conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Black Mischief about Time, English, Handful with the genre: Humor & Entertainment, Humor.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author (1903-1966), whom Time called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled Black Mischief about Time, English, Handful with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Contemporary.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author (1903-1966), whom Time called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, A Handful of Dust, Scoop, and Brideshead Revisited, were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a plot for a story about Time, English, Handful with the genre: Humor & Entertainment, Humor.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Black Mischief: After winning a civil war Seth, Oxford-educated emperor of the fictional nation of Azania, makes it his goal to "modernise" his country.\nHe recruits Basil Seal, a shiftless college friend and heir to an English political family, to preside over the newly established Ministry of Modernization, with the help of Krikor Yokoumian, a successful Armenian entrepreneur.\nUnbeknownst to Seth and the Ministry, the French consul Ballon plans a coup d\'état.\nAt a "Birth Control Parade" organized by Seth, Ballon and several religious leaders overthrow the Emperor and install his senile uncle Achon.\nBasil attends Seth\'s funeral feast and discovers afterwards that he has eaten the stewed remains of his girlfriend Prudence Courteney, the coddled daughter of the British Minister, whose plane had vanished after the evacuation of the British compound.\nWith no heir to the monarchy, the League of Nations steps in and claims the country as a League of Nations Mandate.\nBasil returns to England and disturbs his old friends because he has become "serious".
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Add another sentence about \nHowever, Achon, Seth, hiding.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Black Mischief: After winning a civil war Seth, Oxford-educated emperor of the fictional nation of Azania, makes it his goal to "modernise" his country. \nHe recruits Basil Seal, a shiftless college friend and heir to an English political family, to preside over the newly established Ministry of Modernization, with the help of Krikor Yokoumian, a successful Armenian entrepreneur. \nUnbeknownst to Seth and the Ministry, the French consul Ballon plans a coup d\'état. \nAt a "Birth Control Parade" organized by Seth, Ballon and several religious leaders overthrow the Emperor and install his senile uncle Achon. \nHowever, Achon dies upon coronation, and Seth dies in hiding. \nBasil attends Seth\'s funeral feast and discovers afterwards that he has eaten the stewed remains of his girlfriend Prudence Courteney, the coddled daughter of the British Minister, whose plane had vanished after the evacuation of the British compound. \nWith no heir to the monarchy, the League of Nations steps in and claims the country as a League of Nations Mandate. \nBasil returns to England and disturbs his old friends because he has become "serious".
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first three paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Black Mischief
  And yet, I am inclined to say, the beating human heart is greater and grander than a pump. The line between what is natural and what is mechanical remains resistant to trivial erasures; even the physical heart, the thing in flesh, has its store of secrets and cannot completely be represented by means of its dynamical states. Neither can the human soul. Why this should be, I do not know.
  Some weeks before my arrival, the grizzled old chief of a major firm had been unceremoniously ejected from his office by a crowd of corporate revolutionaries. The new chief, some dark figure whose name, I think, was Armbruster, had evidently spent some time on the golf course with Roger X, a Flyte director, and an elegant, ineffective, dreamy character, with soft white hands, silver hair, and a deep ridge of unhappiness between his furry, brushed eyebrows. After arriving at the office in a maroon limousine, it was X's habit to repair to the executive washroom for morning ablutions; he then spent the rest of his day sitting at his immense walnut desk, straightening the starched cuffs of his Sulka shirt and staring into space. He was not a failure, plainly, for he had been made a partner of the firm, but neither was he a success. His colleagues believed that he had discovered a queer dimension between making and striking out and treated him with puzzled, deferential respect. One morning X informed those colleagues that Armbruster had requested the services of a Flyte team. The general effect was rather as if X had declared himself capable of flight, and had then actually leapt from the fourteenth floor and after extending his thin arms soared successfully toward the pale and yellow sun. That afternoon, the team – X, two Whippet-like partners, an associate with asthma who wheezed even when he walked, a computer specialist, X's private secretary, me – met Armbruster for perhaps five minutes. I had expected someone thuggish, but Armbruster turned out to be thin, even frail, with sandy-yellow hair, a long, sallow Talmudic face, concave cheeks, and a delicate arched nose flaring dramatically to a pair of midnight-blue and inky nostrils. He spoke with a trace of a lisp and a touch of a stutter. Standing in front of his desk, one lean hip braced against its edge, he outlined in delicate detail his dissatisfaction with the management methods of his predecessor and his vision of the wonderful world our two firms would enter together. "Suh, Suh, So much to do," he stammered softly, as X sat beaming, his own phocine head rocking in time to the barely pulsed beat of Armbruster's left foot.
