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: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book? Start with the sentence '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'.
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.
  Stella, played by Mercouri, is a singer at the Paradise Taverna, who sings "all the songs of life and love and death." She chooses her lovers instead of being chosen by them, and deals with them honestly; her idea of a contract between lovers would have a respect for the other's freedom as its first principle. She wears low-cut dresses that outline her body neither indifferently nor to provoke: the way she handles them reminds me of the costumes of women skaters—she has an athlete's sense of her beauty, that her sensuality and fine body are an accomplishment, they reflect her skill in being alive, not enticement; they are a sign of self-respect, not cunning or need. She is ending an affair with a younger man, who is well-mannered and gentlemanly with her but is essentially using her to escape his suffocating family, whose idea of middle-class correctness conceals brutalities that are completely foreign to Stella, and who are horrified that she loves and respects her work dancing and singing with the "repulsive bouzoukia." She then meets a soccer player named Miltos, who courts her by threatening to drive his car over her, when she initially refuses to go out with him, tearing through the entrance of the Paradise Taverna. He tells her that when he likes a woman, it's "like going into a cage with wild beasts," and lights a stick of dynamite, threatening to throw it at her instead of roses. He presents himself as her erotic equal, someone who defies conventional social or sexual constraints, but he sees erotic life as violent, a struggle to the death, in which victory, the man's fulfillment, means that the woman submits utterly to the man's will, or has to die. He cannot tolerate the sense of her as separate from him, and must either force her to fuse with him, so that they seem to be a being with one will, or destroy her. He tells her that he has decided they will marry, and that if she refuses to do what he wants, he'll leave her, he swears on his mother's life. Stella wants him so much that she goes against her misgivings and consents, and he tells her the church and the day he has chosen. Love, she sings at the taverna, in a song you still hear often on the radio or at concerts, is a switchblade, with a double blade of joy and pain.
  Women crowd around the vat after the liturgy, carrying pitchers, teapots, and plain drinking glasses to get supplies of the holy water, "the holiest of the year," one says to me. A man and a boy ladle the water into the containers, busy as short-order cooks. The sea is also being blessed today; a neighbor of mine tells me that the ceremony of diving into the water to retrieve the cross helps bring the beginning of calm weather, and hurries the process of breaking up the ice. All over the country, men who have made special vows are performing the feat of diving into the waters to bring to the surface the cross their bishop or priest has thrown. In northern Greece, where the rivers and lakes are full of ice, the feat is especially painful, and the evening papers are full of pictures of shivering men with hard-won smiles of pride. The main Athens ceremony, the friend who is taking me to lunch claims, is held at a heated swimming pool—the bishop, she says, has the cross on a kind of leash, so it doesn't sink to the bottom. I can't tell if she is teasing.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know four more paragraphs?
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: Do you know the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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. 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: Add another sentence about Tracy, Johnston, Borneo's, signed, rafting, included, swimming, sweat-eating.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: 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.