A Bit of History: 5 Peeps and a Tweet

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

In an effort to log some history, and also to chronicle my own exploits, I present this article from an old, old issue of the slick, slightly left-of-center magazine NEWSWEEK, which is still hanging around in digital format! This was the first article I’d ever seen, at the tender age of 11.5, that mentioned dolphins in connection with extraterrestrial aliens — which, in essence, is what the dolphins are, living in our own oceans instead of those of Jupiter, Uranus or Xagramorfagel (if you haven’t heard of the last one, don’t worry, it’s going viral any day now!). My favorite novel at the time being Robert A. Heinlein’s Star Beast, about a pet alien and his boy, I was, of course, extremely eager to make a dolphin’s acquaintance, as I was sure they had nothing better to do than hang around, waiting for me to show up! Here, then, although I do not know the author’s name, I present the first article I encountered to mention dolphins in connection with ET aliens!

Newsweek: Space & The Atom
Oct. 22, 1962, pg. 51

FIVE PEEPS AND A TWEET

Man’s first contact with extraterrestrials may never come — or it may be only a beat in history away; his giant radio telescopes could pick up a message from space tomorrow (July 22, 1960). But when it comes to working out a system of interspecies communication with a species that may not even exist, man is still in kindergarten. This lack has long worried space scientists, who think that the parties at each end of the “telephone” might have everything to say to each other and no common way to say it.

One suggested way of surmounting this embarrassment is to practice communications with other species on man’s own planet, but which species? In answer, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made its choice, and not surprisingly it is the bottlenose dolphin. Under an $80,700, one-year grant from NASA, communication with the brainy mammal will be explored by the dolphins’ old friend, Florida neurophysiologist Dr. John Lilly, who has been studying them since 1955.

Dr. Lilly, who is convinced that “man will communicate with another species in a decade or two,” has long considered the dolphin the most likely possibility. His reasons: Dolphins’ brains are larger and more complex than man’s; they talk to each other in a high-speed language of whistles, click, squawks and blats; and they can produce an eerie mimicry of the human voice, even copying subtle inflections (one recently mimicked the Southern drawl of Lilly’s assistant). Dr. Lilly is now feeding tapes of dolphin sounds to a computer, which will sift them for a meaningful pattern. “It is possible that their intelligence is comparable with ours, though in a very strange fashion,” he has said. “They may be a group with whom we can learn basic techniques of communicating with really alien intelligent life forms.”

Say It With Shapes: Such technologies would obviously be of vast assistance to space scientists. Although few expect that man will ever drop in on the residents of another solar system (the trip could take centuries), they haven’t given up on earthbound communication. Before the advent of radio, all suggestions for signaling extraterrestrials were optical in nature: Flashing messages with large mirrors and searchlights, or cutting vast geometric patterns out of forests and farmlands. [Italics added for emphasis, this seemingly suggests “crop circles” a full decade before they were first reported by UFO investigators!]

Far more practical schemes accompanied the development of powerful radio transmitters. The problem is what to translate. One of the most elaborate schemes is that of Hans Freudenthal, a Dutch mathematics professor writing in English. Called Lincos (for Cosmic Language), it depends upon the supposedly universal concepts of mathematics. First Freudenthal would teach the extraterrestrials the idea of “greater than” by sending five peeps, followed by a different signal—perhaps a tweet—and then three peeps. This would be repeated, using several combinations of peeps, until the listeners had equated “greater than” with the peep signal. Similarly, the concepts of “less than,” “equals,” “plus,” and “minus” could be taught. Eventually, Freudenthal hopes to transmit an elaborate mathematics language, then go on to the tasks of sending lessons in physics, physiology, and even ethics.

TV Images: A simpler sounding plan—the transmission of TV images—has been suggested by Dr. Frank Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Greenbank, W. Wa. It is based on the principle that television pictures can be broken down into tiny dots of light. The different intensities if the dots can be translated into correspondingly differentiated such as dots and dashes, frequencies, or numbers, and sent as radio signals. Drake hopes the aliens would understand this principle and reconstruct our television pictures from the signals.

