conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Bruno, Littlemore, Best with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
  I probably would have languished once again in the Lincoln Park Zoo for the rest of my life, having been picked up by the cruel and curious child of science, toyed with until boredom and then unceremoniously dropped, returned to my fellow animals with a mind now damaged, deformed, and deranged by human civilization but perversely ungifted with any of its benefits, not enough culture or language to build a communicative consciousness, and so doomed to sit forever in idiot moody silence, comprehending what is said and done all around me and yet unable to offer a word in return. Was it love—the love between me and Lydia—that saved me from such a fate?
  No. Perhaps—this is what I think only when my mind is sunk in the mud of its darkest meditations—perhaps I should lend more of the credit for my successfully completed education into manhood to Mr. Lawrence than to Lydia, that I should say it was not so much our love but Mr. Lawrence's money that saved me, because in this world that we have made for ourselves, love alone is powerless—everything is powerless—without capital. Yes, let's face it: love was part of it, but honestly I was simply saved by a wealthy and generous man's money. Love alone never saved a thing.
  The final stop on Mr. Lawrence's guided tour of his ranch deposited us before the small pink stucco house where Lydia and I would live like Ovid in exile for the next two years. Two times in this place we would see the crystalline white snow sublimate out of being to denude the brown and green ground, and two times we would see it slowly accumulate again. We experienced two winters, two springs, two summers, and two falls in this place, some seven hundred plus days, two Christmases, and four birthdays: two total Christmas trees, four total birthday cakes for me and Lydia. Over time, I would come to know Regina and Dudley Lawrence as friends of a certain sort—allies at the very least— though I never grew to feel entirely at home with them. I would come to love Sukie, the dog, and to know the friendship of Clever Hands, the only other member of my own species I would at all consider a true friend in my life.
  The cabin—as Mr. Lawrence referred to it, as he parked the green Jeep before its pink-painted façade—was really a house, and a pleasant one. It afforded us at least three times as much living space as our apartment in Chicago had. It was a one-floor structure, complete with a fireplace, a bedroom, a bathroom, a cozy living room, a kitchen, and a garage that would mainly become a studio space for me, which I obligingly shared with Lydia's car in the winter. We found the house decorated in the Southwestern themes prevalent in this area: brightly colored woolen serapes draped over sturdy rustic furniture, prints of yonic Georgia O'Keeffe paintings framed on the walls. We had an attractive front yard, in which spiky yellow and fluffy purple flowers sprouted in the spring. The steps of the back porch descended onto the grassy, lightly manicured wilderness of the Lawrence Ranch, where, when the snow had dissipated, emus, camels, giraffes, elephants, rhinos, zebras, and all kinds of other outlandish animals were permitted to wander the grounds at will, and their massive and ungainly bodies would often curiously saunter right up to our porch to gaze at us, or into the windows of our home.
  These two years in the great American Southwest, our own savage pilgrimage, were two years of long meandering walks in the surrounding fields and woods and mountains, two years of feeding the animals, two years of ambling the trails of the ranch side-byside with my surrogate brother and fellow semi-enculturated chimp, Clever Hands—Lydia, Clever and me, with Sukie the dog yapping excitedly ahead of us on the trail at a handful of passing zebras—and two years of continuing my education, as well as my passionate love affair, with Lydia. Every Arcadian day would be spent in play, in love, in conversation, in a simple life, simply lived. It was there, at the Lawrence Ranch in Colorado, during these two relatively uneventful years of contentment and bliss, where my ontogenesis was completed—in peace, in quiet, in secret. This was possible only because I was living in such an unstressed atmosphere, in such a safe, interesting, and pastoral environment, in which nothing much was ever expected or demanded of me, of us. Several evenings per week Lydia and I would spend in the "big house," as we at once began referring to it, with Regina and Dudley Lawrence, with Larry and Lily and Clever, eating dinner—at the table, with civilized manners—and conversing, drinking wine, sometimes playing games late into the evening, such as charades, or board games like Monopoly and Pictionary. I tried to teach Clever Hands to play backgammon. He learned the game, but in the same way he learned sign language: he learned to perform the right motions, but would put them together in such erratic sequences that it was dubious whether he actually knew what they meant. In any event, I always won.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: There was some initial business to discuss. After that was over with and the DaSilvas (Dr. DaSilva was the husband of Cecília, who ran the legitimate half of their business) were sufficiently convinced I was trustworthy, Cecília returned to the front of the store and I left Audrey and Sasha in the waiting room to follow Dr. DaSilva back to his office, a cramped but clean, windowless room with a desk, a sink, and an operating table. An assortment of surgical equipment lay gleaming on the counter. The operating table had a white bedsheet draped over it, with fluorescent lamps C-clamped to its edges. Dr. DaSilva decompressed into the office chair behind his desk, and I sat across from him in a small wooden chair facing it. There was a distinct sense of Old World gentility to Dr. DaSilva. Seen close up, he looked even more like a silent film star: he even seemed to move like a man in an old movie, too slowly when standing still and too quickly when walking, and sometimes, while in transit, popping instantaneously from one place to another; you could almost hear the crackle of decaying film as he moved around the room.
