conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Changing the Subject about em>Central, Park</em, CHANGING with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Poetry.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author, former editor of <em>Central Park</em> magazine, has published many books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry--including CHANGING THE SUBJECT (Ellipsis Press, 2010), <em>The Possibility of Music</em> (FC2, 2007), and INSTEAD OF CONFUSION (Asylum Arts, 2002). He is currently a professor of English at San Diego State University.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Changing the Subject
  The greatest mistake of all time took place thousands of years ago, when God let Noah's family survive the flood. God's plan was to start a new human race with a man he thought he could trust, but the limits of Noah's moral awareness were obvious right from the start. No sooner had God's rainbow vanished into the clouds than Noah was getting drunk and cursing his grandson, declaring that Canaan's descendants—one-third of the future human race—would be the lowest of slaves, a monstrous over-reaction that would have tragic consequences for countless generations of innocent people. Clearly, Noah wasn't the man God thought he was.
  If God had been smart, only non-human animals would have been on the ark. The human race would not have survived and gone on to destroy and/or mistreat all other creatures. Instead, God made a point of encouraging human domination, assuring Noah that "the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth." Why was someone as crazy as Noah given such ominous power? Why were all the animals put in such a compromised position? Had the "beasts of the earth" really done anything wrong?
  History has consistently shown how cruel our species can be to other animals, even those we've domesticated. We call dogs our best friends, but think of the horrible treatment they often receive. I've had dogs all my life, and I know they can be great companions. So when I think about the disgusting things that happen to them in research labs, I go out of my way to set things right, especially when the crime hits close to home. The most extreme example of this took place twenty-five years ago in New York, when my friend Karl was living with his dog, a beagle he called the Buddha, in a basement apartment a few blocks south of Canal Street.
  Karl woke one night at half past one with a ruptured appendix. He almost didn't make it to the emergency room. Other complications developed after the surgery, and he had to stay in the hospital for a month. His next-door neighbor was willing to feed the Buddha, but Karl's problems went beyond immediate care for his dog. He had no health insurance. Whatever he had in the bank was needed to pay his medical bills, leaving him with nothing to pay his rent. He was already three months behind, and the landlord lost his patience. He called the Salvation Army and had Karl's furniture taken away. He put an ad in the paper and got a new tenant the following day. By the time Karl's neighbor got home from work that night, there was no dog to feed. The landlord had taken the Buddha to the dog pound, which kept him forty-eight hours, then gave him to a medical research lab.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Changing the Subject
  The greatest mistake of all time took place thousands of years ago, when God let Noah's family survive the flood. God's plan was to start a new human race with a man he thought he could trust, but the limits of Noah's moral awareness were obvious right from the start. No sooner had God's rainbow vanished into the clouds than Noah was getting drunk and cursing his grandson, declaring that Canaan's descendants—one-third of the future human race—would be the lowest of slaves, a monstrous over-reaction that would have tragic consequences for countless generations of innocent people. Clearly, Noah wasn't the man God thought he was.
  If God had been smart, only non-human animals would have been on the ark. The human race would not have survived and gone on to destroy and/or mistreat all other creatures. Instead, God made a point of encouraging human domination, assuring Noah that "the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth." Why was someone as crazy as Noah given such ominous power? Why were all the animals put in such a compromised position? Had the "beasts of the earth" really done anything wrong?
  History has consistently shown how cruel our species can be to other animals, even those we've domesticated. We call dogs our best friends, but think of the horrible treatment they often receive. I've had dogs all my life, and I know they can be great companions. So when I think about the disgusting things that happen to them in research labs, I go out of my way to set things right, especially when the crime hits close to home. The most extreme example of this took place twenty-five years ago in New York, when my friend Karl was living with his dog, a beagle he called the Buddha, in a basement apartment a few blocks south of Canal Street.
  Karl woke one night at half past one with a ruptured appendix. He almost didn't make it to the emergency room. Other complications developed after the surgery, and he had to stay in the hospital for a month. His next-door neighbor was willing to feed the Buddha, but Karl's problems went beyond immediate care for his dog. He had no health insurance. Whatever he had in the bank was needed to pay his medical bills, leaving him with nothing to pay his rent. He was already three months behind, and the landlord lost his patience. He called the Salvation Army and had Karl's furniture taken away. He put an ad in the paper and got a new tenant the following day. By the time Karl's neighbor got home from work that night, there was no dog to feed.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She stood there with her mouth open, pencil poised above her pad. Finally she said: What do you mean?