Yet both these ingenious plans, and many like them, rest on the fragile assumption that the extraterrestrials think as we do. Perhaps they do: then again it is conceivable that mathematics and inductive reasoning may be as foreign to them as their worlds and bodies might appear to us. Here lies the potential value of the dolphin—a creature operating in an environment perhaps as alien to humans as that of Mars. Even the slightest clue to how such a creature thinks could eventually lead to radically different approach to placing interstellar “telephone calls”—or a new method of analyzing space static to discover is someone is trying to call us.

But this is a long way off. “Right now we don’t expect any dolphins to teach us how to talk to Martian ants,” a NASA official cracked last week. “We’re simply trying to decode their own talk.” What happens after that, of course, depends on what they have to say.

###

Analysis: This article, and several others like it in LIFE, Look and other popular publications opened my eyes (and ears, don’t forget the ears) to the possibility of communicating with dolphins! As an avid science fiction reader, I was delighted with the idea that our seas might contain a comparable form of non-human intelligence. I eventually got much more than I expected, by about 2 or 3 orders of magnitude, with Dolly!

The last paragraph of the article is particularly telling, and sad. The famous anthropologists Dr. Gregory Bateson & his wife Lois Cammack had joined Lilly in the Virgin Islands to see what was going on, and, a year later, “See if you’re smart enough to decode their talk before you try to teach them ours” was Bateson’s parting shot. He later wrote “Steps to an Ecology of Mind,” a book which I tried three times to read, and failed miserably each time.

And this is what Lilly’s most vociferous critics complained about his research, quite properly: HE NEVER PROVED THAT DOLPHINS EITHER USE OR COMPREHEND LANGUAGE BEFORE HIRING MARGARET HOWE (LOVATT) TO TEACH THEM ENGLISH! In scientific terms, this is serious cart-before the horse-putting, and it is an obvious no-no! Why, then, did Lilly pursue it so devotedly?

It strikes me, from both reading his writings and my personal experiences with him, that Lilly had to some degree an obsessive-compulsive disorder. This is common in scientists who strive under pressure for a high degree of accuracy, often to several decimal points. It’s also indicated in Lilly’s own autobiographical novel, “The Scientist,” in his descriptions of his lonely, rather isolated upbringing and childhood.

I can’t really say how Lilly handled major disappointments, because I never observed him doing so. But one of the privileges of whiteness, wealth (which Lilly had in relative degree) and education is that you’re insulated, to some degree, from failure. It may be that, as the evidence that he was on the wrong path accumulated, Lilly stuck more and more strongly to his abortive theories because he had to, to support his rather expansive ego. To admit he was wrong would be uncharacteristic of him, until much later in life.

There was also the practical aspect that Lilly had, with the establishment of the Dolphin Communications Laboratory, taken on the care and feeding of three, 400-lb. (180-kg.) adolescents who could smack you through a concrete wall, if they wanted to. It’s a big responsibility, and I don’t think people are going to give you much money just to study dolphins to see if they maybe, possibly, HAVE a language!

Finally… finally, sometimes a scientist, like everyone else, has a strong hunch that things are heading the right way, that they can disregard everybody else, that they can break the rules and still win! Such feelings are hard for a logical, rational mind to resist, precisely because they are not rational nor logical. But neither having a strong hunch, nor following it to the bitter end, makes one automatically right! Appearances can be deceiving, and as often as not, it is ourselves we deceive.

What matters to me is, I found something I wanted to pursue, and I have pursued it all my life. Maybe not as a scientist, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t made remarkable discoveries, such as this: WE HAVE HAD LIVING BESIDE US, UNNOTICED, FOR MILLIONS OF YEARS, ANOTHER SPECIES OF LIFE THAT ROUTINELY ENGAGES IN MANY OF THE SAME HIGHER-ORDER FUNCTIONS THAT WE HUMANS DO: COMPLEX PROBLEM-SOLVING, SOCIAL AWARENESS, INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP IDENTITIES, ETHICS, THEORY OF MIND, and has enough imagination to realize that in some ways this odd, upright ape with the clever fingers IS RATHER LIKE ITSELF, in that our minds have strange and significant similarities!