  I sat through the meeting in hyperborean gloom and took a full hour to return to my office, zig-zagging aimlessly up one avenue, peering peepishly into a store window and shrugging off the overtures of a shambling, purple-lipped, mid-afternoon streetwalker.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me two more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: I said that I did. With a shrug that spoke of the complexity of the matter, Honig then appealed to me with his eyes, as if he expected me – of all people! – to seize on that hidden connection between what he wished to say and what he had said, and which was obviously tormenting him like the tickle before a sneeze.
  Organic chemistry I found a difficult, tormenting, itching, hair shirt of a subject. God, however, tempers the wind to the shorn lamb: Before too much time had gone by, Honig asked me to drop my studies and devote myself entirely to the international registry of chemical compounds. Within a week I discovered what was, in any case, obvious: No chemical company in the United States had the faintest intention of sharing proprietary information with members of the department of biological sciences at Columbia University; more often than not, when I wrote to Du Pont or to Monsanto or to Dow Chemical, I would receive my original letter back by return mail, an indignant "No!" slashed in red letters across the top. Representatives of the Soviet Union, to whom Levinthal presented his plan at the United Nations, treated his proposal as if it carried an embarrassing disease.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Schutzenberger now resumed his studied pacing, moving from north to south in the stuffy living room, and then from south to north, the pale, pink light of late afternoon at his back.
  Once Schutzenberger arranged for the laboratory to travel to Florence for a conference at the Institute for Global Analysis. We left Paris in the late afternoon of a damp, drizzling day, our entire group of fifteen traveling together on the slow overnight train that leaves the Gare du Nord at around five in the afternoon and arrives the next morning in Florence a few hours after dawn. Everyone brought his own food. I found myself in a compartment with Maurice Gross and Schutzenberger. As the sun fell over the flat fields of southeastern France, Gross brought out a bottle of red wine, and, when that had gone, another, and yet another. The light acquired for a time an eerie fluorescent glow. Schutzenberger and Gross talked steadily, snickering and smiling, the French sentences like the long listing glide of an evening bird.
  French railway tracks are seamless. To an American, used to a monotonous Amtrak clunk, the sound seems strange, a steady elegant hiss. At each station the sequence of steps, and the scene beyond, was the same. The long clumsy train would come to a halt with a great melancholy release of air from its steam brakes. From outside, a muted gabble of rapid-fire French. Looking through the smudged window, I could see a row of tall lamp-posts, their tops curving into a glowing, bug-spattered tube. On the station house wall, facing the tracks, was a perfectly round clock, with elegant, spidery hands, and a row of tattered and defaced advertising posters, chiefly for Kronenbourg Beer or a horrible instant soup; beyond, there was the empty ticket room, with a single spare wooden bench. On the station platform itself, an old-fashioned luggage cart, its gap-toothed prongs dug into the concrete, stood posed companionably beside a very old woman – the same woman at each stop – who stood staring somberly into space. A whistle would blow and then our plump, energetic conductor would walk rapidly from the front of the train to the back, peering underneath the carriages, and finally swinging up the steps as the train moved from the station.
  We arrived in Florence the next morning, groggy and hung-over. Everyone was happy to be in Italy. The light was strong, vibrant, bathing the far hills in a flamboyant series of browns, umbers, and faint rufous reds. We trooped off to our hotel, where, of course, the proprietor, standing before a greasy ledger in his undershirt, his palms held upward, explained in his pidgin French that he had never received our reservations. Without washing or changing our clothes, we headed toward the museums, and the piazzas, and the great churches, and those marvelous Florentine coffee shops where indescribably pretty young women gather to sip sickly-sweet drinks and exhibit their gold-coppery shoulders.
