Dolphins are still neat

The following is a passage from one of John C. Lilly's early studies of bottlenose dolphins:

"When a female and a male dolphin are confined in a relatively small area in captivity, the courting behavior is rather violent. If they are isolated with a movable barrier between them, they will resolve all kinds of problems in order to be together, e.g., opening a gate to gain access to another pool and closing it behind them. As soon as they are together they start pursuit games. The initial phases of this behavior appear violent and can continue for the first 24 hours. If the female is not receptive, the male continues to chase her, exhibits erections, rubs against her, and tries to induce her to accept him. They bite one another, they scratch each other's bodies with their teeth. During the mating procedure; they will develop lesions practically everywhere on their bodies specifically on the flippers, on the back, on the flukes, on the peduncle, and around the head region.

"The erection in the male occurs with extreme rapidity. We have observed and timed it in our own tanks: it is something on the order of three seconds to completion, from the time the penis first appears in the slit. It can collapse almost as rapidly, and it looks almost as if it were being done in a voluntary fashion. It is very easy to condition a dolphin to have an erection. The stimulus, for example, can be a single visual signal. One trainer chose to raise his arm vertically as a signal, and the dolphin would turn over and erect his penis in response. If Elvar, one of our dolphins, is alone and a small ring, about a foot in diameter and an inch thick, is tossed into the water, he will have an erection, with his penis lift it off the bottom and tow it around the tank."

Heroism

I don't have many heroes. Thoreau I revere for his love of truth and of beauty; Coleridge I think the greater for all his shortcomings. But I do have a passionate belief that heroes must be courageous. And I do not call shooting three men who pose no threat to you courageous. The assassins aboard the USS Bainbridge were not heroes; they were technicians. Their performance was not daring; it was as routine as a city worker emptying a garbage can. Only a nation obsessed with carnage and starved for military success could celebrate Easter by cheering the deaths of three thieves.

The Alexandria Quartet

I read Durrell's collection when I was in my mid-twenties and was ravished. Today I am less naive, less satisfied by the lazy repetitions, the obsessive obsessing. Still, the achievement, the singularly narcissistic—in its way, far more narcissistic than the unreadable diaries of Nin—quartet, with its mirrors, its scrapbook approach to novelizing, is impossible to dismiss. It is one of the last great acts of Orientalism.