We humans, as the dominant species on Planet Earth, need to acknowledge that a non-technological species, which cannot even open a can of beans or unfold a Swiss Army knife, is Number 2, and in the ocean, they are, and always will be, Number 1! Due to their 12-million year head start on us in the Large Brains Department, and their incredible record of sheer SURVIVAL over that time, we should be approaching them as older and wiser beings, with the respect and deliberation they deserve. Let what nature writer Loren Eisley called “our long human loneliness” finally be over, as we are re-admitted to the order of Nature by our old friends, the dolphins!

The author as he appeared in the 1970’s, eavesdropping on a chat between a dolphin and a Martian ant, whose appearance is thanks to NASA. Biden’s going to announce it next week, no, REALLY!

All contents & illustrations ©2023 Malcolm J. Brenner. All rights reserved.

“Grusch revelations verify my UFO novel,” science-fiction author claims

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner
Cover illustration by Thea Boodhoo

For Immediate release, June 8, 2023/NOT EMBARGOED

Staff Report, Eyes Open Media

PORT CHARLOTTE, FL — Recent allegations that the U.S. has recovered parts, wreckage and even intact vehicles of extraterrestrial origin, made by a former government employee turned whistleblower, should expand interest in a controversial local author’s 2015 story about the attempted retrieval of a crashed alien spaceship and its surviving crew member.

“My novel ‘Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair,’ opens with four members of an elite but woefully inadequate government black-ops unit trying to locate a reported UFO that’s crashed in the foothills of the Rockies, outside of Durango, Colorado,” said writer Malcolm J. Brenner. “What follows is a rather improbable science-fiction story, told in three-and-a-half timelines, of interplanetary intrigue, cosmic war and lust, both human and alien. It’s also the story of my second marriage, backed up by an authentic newspaper clipping.”

Brenner, just turned 72, is the author of two other self-published books, one of which has achieved some notoriety. “Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover” is his thinly fictionalized novel of courtship and eventual seduction by a marine mammal of unusual abilities, one of them being interspecies telepathy! First published in 2010, it’s since sold more than 2,500 copies in 18 countries, Brenner said.

The plot of “Mel-Khyor” revolves around the surviving alien’s attempts to repair his AI-augmented spaceship and escape Earth, with the help of Susie Louise McGonagle (a pseudonym), whose family happens to own a vacation cabin just down the trail from the crash. Susie is shocked when the alien, called Mel-Khyor, tells her if he and his Ship are about to be captured intact, he is under orders to disable the Ship, and then kill himself, to prevent humans from obtaining advanced, star-traveling technology!

“Needless to say, Susie springs to his aid, then wonders what she can do to repair an alien spaceship,” Brenner said. “It so happens that the Ship learns to interface with her, so that she effectively becomes part of it, repairing itself!”

As unlikely as this scenario sounds, Brenner recalled, it originates in some pillow talk he and his fiancée had in New Mexico, after watching an early episode of the then-popular 1990’s cosmic-paranoia show “The X-Files.”

“She was sleepy, and that episode about UFOs must’ve jogged her unconscious,” Brenner said, “because she mumbled some words as we were going to bed, and when I realized she was talking about an actual, first-hand encounter with an extra-terrestrial alien, my blood froze.”

Further research revealed the timing of his ex-wife’s encounter, the night of August 2, 1978, coincided with reports of an unusual meteor falling over Canada and plunging south to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where it apparently exploded harmlessly 15 miles up, but with the force of a tactical nuclear weapon. The U.S. Air Force confirmed that the object, a bolide, was not man-made; Brenner believes the blast may have been a decoy intended to discourage searchers from looking for the survivor.

“If so, it didn’t work,” Brenner noted wryly.

It now seems that statements and allegations made by David Grusch, reportedly a former employee of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and a decorated Army combat veteran of Afghanistan, confirm that the U.S.A., and other nations, are in possession of wreckage, debris and even intact vehicles of extraterrestrial origin. Grusch was a liaison with the Defense Department’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force for three years, and later a leader of the NGA’s UFO/UAP analysis unit. He is well-spoken-of by members of the intelligence community who know him. (Source: The Debrief, June 5, 2023.)

