I’ve lately taken to asking Anthropic’s Claude to write as if Dorothy Parker was writing another writer. Its a thing. Its a very funny thing. Here’s the latest.
The Last of the Gin, or, A Summer Night with Insufficient Ice
The party had been going on since the Tuesday before last, and the moon, which had been hired for the evening at considerable expense, hung over the lawn like a dime someone had been too polite to pick up.
Everyone was beautiful, in the way that people are beautiful when they have never once been asked to do anything. Women drifted across the terrace in dresses the color of expensive disappointment, and men in white flannels leaned against the balustrade, looking out at the dark water as if it owed them money and a better view.
“Isn’t it marvelous?” a girl said to me. She said it the way one says it to a waiter, without expecting to be answered.
Far across the bay a green light burned, steady and sad and faintly smug, the way lights do when they have been told they mean something. I looked at it for a long while. I felt, as one is supposed to, that all my life I had been reaching toward something just beyond my fingertips, and I was fairly sure it was the bar.
The orchestra played something slow, and everyone grew tender and false. Somebody wept charmingly into a champagne coupe. Somebody else said that nothing would ever be the same, which was true, as nothing had been the same since breakfast.
I stayed until the dawn came up, pale and rather overdressed, and promised everyone a fresh start. I have found that dawn promises a great deal and is never present at the settling of accounts.
Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University
