Word: manual
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Many readers miss the florid circumlocutions of such erotic classics as Fanny Hill or My Secret Life. Today's pornographer handles a love scene as if he were dictating an engine-repair manual for high school dropouts. Not so the oldtimers, whose swooning maidens entered the amatorial bout with timorous displays of budded rotundities, swelling hillocks, portals of ecstasy and other geographical purlieus quite foreign to Gray's Anatomy. When it comes to a seduction scenario, few contemporary eroticists could match the subtlety of an anonymous 17th-century poet in reciting a pastoral love-in between a fair...
...become an anachronism. Today, assured of virtual immunity against seizure and prosecution, movie exhibitors and importers have no qualms about films that would have been cut or confiscated a few years ago. Far-out films now on show include The Libertine, in which a widow acts out a manual on errant sex; I, A Woman, II, which portrays fetishism, voyeurism and varied adultery; and Therese and Isabelle, a "love story" that treats of lesbianism and autoeroticism...
Luttwak's how-to manual (complete with 13 tactical diagrams) charts every step of a coup, from plot to power. The average coup-once physically launched-takes about 13 hours. The whole art is to analyze all forces that might squelch the coup and, if possible, "neutralize" them beforehand. To block airborne troops, for example, a single bribed technician can silence a key radio-station or airport control tower. Capital cities can be isolated and made safe for coups by parking trucks across the airstrips that link them to the outside...
...tone inclines rakishly toward the comic. Ellen is pregnant, and the marriage has to be a bit of a scramble. There is a mad, drunken bus ride on the part of the groom. In a scene of smothered hilarity, the couple receive spiritual instructions (and an introductory sex manual) from a young minister with a crew...
...manual also contains instructions on how to make oneself afraid, including terse scary stories. One is about a man who squeezes a tiny woman out of a tube of toothpaste. Another poor fellow discovers blood leaking from minuscule teeth marks under his watch band. Not bad-though for chilling empathy, neither surpasses an anonymous genius's unpublished masterpiece about sliding down a bannister and having it suddenly change into a razor blade...