Referring back to his ex-wife’s experience, which he admits to sometimes doubting, Brenner said “It’s not the lack of extraterrestrial vehicles, it’s the lack of pilots who can actually fly them! These craft are, according to my ex-wife, controlled by a very sensitive, sophisticated artificial intelligence which merged, in some way, with her mind. The alien did that so he could interrogate her, but the net effect was that thereafter, she and the Ship were mentally linked, giving her the ability to work as its eyes and hands in repairing it,” Brenner explained.

“Flying one of these vehicles is going to require someone, like her, who has already been tuned-in to the sapient Ship and can do the equivalent of a ‘Vulcan mind-meld’ with its supercomputer,” Brenner continued. “It isn’t going to be easy, and if you don’t have what amounts to the computer’s password, it isn’t going to be fun, either!

“Such people are going to be in demand, to the point where our government might intervene to get them to cooperate, for National Security reasons,” Brenner mused. “I told my wife that her best protection from that would be to go on Oprah Winfrey’s show and tell her whole damn story. That way, if you ‘disappear,’ at least somebody with some clout will notice!” However, she rejected the idea.

Brenner has steadfastly refused to identify his ex-wife, or tell of her current whereabouts. “Somewhere between the Mississippi River and the eastern border of California,” he said when asked if he knew where she was. “She has relatives back East, somewhere, so she might be there, too.

“Please note that her son, in his late 30’s, served as a U.S. Army Ranger in the 10th Mountain Division for several years, surviving a brutal fire-fight in a conflict zone. I know for a fact that he will brook no intrusions whatsoever on his mother’s privacy,” Brenner warned would-be busybodies.

Brenner’s third book’s a memoir, “Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood,” documenting the trauma inflicted on him by a sadistic pedophile psychiatrist and a cold, sometimes-brutal mother.

“Mel-Khyor” and “Wet Goddess” can be bought on Amazon, and an audiobook version of “Mel-Khyor” is available on Audible and other sellers. “Orgone Box” is at present only available as an ebook from Smashwords, but Brenner hopes to be able to reprint it as a trade paperback soon. He is working on a non-fiction book about his time as a newspaper reporter on the Navajo Nation.

Brenner’s web site is http://malcolmbrenner.com. He can be reached at malcolmb2@centurylink.net, or by cell phone at (415) 640-5013. Brenner strongly suggests you text him before calling, as he receives a lot of junk calls and sometimes answers them rudely.

Below is the Durango Herald’s clipping referred to above, documenting the alleged meteor’s fall.

And finally, a review of “Mel-Khyor” from the Florida Weekly.

That’s all for now, folks!

An “unidentified flying object” appears over the desert near Highway 50 in central Nevada. Photo taken with a 35mm Olympus OM-1 SLR camera, Kodacolor film, 35-70mm Zuiko zoom lens. Exposure f11 @ 1/125. Date: September, 1992.

NOTEZ BIEN: This post somehow went out yesterday restricted only to my subscribers, so thanks, both of you! But I meant it for the sweating masses of the Third World, the laboring ignorant peons that make up the bulk of Earth’s population, the ones who haven’t bought any of my books yet, and I don’t know how it got so restricted! Here it is again, now available to anybody who can read, which I hope includes you, dear reader! Enjoy, or enjoy again, if you got this yesterday. More to come!

GENTLY USED E-BOOKS, CHEAP!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner
The author as evil genius. Photo by Keithen Martinez.
The author as an evil genius. Photo by Keithen Martinez.

Hey, gang, here I go again! Only I lied when I wrote that headline, because these babies are brand new bargains and rarin’ to go! Drive ’em off the lot for up to 1/2 price, no trade-in required and no tiresome negotiations! I just didn’t think you’d believe me if I said that in the headline!

Yes, it’s the annual Summer/Winter Sale at Smashwords, my favorite purveyor of e-literature. Why? Because, with exquisite taste, they published me, when all other e-book distributors gave me either derisive scorn, or mocking laughter, at the thought of publishing a human-dolphin romance novel!

