The Bitch Is Back! So’s The Book!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

The report of my death was an exaggeration. — Mark Twain

Hey there, fellow Malcolm followers! (Yes, I am a follower of myself! That makes sure SOMEBODY reads these blog posts, aside from the FBI.) Been a while, huh? Like, March, almost two (count ’em, 2) years ago? Deux ains? Dos años?

I haven’t updated this blog since then, and doubtless both of you are wondering, “What the hell happened to Malcolm? Did he fall off the edge of the world, or get eaten by a Bigg’s orca whose echolocation mistakenly identified him as a nice, plump seal?

“Was he abducted by the good aliens, the bad aliens, or the aliens we just don’t know about? Shanghai’d into the white slave trade, chained to a desk, churning out cheap porno novels for the Yakuza or the Sinaloa Cartel? Did he take some drugs and go mad, because, you know, drugs (the bad ones, anyway) do that? Or did the dolphins carry him off to some deserted island, to study him in greater detail?

“Alas, we’ll never know! R.I.P., you crazy motherfucker! You wrote the best sex-with-a-dolphin novel I ever read!” — Anonymous Hipster in San Francisco

It is tempting to envisage such improbably romantic scenarios, but sadly, it is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG! What REALLY happened was… I got sick. Real sick! And I couldn’t write to save my life.

I suffer from vertigo, which is a VERY debilitating condition, and CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), which is more of the same. CFS feels like crushing tiredness and the absolute imperative to sleep, but when you awaken you don’t feel any more rested than you did before you nodded off! And my vertigo, which has so far defied diagnosis despite a brain scan, is so bad sometimes that it nauseates me. If I sit on the rotating office chair at my desk, I’m unstable. It’s easier, and safer, to slouch on the couch.

Then there is also the Perugia nodularis that afflicts my skin, but that’s so gross, let’s not go there. I use a lot of gentamicin ointment and adhesive bandages, leave it at that. What does the name mean? It’s Latin for “itchy bumps.” You had to ask, didn’t you?

These maladies make it very difficult to organize and focus my thoughts in a way that promotes the kind of easy, clear writing I like to produce. It’s been this way since 2016, and in the spring of 2020, with COVID-19 stalking us like a hungry predator, I simply couldn’t write anything anymore. I felt crushed, isolated and depressed.

In short, I felt just like everybody else! My attention span was shorter than a goldfish’s, my balance was all in my ankles and often the room would spin like I was riding some demonic merry-go-round. Other days, I felt more energy, pretty normal! But if I exerted myself, like I wanted to to get some freakin’ things done around here, I paid for it in spades for days afterward.

Recently, in order to cope with this condition, I’ve had to learn how to not tax myself, how to pace my efforts, and not to expect too much out of me.

The good news, health-wise, is that aside from these annoyances, I don’t seem to have any of the really deadly or debilitating diseases of old age. No cancer, heart disease, senility, Alzheimer’s, emphesyma, liver problems… the list of things I DON’T have is probably a lot longer than the list of things I do!

So I count my blessings and offer prayers of thanks to Fortuna, the Roman goddess of Chance, who appears to me as a magnificent serpent with a purple Mohawk (no, I don’t know how that happens!). And she tells me I’m a fool to make any offerings to her, because she’s merely a mask on the macro qualities of the inherent quantum instability of the Universe at the sub-micron level.

“Below 10 to the minus 23 centimeters, everything is random.” — Dr. John C. Lilly

And Wet Goddess? I sold out at Christmas! My remaining stock wasn’t that huge; fortunately, demand was only a fraction of last year. I now have another 48 copies on hand (sold one, sending one to Thea, who gave hers away to a friend), ready to go. I have been especially gladdened by readers who are ordering additional copies to share with somebody else! That’s great!

I really don’t care if I sell a lot of books, or make a lot of money at this self-publishing game. What I really care about is that the ideas I am promoting — that we humans are not alone ON THIS PLANET in possessing self-awareness, deep thought and curiosity about the other inhabitants of the world — become more widespread in society at large, and more acceptable to the (sometimes) rational minds of scientists.

