conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Brooklyn, York, Washington with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'Feeding Frenzy'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the first two paragraphs for this book
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Feeding Frenzy
  Yes, I read Morgan's biography to make me feel better about my own drug addiction. 'Damn it,' I would reprove myself, aged thirty-two and collapsing under the weight of a massive cocaine habit, 'Burroughs hadn't even begun to use drugs at your age – you must still have some mileage left in you!' Or else I'd note that at least I didn't have the dual outsider's curse of being homosexual as well; or that I didn't have quite so many criminal convictions as Burroughs – and certainly not one for the manslaughter of my wife.
  It's tawdry stuff, and from the vantage point of drug-free sobriety, I not only find my own preoccupation with the demented fandango that Burroughs cut across the fringes of the counter-culture for sixty-odd years to be pathetic; I view the life of the man himself as irredeemably pathetic and lacking in spiritual value. There's nothing cool about witnessing the death from liver cancer of your only son, and Burroughs's later years, which he spent corralled in the Midwest, Dali-like putting his valuable signature to bogus works of replicated 'art', seem to be a kind of karmic fate. No wonder he ended up doing Gap commercials.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Bill's, Joan, Volmer.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Feeding Frenzy
  Yes, I read Morgan's biography to make me feel better about my own drug addiction. 'Damn it,' I would reprove myself, aged thirty-two and collapsing under the weight of a massive cocaine habit, 'Burroughs hadn't even begun to use drugs at your age – you must still have some mileage left in you!' Or else I'd note that at least I didn't have the dual outsider's curse of being homosexual as well; or that I didn't have quite so many criminal convictions as Burroughs – and certainly not one for the manslaughter of my wife. 
  It's tawdry stuff, and from the vantage point of drug-free sobriety, I not only find my own preoccupation with the demented fandango that Burroughs cut across the fringes of the counter-culture for sixty-odd years to be pathetic; I view the life of the man himself as irredeemably pathetic and lacking in spiritual value. My wife has, with exemplary intuition, come to convince me of murderous intent on Bill's part when he told Joan Volmer, his common-law wife, to put the shot glass on her head so 'we can do our William Tell trick'. There's nothing cool about witnessing the death from liver cancer of your only son, and Burroughs's later years, which he spent corralled in the Midwest, Dali-like putting his valuable signature to bogus works of replicated 'art', seem to be a kind of karmic fate. No wonder he ended up doing Gap commercials.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: five more paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Nick Hornby has written a novel that can rank as a reasonable piece of juvenilia. There are passages in it that are affecting and describe emotions that are recognisably those of thinking, breathing adults. Some scenes, notably the post-coital ones, and the girlfriend's father's funeral (deaths small and large), are well-paced and believable.
  Of course, with the restoration of the monarchy the building was finally consecrated as a church and the freethinkers' remains voided. Then, with the institution of a notionally constitutional monarchy in 1830, the cross was removed and the building became a national necropolis. And so on – with each successive regime the building was remodelled, crosses came and went, mottoes were edited and replaced. It wasn't until 1885 and the Third Republic that the current compromise was achieved. The church was deconsecrated – but the cross remained. The motto went back up on the pediment, and the revolutionaries were reinterred.
  This tale, of how a supposed national symbol becomes instead a cracked actor on the French political stage, contrasts mightily with the nature of the symbolism in our own built environment – and by extension the regimes of which it speaks. Ours is a state in which the only substantial changes have proceeded with profound gradualism. The changes wrought upon our nationalist symbols have been by time, fire and property speculation. Ours is a capital remodelled not by a Napoleon, with the aim of producing nodal points from which artillery could subjugate the revolting citizenry, but by a species of powerful estate agents, intent not on creating a reified architectonic, but on maximising the value of freeholds, leaseholds and even rents.
  It's against this palimpsest of building that the aims of any given government to write itself into history with the ink of mortar must be assessed. It's one thing to come along and remodel existing structures with a view to transforming their symbolic lode – it's quite another to just take over an existing structure and then hope that its mere completion (on time and within budget) will somehow add lustre to the greater glory of the regime. I'm not for a minute suggesting that we'd have a better society now if we'd been subjected to the changes of regime that the French have – national destinies are more convoluted than any possible linear narrative – but by their response to the symbolic demands of national buildings shall we know the true character of those who govern us.
  Last Friday morning I indulged in a little reverse commuting. That's right – reverse commuting. You see, I left my home in central London, and went to work in suburban Watford, right in the heart of the commuter belt. Not only that, but my work that morning consisted in touring a Barratt home, the archetypal commuter dwelling. It was the purest piece of reverse commuting I've ever managed; and as I wheeled the Cavalier north on to the A41, my spirits were swinging in time with the double-breasted jacket dangling from the hook behind my head. 'Agadoo' was playing on Radio 2 and 1 was in heaven.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about Protectorate.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Nick Hornby has written a novel that can rank as a reasonable piece of juvenilia. There are passages in it that are affecting and describe emotions that are recognisably those of thinking, breathing adults. Some scenes, notably the post-coital ones, and the girlfriend's father's funeral (deaths small and large), are well-paced and believable. 