Well I’ve shown them, haven’t I? Since 2010, over 2,150 copies of Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover sold in 18 countries, not including South Korea, which for some reason has a ban on Western books going even to U.S. service personnel, but a psychiatric institute in Beijing did order a copy to complete their collection on decadent, imperialistic Western sexual perversions, I guess. Got to keep up with trends in mental illness, after all, and delphinophilia is one of the latest!

(When looking for my books in Smashwords, be sure to set Filtering in the blue bar at the top of the page to Include all Erotica, otherwise you’ll never see them!)

To get a 25% discount on Wet Goddess regular price of $6.99, use this code: WE48B.

Not only that, but the memoir that rips wide-open the weird, creepy, seamy side of my childhood, and exposes New Age psychiatrist Dr. Wilhelm Reich for the idiotic fraud he was, Growing Up in the Orgone Box: Secrets of a Reichian Childhood, is on sale for 50% off!

What’s it like to be only 5 years old and lying on a couch, butt naked, with a dark, bitter man staring at you, who is going to hurt you, molest you and cause you only pain? And soundproof walls and a locked door stand between him and your father?

This book tells that story, reveals my mother’s callous indifference to my welfare, and exposes the dangers of believing in pseudo-science, or any unwarranted belief system whether religious or not, rather than your own child.

To get a 50% discount on Orgone Box regular price of $6.99, use this code: BJ25B

The Smashwords Summer/Winter Sale lasts from July 1-July 31, and they call it that because when it’s summer in this hemisphere it’s winter Down Under, right? Right!

And, maybe, I will get out an e-book copy of my straight, heterosexual sex-with-an-alien science-fiction novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair in time for the sale. I’ve had some people who don’t like the audio book asking for it, and it’s time I did it, because it sure is gathering dust in paperback! Stranger things have happened, pigs have flown.

But basically you should buy my books for 2 reasons:

1) They are supremely entertaining, if weird, stories that happen to be true, and

2) I need to increase my gross income, so I can support my writing habit. And I’m Jonesing bad, man, bad!

Well, what are you waiting for?

True Crime and Coke®: Of Reich and Wicca!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner
Members of Amber K and Azrael’s coven gather on the hills above Los Alamos, N.M. to perform their magic rituals. A cover I shot, which never ran on the last of Llewellyn Publishing’s 4-volume “Witchcraft Today” series, because the first three volumes sold so badly they threw away this photo and changed the cover to something harmless and non-controversial, hoping to cover their tracks. Of course, it didn’t work. Photo ©1995 Malcolm J. Brenner.

NEWS FLASH: At precisely 8 p.m. on June 30 (if hostess TerriLee has her act together, likewise me, and the internet gods smile upon us), I will be a guest, for the second freaking time, on the podcast True Crime & Coke. This marks a new level of sophistication in my career as a dolphin evangelist, because it’s the first time anyone has asked me to be on a second time!


But this time, the subject won’t be those clever dolphins and their unstoppable sex drives. Instead, it will be two experiences in my life which affected me profoundly: The influence of the mad 1950’s pseudo-scientist Wilhelm Reich on my family when I was a child, documented in my memoir Growing Up in the Orgone Box; and, decades later, in my 30’s, learning to become a Witch (yes, not a warlock) from my first wife Seafoam, only to suffer, some 20 years later, a complete loss of my faith in ritual and magic as my marriage to my second wife (I can’t remember her magical name, so I’ll just call her as I do in my most recent science-fiction novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair, Susie Louise) crumbled around me, taking my profession, home, family and sanity with it.

The late Dr. Wilhelm Reich with his “orgone energy cloud buster,” a claimed weather modification device which ran on bluster and pseudoscience.

I don’t know exactly how long the program will be, 1-2 hrs. (I can’t go much longer than that, especially starting at 8 p.m.) is the usual, or whether listeners will be able to ask questions by text or call in. All that is to be determined, is above my pay grade, is being contemplated by cool and objective minds far greater than mine… or any humans! Muuu-hahahahaha! But, if you’re not too busy digging your new flower bed in the evening hours, or working on a canning project, or finding a cleaning solution that remove those stubborn blood stains from the curtains, why don’t you tune in?