How much time I have left in this world, I do not know, and I’m pretty sure I won’t live to see the changes I would like to bring about come to pass. It should be enough to ignite the torch, and leave it to my daughter’s generation to carry it forward. Think peace, and a happy New Year to all my readers.

A Bunch of Reviews

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

I may have been mostly sitting on my butt lately (it’s the vertigo), but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been mentally active (I hate double negatives, don’t you?)! I’ve been reading books and watching movies, and here are my brief opinions of a bunch two of them.

 

The Current War

This larger-than-life story pits two 19th Century titans of industry against each other AND the forces of nature! It has the added feature of being mostly true.

On the one hand, all-American inventor Thomas Edison, whose sweatshop-cum-laboratory has given the world the wonders of the victrola and many other inventions, with direct current (DC), which usually won’t kill you but can’t be transmitted very far. Edison’s solution: what do people living in the country need electricity for, anyway?

George Westinghouse, having invented the air brake for railroads and thus made his million, sees the potential in this mysterious stuff, electricity. When his senior researcher is killed in a predictably avoidable accident, Westinghouse recruits the weird Serbian Nikola Tesla, who has been digging ditches since being fired by Edison’s lab for advocating an alternative to DC, the vastly more transmittable but also more dangerous alternating current (AC). There’s also the little matter of the $50,000 bonus Edison promised Tesla and then welched on, saying “You don’t understand the American sense of humor.”

Thus is engaged the The Current War, which lasted from about 1890-1904. Edison demonstrates the dangers of AC by electrocuting an incredible number of stray and unwanted animals, only the first of which is shown, fortunately, and off-screen. Tesla responds by letting millions of volts of AC cacade over his body at the 1893 Chicago Exposition with no ill results.

Overall, the film is gorgeously filmed and very, very believably acted by all those involved. Female characters, mostly in the form of the two inventors’ wives, are represented. It was reportedly a troubled production, with portions re-shot after a test screening at a film festival, but if so, the result doesn’t show on the screen. (Thanks, Martin Scorsese, who as a co-producer insisted on the right of the final cut!)

We take electricity and the light, warmth and power it gives us for granted. This film reminds us that we shouldn’t, that it was the work of hard-nosed businessmen that brought those wonders to us. I wish all historical films were this good!

 

Peter Fisher’s Odyssey: Marine Mammal Warfare

a novel by Michael Greenwood

In 1978, when I briefly worked for newspaper heiress Margaret Scripps Buzzelli, she flew me to Moorhead, Minnesota, where I interviewed a very withdrawn and forlorn Michael Greenwood. He was a civilian scientist who’d just served as a source for the influential 1977 PENTHOUSE article “The Pentagon’s Deadly Pets,” which pretty much blew the whistle on the U.S. Navy’s use of dolphins at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam. (Note: I can’t find the original article on the Web. It should be. I think I have a copy in my files, I’ll OCR it and put it up here.)

Of course Greenwood, who shows remorse for his dolphin deeds similar to Flipper trainer Ric O’Barry, says the dolphins at Cam Ranh were weaponized with syringes that injected enemy swimmers trying to mine the U.S. warships with compressed air, causing an instant and fatal embolism. The U.S. Navy has said it never weaponized dolphins, finding them to be to unreliable in targeting as a weapons platform, and anyway a live enemy swimmer is more valuable than a dead one, because he can give you intelligence.

I spent a couple of days interviewing Greenwood, smoking dope to control the weirdness of what I was hearing while he consumed an inhuman amount of cheap beer. He talked about dolphins and more, about distant communication with submerged submarines using ultra-low frequencies and about being able to send them a self-destruct signal should they fall into enemy hands. And about a tell-all book he hoped to write on the subject, then tentatively titled The Dolphin Machine.

It was a very heavy interview. I still have the tapes, and I have tried to listen to them to edit them into something I can put on line. But Greenwood’s elliptical, looping, self-reflexive way of speaking defeats me every time. He is incomprehensible and hypnotic, and that’s a bad combination. I went home feeling depressed.

