle at a quarter to eight and only be seven minutes late. We'd slink into the Mandatory Staff Meeting and the pimply actor would glare at us, less for tardiness than the way we'd come in. In a mutual, unspoken agreement we'd always enter the meeting smiling or even laughing at one another as if we'd been chatting blissfully the whole commute instead of waiting for our coffee to cool and listening to the grating radio announcer update us on our tardiness. The hit song that summer was "Bing Bing Bing," which acccording to the chorus, is the sound my heart makes when I see you babe.
  The Camp Director would declare winners and losers and the kids would all scamper to the Morning Activity, the second scene in the Hello Act. Based on some checked-off preferences mailed in by Mom, the kids could learn new Hebrew songs from Cyn, rehearse vaguely Jewish skits under the direction of the pimply boy, glue things in the shack I managed, play a variety of sports rechristened with Hebrew names, get wet under the sunglassed silence of the lifeguard, or, until it was discovered that what they were doing was pairing off to tongue each other in the semi-seclusion of the Theodore Herzl Grove, go on Nature Walks. Bing bing bing and it was time for Peace: a kosher lunch.
  The Goodbye gong marked the afternoon activities, and by the end of Goodbye everybody was cranky, so the two-thirty closing ritual at the flagpole never had the soft-focus magic of the brochure. The cranky audience had to listen to a brief presentation from one cranky group of activiteers. Cyn's kids would sing. While the pimply director stood in front and mouthed the script, we'd see a vaguely Jewish skit. The lifeguard would break his silence and present the day's Most-Improved Swimming Medal to some blue-lipped boy who would take the certificate in his proud little puckered hands. And, before Nature was shut down until further notice, a blushing couple would hold out a leaf they'd probably pressed between their heaving Camp Shalom T-shirts.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I took a breath and remembered the second step: I had to believe that a power greater than me could restore me to sanity. If I wanted a Styrofoam cup of coffee, I had to throw my change in the coffee can decorated with Bindings giftwrap stickers, contributing to the Employee Coffee Fund. But the government was paying for Good Cop's coffee. That was power. Faith. The second step. "With each other," I said. My reflection wiped its nose. "With each other."
  I caught Good Cop mid-sip and he grimaced and swallowed, reluctantly. Mimi had done that when she stood up, retying her nightgown. "You mean—? You can't be—?" His reflection wiped its eyes. "No."
  Good Cop glared at me, his reflection, I could see, shimmering in the one-way glass. "You're not making any sense."
  Bad Cop was sitting behind grimy glass in the lobby, giving me a manila envelope with my keys, my wallet and Breaking the SPELL, and a dirty look. To have been behind the mirror he would've had to sprint, unless there was a network of hallways I couldn't see, a whole way of getting around that was denied me. I'd believe that, too. Anything.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last two paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'Stories like this happen all the time, and you read about them, but they just slip by in little strips of paragraph at the side of the bottom of the back page of the newspaper'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Stories like this happen all the time, and you read about them, but they just slip by in little strips of paragraph at the side of the bottom of the back page of the newspaper. Some town in South America reports a giant snake, swallowing children whole and cows; neither the snake nor the story appear again. They dig up an ancient, undisturbed tomb, and find stereo equipment in it, as inappropriate as a baby in a basket washing up outside the Pharoah's palace. You blink and wait for the next story. A strange weather something is killing all the fish in a lake somewhere. Somebody died, far away, we don't know why. A bored and ambitious reporter might link up the deaths someday, one in Pittsburgh, one in Pittsburg, one up in Oregon and one on an island, but the editor won't O.K. the travel money to go check it out. Somebody might decide to write the biography of a big-shot in the men's movement, and the Andersons will get that knock on the door they've been half-waiting for since that vacation they took a long time ago. But they'll be wrong about where the resort was, and what year they went; the rest will sound untrustworthy, too. And it is untrustworthy; why, a reader would say, if it was so scary and everything, did Joseph manage to sleep with Allyson three more times before he left?
  I don't know why. One day your family is spinning around your head, blurring everything your eyes take in; the next day it's all at rest and you just want to get laid, eat dinner, quit your job, get on with it. It turns out that your life is made of specifics, no matter what you learn at college about Tolstoy: Each family is different, whether happy or unhappy. Their influence melts into you like ghosts, untraceable, imaginary. You can formulate something out of it, if you must; you can force things into a structure like librettists do, telescoping months of action into a four-act-farce, or like therapists do, stuffing all you think into twelve little steps like folded clothes in a duffel. Call it the Old Testament and scribble it on lambskin. But why? The truth just flows under you like a river. You can float on it but you don't know where it's going. The investigation was over and I was free to leave.