Members of the Neo-Pagan community particularly invited, not because I’m going to try to talk you into or out of anything, but maybe you can find something in my story to relate to. After all, who among us has not, at some time, doubted the efficacy of their magic? And Reichians? Sure, they can listen in if they want, and learn that their “Great Man” (Reich’s own term for himself — modest, much, Wilhelm?) had serious feet of clay. A man who, despite having written a textbook called Character Analysis, proved to be an absolutely clueless idiot when it came to analyzing the character of his closest associates.

What more can I say? I’m going to reveal some really awful family secrets? Yes. I’m going to spill my guts? I’m going to set my hair on fire? Sorry, no seppuku, no ignitions, but, as said of the celebrated Mr. Kite in the Beatles’ song,

“A splendid time is guaranteed for all, and tonight Mr. Kite is topping the biiiillllll!” (Cue the calliope.)

Why dolphins really ARE “little people in wet suits,” Part 1: Feelings, Ooohh Feelings…

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner
From the Sunday comic strip “Mark Trail” many years ago. I don’t know if it’s still going or not. It wouldn’t be a great loss, because nobody read the daily strips about a park ranger, but this one on a weekend caught my attention.

I think it can be safely said that I do know what anthropomorphism is. In its simplest form, it is endowing non-human entities, be they animals, plants, objects or just natural forces, with human traits, like awareness, reason, and emotions.

Especially emotions. We are long past the point of imagining a god is mad at us personally or collectively because a storm passes over… but a tornado, typhoon or hurricane may elicit that response, because the damage is more severe, or widespread, or fatal. Legally, we still refer to things that are foreseeable but unlikely and unavoidable as “acts of God,” a term that shows the piety of our lawyers, if not their wits.

We must thus be very careful in our dealings with other animals, who do not share our human ways, not to anthropomorphise them; we do so at our own risk! For instance, that grinning chimpanzee isn’t happy with you, it’s about to rip your face off!

PIC BY M WATSON / ARDEA / CATERS NEWS – (PICTURED: A Chimpanzee laughing) – These comical creatures are clearly up FUR a laugh in these sidesplitting images which show a variety of ecstatic animals enjoying a good old chuckle. The hilarious snaps, taken by a whole host of photographers from around the globe, prove life in the jungle is most definitely jolly, as creatures from an orangutan to a elephant seal are pictured mid-laugh. A cheery chimpanzee can be seen sporting a toothy grin as he enjoys life at Chimfunshi Wildlife Orphanage in Zambia. And a pot-bellied pig is clearly tickled pink at his home in Lower Saxony, Germany. In another image an Icelandic horse appears to crack up when he spots a photographers camera, while a chuckling cheetah creases up in Kenya. SEE CATERS COPY

Exposing your canine teeth (fangs) is a sign of aggression in chimps, even though grinning among us humans is a sign of pleasure. Moral? Just give that chimp a nice, close-lipped smile, and retain your face a while longer.

From the brilliant Japanese Manga comic strip Beastars, one season available as a fantastic anime on Netflix. After a llama student is horribly murdered one dark night, it’s the predators vs. the herbivores at Cherryton Academy, where a bunch of neurotic students ranging from a shy wolf who doubts his killer instincts to a dwarf rabbit with nymphomania and a young buck — literally — maneuvering himself into a place of esteem and power are being educated… but not in reading, writing and arithmetic!

Same with a dog that humps your leg; this often comes up in discussions about how Dolly the dolphin used to rub against me. She was definitely masturbating, but chances are about 90% that your dog doesn’t have sex on its mind when it humps you, it has dominance.

I say that because I saw it in action. Long-time readers will remember that before I acquired Epic I had two other dogs from Grants, N.M., Pixel and Pugsley. Pugsley was a neutered Husky bitch, one of the smaller dogs that Husky enthusiasts tell me do most of the actual sled-pulling.

So that was Pugsley’s raison d’être. Then Cay came to stay at my place and brought with her Keiko, an utterly untrainable (to Cay, anyhow) 80 lb./36 kg. male pit bull mix.

The mixed-breed Keiko in a quiet moment.