So now we have the promised novel, only it’s titled Peter Fisher’s Odyssey: Marine Mammal Warfare. I think it may take the cake for longest gestation time for a literary work, even beating my own Wet Goddess, which took 37 years to finish, or 24, if you don’t count the 13 years I put it aside because I was emotionally too close to the story. For the record, I think the earlier title, and probably the earlier draft, were better.

Greenwood has written a novel just like he talks — elliptical, looping, self-referential — and very confusing to read. I have gotten 81 pages into it, and I can’t bring myself to pick it up again. It’s sad, because THIS IS THE ONLY NOVEL, AND PROBABLY THE ONLY WORK OF ANY KIND, ON THE OBSCURE SUBJECT OF MARINE MAMMAL WARFARE!

But here’s what I’ve been able to glean so far: The title character is leader of a Navy S.E.A.L. team, The Hounds of Hell, doing a dirty mission in Vietnam. Then he comes home, goes to college, and asks his professor a bunch of obvious, didactic questions like “What is a scientist, Max?”  Cut to Peter, now a novice professor of psychology, lecturing his first class… and he flashes back to the time years ago when he, several human collaborators, a bunch of dolphins and a couple of pilot whales, infiltrated a Chinese harbor and fucked-up a bunch of Chinese whales.

At least, that’s what I think is going to happen. Peter Fisher finishes teaching the class before he finishes the flashback, and then… he dies. This is revealed on page 84. I’m sure that his story continues somehow, because the book goes on for a total of 666 pages. All of them as self-referential as an actor speaking to the camera.

There’s an old dictum in writing fiction, or non-fiction for that matter: Don’t tell the reader what you want them to know, show them. Greenwood never seems to get this, and thus we are subjected to a novel that reads somewhat like a corporate board meeting: Greenwood clues us in on what he’s going to tell us; then he tells us; the he explains what he just told us. It’s insane and boring as shit to read, but I really want to finish the book because I know Greenwood personally (albeit superficially), I can tell he went through something traumatic with dolphins, and I admire what he was able to do and learn about them. He’s also responsible for the release of one, a female Tursiops named Dolly Phynne, from the Navy’s Key West facility, without orders to do so. For which, I gather, he got in trouble. But Dolly Phynne is a another story.

(Greenwood also tells an incredibly funny and poignant story about a dolphin’s blunt response to open-ocean work, but that too is another story.)

Well, this book has a bunch of 5 star ratings on Amazon, so I guess somebody must like it. But now that I’ve put it down, I can’t pick it up again. You try.

(More reviews to follow in a separate story)

 

The Bleeding “Edge”: End of a Saga?

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

somebody's_me

Press Release: For Immediate Release, 11/19/2019

Eyes Open Media, XXXX Easy St., Port Charlotte, FL 33952

malcolmb2@centurylink.net    (415) XXX-XXXX

Zoophile American Author Wins Case Against New Zealand Radio Station, Gets Nothing In Return

PORT CHARLOTTE, FL – Writer, publisher and self-described zoophile Malcolm J. Brenner has won a case against MediaWorks, Inc., a New Zealand broadcaster, for airing a distorted interview with him – where one member of the trio of interviewers insulted him, cursed him, and then left the studio.

“The interview lasted about 20 minutes, but that four-minute segment was all they used,” Brenner said, “and they lied to me about that.”

However, he’ll get nothing for his troubles, not even an on-air apology.

The ruling came from the Broadcast Standards Authority, New Zealand’s equivalent of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which found that a program on the station The Edge had deliberately edited an interview with Brenner to present an unflattering portrait of him.

“That’s disgusting! You’re sick! Dolphins cannot give consent,” said Meg Annear during a March 30 interview with the author of the controversial novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover.She then got up from her microphone on The Dom, Meg and Randell Show, removed her headphones and, over the protests of her partners Clint Randell and Dom Harvey, walked out of the studio.

“I’ve had this happen before,” Brenner said. “Some people, particularly certain women, are ‘triggered’ when I begin to describe the dolphin’s uninhibited courtship behavior toward me, and they react as if I was describing my own behavior.” When this happened at a radio station in Australia several years ago, the station opted not to air the interview.