  She tapped her pad with her pencil, cocked her head and said: You're in a small café. You ordered something for lunch.
  I looked out into the fading light. Again the sun was going down too soon. According to my watch it wasn't even half past four. I looked at the waitress tapping her pad and cocking her head. I cocked my head and started tapping my finger on the table. I tried to crease my brow so that I looked like I was thinking. I tried to tell myself what I was thinking. It wasn't easy. As soon as I put my thoughts into words, it felt like I'd replaced my thoughts with words, with sounds and shapes that had no firm connection with anything beyond their own sounds and shapes, defining themselves only in relation to each other.
  I looked back outside. My car's windows were open. My dog had jumped out and was running down the road. I put a twenty-dollar bill on the table, excused myself and rushed out to my car. I drove as fast as I could but my dog seemed always to be the same distance away, a dot on a long white road, until he disappeared into the deepening twilight. I pulled off the road, got out and shouted my dog's name as loud as I could, over and over again. There was no response, just the echoes of his name. For the first time since I'd adopted him five years before, I felt alone. But I knew the only thing I could do was keep driving and hope for the best.
  The road was climbing out of the desert into the mountains. The fading light was deceptive, the pavement increasingly icy. I felt that at any moment I might skid off the road and over the edge of a cliff. On the other side of the road was the forest, pines framing patches of snow that grew larger and more frequent as the road curved upward. The steady sound of the engine was making me sleepy, bringing me to the edge of a trance filled with shifting patterns of moonlight split by thousands of branches bending in the wind. To keep myself awake, I turned on the radio. The DJ said she was broadcasting from the moon, which I thought was a stupid joke, except that the music was unlike anything I'd ever listened to, resembling the motion of a box kite in the wind, erratically darting up and dodging side to side and diving, resembling the motion of a swing gliding up into a sunlit pause and gliding back down into shade, resembling the motion of a waterfall plunging and rising in faint prismatic mist, resembling the motion of an ambulance on a slippery mountain road, sliding up and down one steep switchback after another, resembling the motion of a lifeboat in a storm, lifted into the sky with each wave, trembling briefly in the foam of each crest, dropping quickly into the frothing dark before the next wave, analogies superimposed, each above and between and below the others, not moving and changing from moment to moment, but moving and changing into the depth of a single deepening moment, finally stopping in front of a huge stone house.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.. Start with the sentence 'But a few nights before, she'd met a man she couldn't read'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But a few nights before, she'd met a man she couldn't read. She'd drawn such a blank from the message of his body that she'd lost it completely. She knew he was somewhere in his own bathroom, but she couldn't find him, and she'd gotten so confused that she'd actually concluded that she could start living in his apartment, paying almost nothing for a space with a lovely view of New York Harbor. Now that she saw the change in the waiter's body, she knew what to look for in the man she'd lost track of, and she got up and left without waiting for the waiter, dashing down the street, outrunning the sound of her footsteps back to the room she'd begun to call home.
  Honey Stone looked out the window into the gathering fog. Her body began to relax as the night came on. The motion of the lights in the harbor pulled her slowly into a trance, releasing all the words in her head from their customary shapes and sounds. She turned and met the face of Harry Knight coming out of the bathroom.
  They left and walked in silence through the maze of industrial streets, across the Brooklyn Bridge to the lights in the fog of City Hall Park. When they came to a bench, they told themselves to stop. They looked at each other. No footsteps approached or moved away. No garbage was blown by wind across the pavement. There were streetlamps near the benches in the park and lights in the harbor fog. But no one coughed or laughed or lit a cigarette in the distance. No sirens made the night seem filled with tragedy and menace. No cabs or trucks went by, and no one screamed or wept or tripped and fell. But Harry Knight and Honey Stone were surprised when they looked at each other, as if they weren't expecting what they saw. They took a step back from each other, took another step back from each other, and stopped.
  They both had a lot to think about. But they weren't thinking. It's true that if you saw them standing there in the fog, looking like they were just about to say or do something else, you'd probably assume that they were thinking, that the silence was filled with unspoken words, possibly important words. But when you reach the stopping point, you don't think. Everything just happens. The noise that's been in your head all your life isn't there. It's like it never was.