conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled Against the Country about Town, Instead, Virginia with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction.. End with the sentence 'Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: "Town" is the place left behind, the place where our narrator might have grown up in something approximate to sanity, if life had gone differently. Instead, this is the story of a boy taken from Town and transported by his parents to rural Virginia, a hellish place where children are treated like mules and miseries are as numerous as flies. The boy's story is not told in a linear format. Rather, readers are sucked into winding, wordy paragraphs that pulse from eloquent reflections on topics as diverse as religion and whipping sticks. The experience of riding the school bus, for example, includes sentences like "I wonder: When the great root below us inspired in Thomas Jefferson his idyllic hallucinations, and began to grow its system westward under the Appalachian range (toward the Mississippi snake oil it would require to reach and pervert California), did it bestow upon him a vision of the roving metal stomach that would, a century and change after his presidency, gobble up the nation's children by law each morning and vomit them into a freshly graveled parking lot?" For some teens, the innovative structure will be a refreshing change from traditional storytelling. Experimentation in art is often well appreciated by young, flexible minds. For others, the novelty of the text may be short-lived. VERDICT the author demonstrates that literature can be a wild, untamed thing, constrained only by the limits of imagination and courage.Diane Colson, Nashville Public Library, TN
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first two paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Against the Country
  The patterns, incidents, and images noted do exist; and while I might be accused of committing a critical fallacy in supposing that Salinger consciously planned them along the line of my discussion, they do offer themselves to my argument, whatever Buddy Glass, mixing memory and desire, might want to say about it.
  Within this dilated moment, as we stared out over the jagged black remains of a hundred-acre wood (poor Pooh! poor Piglet!), and took in that panel of red and gold sky newly visible just beyond it, I swear I could almost smell the synapses firing within my father's brain so as to tug toward his skull what rainbow array of wires our great God-arsonist had laid beneath his cheeks all those fond years prior, which gift and which foresight produced a smile I think anyone would want to call explosive.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When that seventh grader diced his brains with a shotgun, believing he had just got his girlfriend pregnant, and we gathered in the cafeteria (to the east of our homerooms) and faced a small stage (to the north of our chairs) that had no architectural right to be there (and upon which I would later lose, or had already lost, a spelling bee), and heard from our teachers what a promising (because a "silent") young man this had always been, and then heard them invoke the word "hero" (which I suppose he was, in the Hellenic sense, but still), I shut my eyes and tried to remember this champion but could conjure no more than his crisp polyester pantlegs, and those spotless if inexpensive shoes, and a desire to dodge his sharp toe on the playground, and an unbidden thrill at what violence he had done himself over so commonplace a seventh-grade worry.
  When that paralyzed fellow, a graduate, I am guessing, of the high school, who retained his face but whose younger brother, a contemporary of ours, had seemed since the accident to have less of one, came to lecture us in the gym about the dangers of alcohol, and of arguing with one's parents about the dangers of alcohol, and of imbibing more of the dangers of alcohol, and of climbing behind the wheel of a muscle car one's parents had paid for in a misguided attempt to see one teetotaled out there, we scanned the stands above us, and sought out the shadow-face of the shy little brother, who laid back while the abstinence speech was under way, shifting only a little (in agitation? in hope?) when his precedent arrived at the God part, and said how grateful he was for the wreck, and the wounds, since without these he would never have been in a position (legs wrapped around his back, insensate toes pointed up at the welkin) to get off the dangers of alcohol and receive His love, which baffled a small but thinking minority out there (meaning me, mostly, but also, I prayed, the shy little brother), since why would a person praise the wheelchair for rolling him toward Jesus but not the alcohol for rolling him toward the wheelchair? Then, bless or curse him, he reached back and praised the alcohol too.
  And so we have want of angels, those among us who wish to die, apparently, yet find ourselves unequal to the task. We have want of country-strong ones who will ride that gas pedal for us, and cut the brake line, and blow us straight to heaven. Or else we have want of town-minded ones who will slow us down a smidge while they push that stalled Lincoln off into the creek bed below (or was it a Ford?) and convince us to take up Proust. Certainly we have want of higher beings who will help us decide whether we are country people at all or are only just pretending to be, under a hypnosis, self- or otherwise, and whether there exists a difference between these concepts large enough for us to consider it here. At minimum we have want of a passable excuse for the delay.
  The chickens had to fetch me mine. Almost without my noticing, these fluffy and white little leghorn hens had formed themselves into the vibrant georgic community Mr. Jefferson had long ago promised and promoted, shooting eggs out their anuses at a pretty pace and gathering for jocular corn klatsches before and after each moonlit mealtime. True, there were setbacks: I began to find open sores beneath the wings again, which caused me to worry that I had made of their rooster too much of a brute, and I was helped along in that suspicion one moonless night when my mother sent me out to fetch a few eggs, and I kicked around the coop yard for my nemesis and, not finding him there, stepped in through the coop-house door and immediately felt his barb penetrate the outer knob of my right ankle to the bone. But in general these birds seemed to have adjusted quite well to their situation, and I observed that when not eating, or laying, or being raped, or volunteering for one of my aeronautic experiments, they banded together in an ongoing project of their own, such as I imagined might lead on to cathedrals.
  Well, that "know" there is debatable, I would even say highly, as is the "moral," and certainly also the "you" (either one), and our priority here, really, is to think about the flock and, moreover, our hero first responders (with their kicks and their corn, and their wounds and resentments, and their possibly put-on country pride), whose duty it is to protect the hens' sacred way of life and, theoretically, their one slim shot at democracy, which trust will brook no dissent or unseemly agitation.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Caught and developed mange while in our care, and so we built a pen in the side yard to keep him isolated from the other dogs, and had him up regularly on the newspaper-draped dining-room table, to slather him with medicine, while everyone gathered around and worried, after which we placed him back in the pen, which he did not understand, any more than he understood why a tiny, massive dog of approximately his same coloring (black, mostly, with touches of white) leapt the pen's high walls on a daily basis to snarl at and ram him, who wanted nothing more than to make friends, just as he tried to when, let out of the pen one afternoon, he climbed, as we all watched, up the concrete-block step to the side porch and was met, in the cornea, by a tabby's hateful claw.
  Bounced in the fields whenever everybody, dogs and people, headed back to the pond. Was assumed for years to be bouncing for joy, he did so love the water. Eventually we learned that he was frightening field mice into showing themselves so that he might eat them. Throat-killed a deer, just before I left, and spent most of a day dragging it up into the yard. Had, nonetheless, a retriever's mouth so soft he once caught a too-low bird on the wing and brought it down to my father, who did not look until the dog got his attention with a "Woof," at which "Woof" the bird flew away.
  Never bit a person, this dog. He may, for all I know, have murdered Blackie, and Brown, and Ginger, and Jackie, and all the rest, but he never did bite into us.
  I last saw him many years later, alone but alive in the backyard of a Southern Illinois rancher. He was deaf and mostly blind now, and I did not think he would recognize me, but he did, and he gave me a bounce, and I said I was not a field mouse, and he licked me. I spooned with him in the grass for a spell, as we had when he was just a puppy, and then I let him be. Later, by telephone, I learned of his fate. My father, ailing himself by then, though we did not know it, had come across the near-dead dog in the yard and had gone to fetch a shovel. He began to dig, and by the time the hole was done the dog was ready for it.
  For Linda, who knows full well that there could not possibly exist, in Virginia or elsewhere in our nation, a county with so preposterous a name as the one given here.