  Dr. DaSilva smiled warmly and laughed, laughing with me, until he adjusted his wireframe glasses, looked at me a little closer, and quit laughing. He cleared his throat.
  I stared straight ahead and listened to the pencil scratching on the paper. When he was done, he showed me the quick sketch that he had drawn of me. It looked like this:
  Dr. DaSilva was evidently a skilled draftsman. I agreed this was an accurate rendering of my profile. Dr. DaSilva flipped a sheet of transparency paper over this drawing, and sketched out a prospective nose on top of it. When finished, he showed me the result:
  I forgot myself—I was hopping up and down madly in my seat, and Dr. DaSilva sharply hushed me. I slapped my hands over my mouth such that I resembled the third and final of the Three Wise Monkeys, and, when I was sure no more yelps of irrepressible joy would escape me, I lowered my quivering fingers. The image Dr. DaSilva had rendered drove me to the brink of tears. He understood precisely the nose that I desired. The nose that would make me a man. Dr. DaSilva also offered to trim my ears into a more human size and shape, but I declined. I've always liked my ears. It was only the nose I was after.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Do you know the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Particular thanks to Jonathan Ames—the first person to read this whole thing straight through in the scattershot and inchoate state it was in at the time—for being an early advocate of Bruno's, and for his continued friendship and support further along.
  Special shout-outs to Jim Mattson, Nimo Johnson, Kate "Hunter Hero" Sachs, Sergei Tsimberov, Roman Skaskiw, Kevin Holden, Andre Perry, Diana Thow, Cara Ellis, Andres Restrepo, John Benjamin, Sam Cooper, Graham Webster, Colin Heintze, Sarah Heyward, Jenny Zhang, Anthony Swofford, Sam Seigle, Gwenda-lin Grewal, and überthanks to Chris Wiley for his unflagging friendship, his apartment, a humdinger of a celebratory dinner, and countless other good turns.
  And thanks to Jane Goodall, who, when I was a teenager, I heard say, "All living things on this planet are far, far closer together than they are apart."
  Great apes are in serious danger. It will be an unforgivable shame on our species if we allow this vital window into understanding ourselves to close forever. To learn about nonfictional ape language research and to support great ape habitat conservation, I urge you to visit www.greatapetrust.org.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: org.
  Special shout-outs to Jim Mattson, Nimo Johnson, Kate "Hunter Hero" Sachs, Sergei Tsimberov, Roman Skaskiw, Kevin Holden, Andre Perry, Diana Thow, Cara Ellis, Andres Restrepo, John Benjamin, Sam Cooper, Graham Webster, Colin Heintze, Sarah Heyward, Jenny Zhang, Anthony Swofford, Sam Seigle, Gwenda-lin Grewal, and überthanks to Chris Wiley for his unflagging friendship, his apartment, a humdinger of a celebratory dinner, and countless other good turns.
  And thanks to Jane Goodall, who, when I was a teenager, I heard say, "All living things on this planet are far, far closer together than they are apart."
  Great apes are in serious danger. It will be an unforgivable shame on our species if we allow this vital window into understanding ourselves to close forever. To learn about nonfictional ape language research and to support great ape habitat conservation, I urge you to visit www.greatapetrust.Particular thanks to Jonathan Ames—the first person to read this whole thing straight through in the scattershot and inchoate state it was in at the time—for being an early advocate of Bruno's, and for his continued friendship and support further along.