The Dom, Meg and Randell Show, however, took a different course – one that involved the station’s lawyers, management, deception and eventually brought in the BSA itself.

“I went ahead and finished the interview with just the two guys, Dom and Randell, and it was okay and about 20 minutes long,” Brenner explained. “Then Dom and I exchanged some mail about when the clip was going to air. Finally, several days later, he emailed me a 10-minute edit of the interview and told me it would air in a few days.”

Brenner tuned in the podcast, but heard nothing. By now suspicious, he went back into the show’s archives and discovered, to his horror, that not only had Dom sent him a decoy audio file, the material that they did air was the most inflammatory part of the interview, where Meg curses at Brenner on her way out the door.

“Once I realized what the station had done to me, I was astonished and outraged,” Brenner recalled. “Nobody has acted with such contempt for me since junior high school, where I was an unpopular student. It was like getting mugged in the hallway, and they didn’t have to do it. It was malicious, it was intentional, and they thought they could get away with it because I’m a foreigner and an admitted zoophile.”

Bestiality has been illegal in New Zealand since the adoption of the constitution in 1963, by nation-wide law. Brenner’s interlude with the dolphin, named Dolly (Ruby in the novel), occurred over six months in 1971, but bestiality wasn’t made illegal in Florida until 2011.

“I did nothing illegal, not in Florida and certainly not in New Zealand, and yet Dom saw fit to deceive me, lie to me, lie about me and defame me,” Brenner said. “He did this solely based on the idea that I had the experience with Dolly 48 years ago and therefore I must be a non-person with no rights under New Zealand law.”

Worse yet, Brenner suspects the station’s attorney, Tom Turton, conspired with the rogue DJ’s plans.

“A couple of days after we wrapped the interview I inquired about when it would air, and Dom said it was being considered by the station’s lawyers, for content, because zoophilia is illegal in New Zealand,” Brenner said. “By that time the edited, four-minute clip of Meg leaving the studio had already aired!”

Was Dom advised by Turton to deceive Brenner?

“If so, I’d find a new attorney,” the writer half-joked. “When Dom told me he had to run it by the lawyers I had a bad feeling, but I decided to say nothing so as not to ‘bad vibe’ the situation. If Turton collaborated, he should be reported to the New Zealand Bar Association for misconduct.

“I learned it doesn’t matter if you voice your suspicions or not, by the time you’re aware of them the bird has flown,” Brenner said. He asked the BSA to order the station to apologize to him on-air, place the full interview in its archive, and to pay him whatever amount the BSA thought would prevent the station from running similar slanderous stories in the future. The Administration can impose up to a $5,000 NZ ($3,600 US) fine.

However, the BSA decided not to place any orders on the station, thus giving it only an symbolic “slap on the wrist,” Brenner said.

“MediaWorks advise that its processes have been reviewed with respect to how it responds to audience feedback on challenging topics. Taking into account the above factors and the action taken by MediaWorks, the Authority considers that the publication of this decision is sufficient to censure MediaWorks conduct and clarify our expectations of broadcasters under the fairness standard. Accordingly, we do not make any orders,”the BSA’s decision, signed by its chair Judge Bill Hastings, reads.

“I’m appalled at the lack accountability,” Brenner said. “This decision leaves MediaWorks free to practice this kind of slander on anyone who comes along, anyone they feel is ‘different’ or vulnerable.

“I don’t even get a formal apology from the people who lied to me, lied about me, defamed me, sent me a false file and tried to bury the truth afterward. MediaWorks said they had no problem making an apology and archiving the show, but the BSA doesn’t require it, so they won’t do it. It’s absolutely disgusting.”

Brenner is filing an appeal of the decision, citing the lack of any orders. He is also the author of a memoir, Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood,and a science-fiction novel, Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair.

For a copy of the complete decision by the BSA (15 pgs.), please contact Brenner at

malcolmb2@centurylink.net or at (415) 640-5013. He is on Miami time.

Website: malcolmbrenner.com