  Of course, with the restoration of the monarchy the building was finally consecrated as a church and the freethinkers' remains voided. Then, with the institution of a notionally constitutional monarchy in 1830, the cross was removed and the building became a national necropolis. And so on – with each successive regime the building was remodelled, crosses came and went, mottoes were edited and replaced. It wasn't until 1885 and the Third Republic that the current compromise was achieved. The church was deconsecrated – but the cross remained. The motto went back up on the pediment, and the revolutionaries were reinterred. 
  This tale, of how a supposed national symbol becomes instead a cracked actor on the French political stage, contrasts mightily with the nature of the symbolism in our own built environment – and by extension the regimes of which it speaks. Ours is a state in which the only substantial changes have proceeded with profound gradualism. The Protectorate was simply not long enough to institute its own constructional permanence. The changes wrought upon our nationalist symbols have been by time, fire and property speculation. Ours is a capital remodelled not by a Napoleon, with the aim of producing nodal points from which artillery could subjugate the revolting citizenry, but by a species of powerful estate agents, intent not on creating a reified architectonic, but on maximising the value of freeholds, leaseholds and even rents. 
  It's against this palimpsest of building that the aims of any given government to write itself into history with the ink of mortar must be assessed. It's one thing to come along and remodel existing structures with a view to transforming their symbolic lode – it's quite another to just take over an existing structure and then hope that its mere completion (on time and within budget) will somehow add lustre to the greater glory of the regime. I'm not for a minute suggesting that we'd have a better society now if we'd been subjected to the changes of regime that the French have – national destinies are more convoluted than any possible linear narrative – but by their response to the symbolic demands of national buildings shall we know the true character of those who govern us. 
  Last Friday morning I indulged in a little reverse commuting. That's right – reverse commuting. You see, I left my home in central London, and went to work in suburban Watford, right in the heart of the commuter belt. Not only that, but my work that morning consisted in touring a Barratt home, the archetypal commuter dwelling. It was the purest piece of reverse commuting I've ever managed; and as I wheeled the Cavalier north on to the A41, my spirits were swinging in time with the double-breasted jacket dangling from the hook behind my head. 'Agadoo' was playing on Radio 2 and 1 was in heaven.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: the last five paragraphs
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It's a wonder we make it through to the final section emotionally intact, but we do and we're rewarded with a vision of the high temple of the late nineties: a mammoth hall, divided into aisles by mighty shelves of mutant Dexion, and to the rear, the maw of a still larger warehouse, its hissing lifts and whining forklifts debouching flatpacks with mantric consistency. McFee and I wander these aisles, marvelling at the huge chattel stacks, and wondering how the hell we'll get anything down from a shelf forty feet up without the assistance of a giant hornhead.
  We make it back from Ikea, and McFee assembles my two, new, sub-Bauhausian armchairs with commendable speed. (He finds them a doddle compared with psychosurgery.) Then he tries to seduce me in one of them. 'Isn't this a little unethical?' I say. 'I don't know about unethical,' he replies, his accent gruff with lust, 'but it's arguably quite Swedish, very decadent, and absolutely contemporary.'
  On Holywell beach in Cornwall we sunbathers and surfers and loungers disported ourselves, our slightly frenzied yawps of pleasure clear evidence that we were determined to suck the last few fervid drags from the dying butt of the August sun. Holywell beach is magnificent – a great sweep of sand, backed by pink granite cliffs and hundred-foot-high dunes. There's a salt-water tidal creek, there are offshore rocks, there's a caff. Among the thousand-odd holidaymakers the morphological strata of body forms were exposed between the tidemark and the waterline. At the top of the beach there were Michelin men and women who wouldn't look out of place on a Donald McGill postcard; further down there were the stick figures of anorexic teenagers sunning their shrunken embonpoints; and in the surf, the neoprene-suited surfers lunged up to catch waves of such a domestic size that they couldn't quite be called breakers – more fractures in the sea's silky surface.
  A series of stentorian notices and flapping flags indicated the area of the beach the coastguard advised swimmers to occupy, and the vast majority of them complied with this. Further flags showed where surfers might go, and these free spirits once again obeyed. A coastguard station, right on the beach, was manned by athletic-looking types sitting atop all-terrain buggies. We took the notices and flags to be suggestions only the sea was, after all, about as anfractuous as a municipal paddling pool and trudged off down to the far end of the beach, away from flags, bathers, caff and all. My wife and the ten-year-old daughter of our friend went in to the sea and holding hands leapt over the chest-high waves. One of the buggies came speeding across from the coastguard station within a matter of minutes. Its rider told my wife – in the nicest possible way – that he'd be obliged if she would confine her pleasures to the flagged zone, along with the rest of the lemmings. 'We've only had one drowning on this section of coastline all summer,' he said, 'and that's something we're proud of.'
