conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Book, div><BR>"One, Ron with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'In Hovering Flight'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.. Start with the sentence 'In Hovering Flight
  Of course one could say the same about Tom's complex, nearly impenetrable scansions'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: In Hovering Flight
  Of course one could say the same about Tom's complex, nearly impenetrable scansions. But it seemed they worked for Addie, who, even with her tin ear, eventually became as adept at hearing, and recognizing, birds in the field as Tom. But then Addie had a bit more invested in the process than the average weekend bird-watcher, as well as a bit more reverence for Tom and his method, at least in those early years.
  Ultimately both Addie and Scarlet agreed with Tom that not even live recordings manage to re-create the magic of the singing of birds in the wild—or, for that matter, outside one's bedroom window at the edge of dawn in the early spring. Scarlet once recounted for Tom and Addie a story she'd heard about the composer John Cage (master recorder and transcriber of, among other things, the music of urban cacophony) and his partner, Merce Cunningham, racing back to their New York City apartment after a disastrous weekend in the country, where they had been driven nearly mad by the noisy singing of the birds in the morning.
  The valleys that encircled the little hamlet of Burnham did not feel sheltering to Scarlet. No doubt there were psychological reasons for this. But maybe too it was the presence of the Delaware—a wide brown river with its own complex history, dividing one world from another somehow, obviously not a true barrier between East and West, not since colonial times at least—though at times it felt like one. And the river itself seemed strangely hemmed in, domesticated—skirted along its course through the northern end of Bucks County by the Delaware Canal. There was a kind of claustrophobia connected with that too; it was as if, following the course of a creek from the Burnham hills down to its end at the treacherous curves of the river road and then the footpath between river and canal, you found, instead of the freedom and openness you were hoping for, a kind of stage set.
  When Scarlet returned to Burnham as an adult, she always felt a lump in her throat, a longing for the connection she'd felt as a child with the trees and the hills, the rushing creeks and the paths winding all around the woods between her house and the campus on one side, the river on the other. And also a powerful dissatisfaction that she'd never been able to write about this little corner of southeastern Pennsylvania. She was at home there, but also trapped. And she wondered: Did other people feel this way about their childhood homes?
  Tom had cut a separate, larger window above a little bench at the back of the blind for Scarlet, and sometimes Addie would abandon her scope and come watch with her. Their favorite birds in those days were the black-capped chickadees, playful little performers who pecked at the dollops of peanut butter Addie and Scarlet left along the edge of Scarlet's window when they arrived at the blind each morning. The chickadees would eat and frolic right in front of their noses, staring back at them, as curious as they were. So fearless and trusting.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me four more paragraphs.. End with the sentence '"'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: They also shared the same eclectic tastes in music then—a fondness for a strange mix of Bob Dylan (even in his mystifying born-again Christian phase), Pink Floyd, the Clash. Sometimes, at night, they'd sit with Richard in his room, all of them eating a stash of junk food from the corner convenience store and listening to "Blood on the Tracks" or "The Wall," over and over. Even at sixteen, when Scarlet might have been driving (had either Tom or Addie thought it worthwhile to teach her), she preferred careening over the hills in the Cider Cove cemetery on bicycles with Bobby and Richard, screaming the lyrics to "London Calling."
  A kind of arrested development, perhaps. Scarlet had been happy, she thought, at twelve, thirteen, even occasionally at fourteen. Why not keep doing the things she'd done then?
  Scarlet did pine for Bobby that summer, at least at first. It wasn't that she found him particularly attractive; he was smaller than she was, scrawny really, and his curly, brown-black hair was always a wind- and salt-dried mess—though when he combed it, or on the rare occasions when he agreed to let Cora trim it, it only looked worse. After their one failed make-out session, he and Scarlet agreed not to try that again.
  But all she said was "Sure, that's fine." Because that was all she wanted—all she longed for really—as well. She didn't particularly want to kiss him again; she just didn't want him to leave her behind. "We're misfits," she might have said to him if she'd had the courage. "We need each other."
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Most days a handful of Addie's followers—a couple of Birkenstock-wearing members of Greenpeace here, a few pierced and alienated admirers of her assemblages there—can be found wandering the trails of the Addie Sturmer Kavanagh Preserve, in search of her grave.
  Others, more rational types for instance, like the bird-watchers, both amateur and professional, who also frequent the preserve, consider the notion that Addie is buried there a myth, urban lore of a sort—rather like the oft-told story of Addie's having spotted a Cuvier's kinglet somewhere along Burnham Ridge. Still, when they visit the preserve early in the morning during nesting season, many, if not most, of these more rational types scan the woods of Burnham Ridge with their high-powered binoculars and scopes, half believing they might spot a four-and-a-half-inch bird with a vermilion patch on its head, and a faint stripe from its eye to the back of its head.
  On her walks there with Tom and her daughter, Scarlet has yet to spot either a cerulean warbler or a Cuvier's kinglet. But often, as she sits on the fallen log beside Addie's grave in the early morning, she listens to the call of the wood thrush, and she remembers her parents, together and singing.
  My friends and fellow writers, Mark Harris and Ruth Knafo Setton, read this manuscript repeatedly and with such kind and intelligent devotion; I am thankful to them, and to my other writer's group members, Paul Acampora and Virginia Wiles, for their wise insights and wonderful humor. For thoughtful readings, and for advice on birds, art, writing, and other matters, I am grateful to Ursula Hegi, Joanna Scott, Alix Ohlin, Billy Weber, Martha Christine, Dana Van Horn, Stephanie Anderson, and Pat Mansfield-Phelan and Tom Phelan.
  My daughter Anna Hauser, artist and singer, though she was only six as I finished work on this novel, has been a vital inspiration for the character of Scarlet—particularly for Scarlet's sensitivity and independence. My husband Jim Hauser is my wisest editor, my most thoughtful adviser on language and art, and my steadfast solace; my deepest thanks go to him.