Vol. 8 No. 9 · 22 May 1986
pages 6-8 | 3272 words
Animal Crackers
Michael Neve
- Sexual Selection and Animal Genitalia by William Eberhard
Harvard, 244 pp, £21.25, January 1986, ISBN 0 674 80283 7
- Females of the Species by Bettyann Kevles
Harvard, 270 pp, £16.95, May 1986, ISBN 0 674 29865 9
- A Concise History of the Sex Manual by Alan Rusbridger and Posy Simmonds
Faber, 204 pp, £10.95, April 1986, ISBN 0 571 13519 6
Along the beautiful coastline of California live the northern elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris). When the females are ready, they emerge from the waters of the Pacific to nurse their newly-born youngsters, on land. They are then surveyed by several enormous bulls, one of whom comes to dominate during subsequent copulation-time, which starts about a month after the birth of their young. During copulation, the females utter a kind of snarl: this is thought to be a way of encouraging other males to intervene and compete among each other. How do we know this? Because on hand, in California, watching the struggle for ‘viable sperm’ is a mammalogist. Name? Burney Le Boeuf.
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Letters
Vol. 8 No. 12 · 3 July 1986
From Richard King
SIR: Michael Neve’s discussion of animal sexuality (LRB, 22 May) had its moments. Still, in his lust to score anti-American points, he makes a big cultural deal out of a phrase he fundamentally misunderstands. I refer here to his citation of Bettyann Kevles’s sentence: ‘This checking-out period is called courtship.’ Whereupon, the overheated Neve writes: ‘Life is now a teeming Holiday Inn.’ Unless I’m seriously mistaken, ‘check out’ doesn’t have anything to do with dying: rather, it means ‘to inspect’ or ‘to examine’ something. Thus the pedestrian in New York is bombarded with requests from street vendors to ‘check out’ their wares. I don’t imagine George Orwell or Dwight Macdonald would have been ecstatic about this particular usage, but it’s hardly a linguistic atrocity. More importantly, Mr Neve just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Neve’s anti-Americanism continues to get him into trouble. Later on in his review he writes: ‘Personally, I’m less and less convinced, but I am writing with a sense of dreading America that sometimes overtakes the all too measurable European.’ I can’t for the life of me figure out what that sentence means, but I do know that it’s an example of bad, pretentious writing.
Richard King
Nottingham
From Editor, ‘London Review’
When an American offers to check out of a hotel, he is not deemed to be offering to investigate it.
Editor, ‘London Review’