  Indeed, as a society we're proud of preserving life at all costs – and make no mistake about it, cost is the operative factor here, what with helicopters being regularly scrambled for errant windsurfers – and if we can't preserve our lives indefinitely, we wish to lose them painlessly, drugged up to the eyeballs in high-tech hospitals, not floundering in some primal element. About 90 per cent of the healthcare expended on the average individual in Britain takes place during the last six weeks of his or her life. It follows that we elect governments on the basis that they'll provide us with a painless death. It's long been the policy in the NHS to make quality-of-life decisions on the allocation of beds: if a patient is a mere sentient blob then why not swivel the stopcock of budgetary apportionment? But really, rather than allowing nice men on all-terrain buggies to shepherd us into swimming pens, shouldn't we retain some quality-of-life decisions for ourselves? After all, as Maynard Keynes so sagely observed, 'In the long term we'll all be dead.'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: '. It's long been the policy in the NHS to make quality-of-life decisions on the allocation of beds: if a patient is a mere sentient blob then why not swivel the stopcock of budgetary apportionment? But really, rather than allowing nice men on all-terrain buggies to shepherd us into swimming pens, shouldn't we retain some quality-of-life decisions for ourselves? After all, as Maynard Keynes so sagely observed, 'In the long term we'll all be dead. It follows that we elect governments on the basis that they'll provide us with a painless death. About 90 per cent of the healthcare expended on the average individual in Britain takes place during the last six weeks of his or her life.'
  Indeed, as a society we're proud of preserving life at all costs – and make no mistake about it, cost is the operative factor here, what with helicopters being regularly scrambled for errant windsurfers – and if we can't preserve our lives indefinitely, we wish to lose them painlessly, drugged up to the eyeballs in high-tech hospitals, not floundering in some primal element. 'We've only had one drowning on this section of coastline all summer,' he said, 'and that's something we're proud of. Its rider told my wife – in the nicest possible way – that he'd be obliged if she would confine her pleasures to the flagged zone, along with the rest of the lemmings. One of the buggies came speeding across from the coastguard station within a matter of minutes. My wife and the ten-year-old daughter of our friend went in to the sea and holding hands leapt over the chest-high waves. We took the notices and flags to be suggestions only the sea was, after all, about as anfractuous as a municipal paddling pool and trudged off down to the far end of the beach, away from flags, bathers, caff and all. A coastguard station, right on the beach, was manned by athletic-looking types sitting atop all-terrain buggies. Further flags showed where surfers might go, and these free spirits once again obeyed.
  A series of stentorian notices and flapping flags indicated the area of the beach the coastguard advised swimmers to occupy, and the vast majority of them complied with this. At the top of the beach there were Michelin men and women who wouldn't look out of place on a Donald McGill postcard; further down there were the stick figures of anorexic teenagers sunning their shrunken embonpoints; and in the surf, the neoprene-suited surfers lunged up to catch waves of such a domestic size that they couldn't quite be called breakers – more fractures in the sea's silky surface. Among the thousand-odd holidaymakers the morphological strata of body forms were exposed between the tidemark and the waterline. There's a salt-water tidal creek, there are offshore rocks, there's a caff. Holywell beach is magnificent – a great sweep of sand, backed by pink granite cliffs and hundred-foot-high dunes.'
  On Holywell beach in Cornwall we sunbathers and surfers and loungers disported ourselves, our slightly frenzied yawps of pleasure clear evidence that we were determined to suck the last few fervid drags from the dying butt of the August sun. 'I don't know about unethical,' he replies, his accent gruff with lust, 'but it's arguably quite Swedish, very decadent, and absolutely contemporary. 'Isn't this a little unethical?' I say.) Then he tries to seduce me in one of them. (He finds them a doddle compared with psychosurgery.
  We make it back from Ikea, and McFee assembles my two, new, sub-Bauhausian armchairs with commendable speed. McFee and I wander these aisles, marvelling at the huge chattel stacks, and wondering how the hell we'll get anything down from a shelf forty feet up without the assistance of a giant hornhead.It's a wonder we make it through to the final section emotionally intact, but we do and we're rewarded with a vision of the high temple of the late nineties: a mammoth hall, divided into aisles by mighty shelves of mutant Dexion, and to the rear, the maw of a still larger warehouse, its hissing lifts and whining forklifts debouching flatpacks with mantric consistency