Word: manually
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Cortazar displays his own exotic humor best in a section entitled "The Instruction Manual." As if briefing a group of anthropologists from Uranus, he details precise ways to cry, sing, climb stairs and comb hair: "There's something like a bone wing from which extends a series of parallels, and the comb isn't the bone but the gaps which penetrate space." Cortazar's ability to present common objects from strange perspectives, as if he had just invented them, makes him a writer whose work stimulates a sense of rare expectation...
...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 Not bad-though for chilling empathy, neither surpasses an anonymous genius's unpublished masterpiece about sliding down a bannister and having it suddenly change into a razor blade...
However, he continues in the instruction manual, "you will quickly observe how every member of our little group here detests bigotry in the deepest part of his or her heart. (Most of us happen to be political Conservatives rather than Liberals, but this has nothing to do with our unanimous views toward inhumanity.) In an infinitely smaller sense, it is bad business (and bad sales) to be depreciatory toward geographic locations or abnormal unfortunates. Say 'For the tourists from Cornville' rather than 'For the tourists from Sioux City.' Say 'For the Gay Boys,' or similar, without scorn. We sell books...
What bothers many critics of the chaplaincy is that a minister serving the armed forces is forced to compromise his right to be a religious prophet, to speak out against the sins of the times, including morally questionable wars. Army Field Manual 16-5 makes it clear that the Army sees the chaplain's role as a military support mission: to "supplement and reinforce the total instruction of the troops in the Code of Conduct by his spiritual and moral leadership and his personal presence during combat and combat training." And as an officer, the chaplain is legally obliged...
...develop a cynical attitude toward their job, even when the fire at hand is too dangerous to allow goofing off. They claim that their leaders often use poor judgment in deploying them to build fire lines. But besides this sort of complaint, which is, after all, common to other manual laborers, there is a deeper sense of futility among firefighters. They are flown to some corner of the wilderness and told to work long hours and risk their lives to save a few trees that no one will probably see for decades to come, except from the air. They also...