When the dogs had settled into a predictable dominance hierarchy, with Keiko uncomplainingly on the bottom, every night, after they ate, Pugsley would hump him. Keiko pretended she wasn’t there. For the two dogs, this served a dual purpose: for Pugsley, reassurance of her dominant position over Keiko, and for him, the ability to completely blow her off, because she was fixed, whereas Pixel, who was my mate at the time, wasn’t, and Keiko got her pregnant when… well, that’s another, sad story.

But the point here isn’t to make you any more sorry for me than you already are, it’s to explain that humping for dogs, and many other quadrupeds, is not only sexual activity but a crude form of dominance behavior, expressed by both males and females, and should be interpreted thus in non-sexual situations. The “obvious” betrays us because we are conditioned to think of humping as involving sex. Not always!

I think it can also be safely said that many, if not most, scientists familiar with marine mammals will accuse me of anthropomorphism in allowing my relationship with Dolly to develop to the degree that it did, but this isn’t true either. In fact, I can safely say that, because of my experience, few other humans are as aware of the differences between humans and dolphins as I am!

So what do I make of the late Drs. David and Melba Caldwell, co-authors of many scientific papers and the popular, anti-revisionist, pro-U.S. Navy book The World of the Bottlenose Dolphin, when they say, as they do in the book,

“Dolphins are not little people in wet suits.”

By this, I take it the really mean,

“DON’T FUCKING ANTHROPOMORPHIZE DOLPHINS!”

but they were much too polite to put it that way, at least in print.

(David & Melba chart the auditory damage done to dolphin hearing by attending orca death-metal concerts featuring extended humpback whale solos.)
  • The Caldwells’ “true” book about bottlenose dolphins, which are quite wonderful enough as occasionally clever mammals, never mind the ravings of crazy neurophsychologists who take LSD trips in sensory isolation tanks and come back raving about becoming one with God! Ha! We all know that only Roman Catholic priests have THAT long-distance number!
(The Caldwell’s layperson’s book on dolphins, written to dispel all then-currently circulating myths about them being anything other than very bright, and occasionally clever, animals.)

On the surface, this homily seems like a foregone conclusion. As a species, bottlenose dolphins are vastly older than us, having retained their current form, including the large, 3.3 lb./1.5 kg. brain, much more convoluted than our 3 lb./1.36 kg. model, for the past 12,000,000 (that’s 12 million, for the numerically-challenged) years. We have had our current, erect primate form only since Homo Erectus about 2 million years ago, and our current level of physical and cultural evolution, Homo sapiens, for about 250,000 (one-quarter million) years at longest. Obviously, these creatures who exist without tools, weapons, protective clothing or even manipulative appendages (aside from their mouths) could teach our species a thing or two about SURVIVAL SKILLS!

What I found really surprising about Dolly’s behavior was how much it WAS similar to human behavior, and I don’t think this just my interpretation. For instance, consider the situation when I brought “Elaine,” a young woman (just turned 18, not that it should interest you) I wanted to have a serious (read sexual) relationship with, to meet Dolly, “the gentlest of all the dolphins,” her trainer and the woman who coaxed me to shoot photos for her never-written book claimed.

Dolly towing my wannabe girlfriend about 30 seconds before the next photo was taken.

Dolly, of course, had her own damned ideas!

You don’t want this to happen on a date. Trust me, you don’t.

Am I wrong when I label this behavior “jealousy”? It caught me totally unawares! I had never imagined that a creature like a dolphin could regard me as her exclusive property, to be defended against all interlopers for their attentions, whether her own species or not!

How did Dolly know, sense, or figure out, that Elaine was my girlfriend, a rival for her affections, and not my sister, or niece, or daughter? I remember that day there was absolutely no feeling that I had any type of “contact,” or mental communication, with her at all. And not for lack of trying! I was sending her my thoughts — she just wasn’t letting me know she was receiving them!

Years later, when I read David Holroyd’s account of a similar experience with a captive dolphin in Great Britain, I knew my analysis was correct. When dolphins don’t want to communicate with you, they shut down ALL the channels! That’s how you know you’re fucking up.

I could run this post a lot further, but I’ve already published 2 today, and I need some time to make these points, can’t do it willy-nilly. Bare with me, and I’ll get around to telling you why dolphins ARE sometimes “little humans in wet suits”!