  By and by we walked home through the darkened shabby streets of Florence. It was then almost three o'clock, but Schutzenberger was not ready to call it a night, and so he sank to the stoop of our hotel, and we sat on the curb in front of him, unwilling to let go, unable to keep up. A gray pallor of exhaustion had spread over his face. The lines of age that made him look older than he was had darkened and deepened. He sat smoking for a while, talking of this and that, commenting on nothing at all. Our attention flagged. From behind a parked car, a long, elegant, Florentine night cat appeared, and struck by the fact that here we were, on his street, in the dead of night, sidled over for a closer look. Schutzenberger saw him coming and turned to face the cat. Very slowly, in a low, vibrant voice, he began to talk, gently, soothingly. Transfixed, for no one had ever talked to him like that before, the cat sank to his haunches, licked each paw carefully to make sure they were clean, and then cocked his head toward Schutzenberger to listen more attentively. Schutzenberger talked to the cat about the evening, and the weather, and about Florence and its streets; he talked about cats that he had known and their sad destinies. He talked about the stars and the secret signs of the night sky, pointing with a raised finger to the heavens; he talked about dogs with a deep frown of distaste. He talked about the natural numbers; he talked about the end and the beginning, and much besides. The cat listened to all this, ears cocked, whiskers twitching, but then, finally, remembering that he had business to attend to elsewhere, stole softly away.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Schutzenberger now resumed his studied pacing, moving from north to south in the stuffy living room, and then from south to north, the pale, pink light of late afternoon at his back.
  Once Schutzenberger arranged for the laboratory to travel to Florence for a conference at the Institute for Global Analysis. We left Paris in the late afternoon of a damp, drizzling day, our entire group of fifteen traveling together on the slow overnight train that leaves the Gare du Nord at around five in the afternoon and arrives the next morning in Florence a few hours after dawn. Everyone brought his own food. I found myself in a compartment with Maurice Gross and Schutzenberger. As the sun fell over the flat fields of southeastern France, Gross brought out a bottle of red wine, and, when that had gone, another, and yet another. The light acquired for a time an eerie fluorescent glow. Schutzenberger and Gross talked steadily, snickering and smiling, the French sentences like the long listing glide of an evening bird.
  French railway tracks are seamless. To an American, used to a monotonous Amtrak clunk, the sound seems strange, a steady elegant hiss. At each station the sequence of steps, and the scene beyond, was the same. The long clumsy train would come to a halt with a great melancholy release of air from its steam brakes. From outside, a muted gabble of rapid-fire French. Looking through the smudged window, I could see a row of tall lamp-posts, their tops curving into a glowing, bug-spattered tube. On the station house wall, facing the tracks, was a perfectly round clock, with elegant, spidery hands, and a row of tattered and defaced advertising posters, chiefly for Kronenbourg Beer or a horrible instant soup; beyond, there was the empty ticket room, with a single spare wooden bench. On the station platform itself, an old-fashioned luggage cart, its gap-toothed prongs dug into the concrete, stood posed companionably beside a very old woman – the same woman at each stop – who stood staring somberly into space. A whistle would blow and then our plump, energetic conductor would walk rapidly from the front of the train to the back, peering underneath the carriages, and finally swinging up the steps as the train moved from the station.
  We arrived in Florence the next morning, groggy and hung-over. Everyone was happy to be in Italy. The light was strong, vibrant, bathing the far hills in a flamboyant series of browns, umbers, and faint rufous reds. We trooped off to our hotel, where, of course, the proprietor, standing before a greasy ledger in his undershirt, his palms held upward, explained in his pidgin French that he had never received our reservations. Without washing or changing our clothes, we headed toward the museums, and the piazzas, and the great churches, and those marvelous Florentine coffee shops where indescribably pretty young women gather to sip sickly-sweet drinks and exhibit their gold-coppery shoulders.
  By and by we walked home through the darkened shabby streets of Florence. It was then almost three o'clock, but Schutzenberger was not ready to call it a night, and so he sank to the stoop of our hotel, and we sat on the curb in front of him, unwilling to let go, unable to keep up. A gray pallor of exhaustion had spread over his face. The lines of age that made him look older than he was had darkened and deepened. He sat smoking for a while, talking of this and that, commenting on nothing at all. Our attention flagged. From behind a parked car, a long, elegant, Florentine night cat appeared, and struck by the fact that here we were, on his street, in the dead of night, sidled over for a closer look. Schutzenberger saw him coming and turned to face the cat. Very slowly, in a low, vibrant voice, he began to talk, gently, soothingly. Transfixed, for no one had ever talked to him like that before, the cat sank to his haunches, licked each paw carefully to make sure they were clean, and then cocked his head toward Schutzenberger to listen more attentively. Schutzenberger talked to the cat about the evening, and the weather, and about Florence and its streets; he talked about cats that he had known and their sad destinies. He talked about the stars and the secret signs of the night sky, pointing with a raised finger to the heavens; he talked about dogs with a deep frown of distaste. He talked about the natural numbers; he talked about the end and the beginning, and much besides.