(End Part 1)

Danger: Squirrelfall!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

Writer: John Rhodes Junior. Editor: Ralph.

Illustration
Science-fiction author Malcolm J. Brenner, left, points to the cabbage palm tree from which the alleged assailant rodent allegedly launched the alleged attack.

Photo by John Rhodes Junior, taken with his damn iPhone because the editor won’t let him use the good camera anymore. You drop one 80-200mm f 2.8 Nikon zoom lens, and they act like it’s the end of the world! It’s hell working here, I tell you! Hell!

PORT CHARLOTTE, FL. – It was a Saturday morning, sunny and quiet, and Florida writer Malcolm J. Brenner was feeling pretty good for a change. The crippling combo of vertigo and chronic fatigue, which had weighed on him for years, weren’t bothering him much, and the many superficial scars from Perugia nodularis, a weird ingrown-hair condition created by inherited psoriasis, were somehow healing. All in all, the morning was ripe with favorable omens, and Brenner felt an uncommon sensation of hope wash over his thin, 5′ 9″ frame.

Grasping the blue, artificial fabric leash attached to the muzzle on his mostly-black-Labrador bitch Epic’s snout tightly in his left hand, Brenner stood in his doorway and took stock of the situation. For their morning walk, the first of the day, the dog and her master turned right at the end of his driveway and followed the sidewalk clockwise around the block on which Brenner’s unassuming but totally adequate yellow General Construction house, a remnant of the 1959 Florida housing boom, stood.

The driveway was getting rather pitted, Brenner noted, and he thought of calling an asphalt contractor for a bid. But that would have to wait until he replaced the decorative wooden post that the bitch had pulled down. Epic had run out her cable barking at a neighbor and his dog walking by, and the cable was connected to the post, which fell down. (“If you push something hard enough, it will fall over.” – Fudd’s First Law.) Fortunately, it wasn’t a load-bearing structural member for the carport, and the roof of the structure remained intact, somewhat to Brenner’s surprise. It had been a few days since the incident, and he counted his blessings.

Suddenly, a loud rustling caught Brenner’s ear, coming from a native cabbage palm to his right. The tree stood adjacent to his lot, at the corner of his neighbor’s property, a nice normal couple named Willy and Rachel, and their several kids. Brenner glanced up, and could see the green, leafy fronds of the palm’s crown in violent motion. Some kind of action was going on inside, something not the common squabbling of birds, as Brenner had seen many times before. Something possibly… BIG.

Taking a moment to reflect on what could be causing the rustling, Brenner mused aloud, to his dog in particular, “I bet that’s a squirrel, Epic, the birds don’t make that much noise!” And then, throwing caution to the four winds, the couple set out on their morning circumambulation… the path taking them right under the suspect tree.

“We had only gone two steps, and then it struck me,” Brenner recounted, sweat beading his 69-year-old brow. “I mean, it didn’t really strike me, or the dog, but it just barely missed us! And it didn’t seem to jump from branch to branch and miss, like they sometimes do, it just fell straight down and landed right in front of us, startling me and bringing Epic to a sudden halt.”

Something small, gray, and fuzzy. Something that barely avoided the stony concrete sidewalk an inch away in its rapid descent, something that landed with a loud THUD! in the soft sand that passes for soil in Florida, leaving a small crater, which Brenner surveyed later.

Not a coconut; cabbage palms don’t grow them. Not a dead bird, or a broken branch, or a cluster of palm berries, like he might have expected, but… a squirrel!

A SQUIRREL!

Yes, a ferocious, wild, undomesticated creature now lay before them on its stomach, immobile. Only the Fates knew if it was dead or alive… and capable of attack at any moment!

Illo of squirrel
The suspected suicidal rodent, photographed at another location and time. Well, it really wasn’t the squirrel I’m writing about, this is a different one, but hey, they all look alike to me, don’t they to you? And don’t call me a racist for saying that! It’s just a goddamn SQUIRREL, not a G**k or a Ch*nk or a J*p or a N*gg*r or a Sp*c or a W*p or an Inj*n, for Pete’s sake! Hell, I don’t even think it’s J*w*sh, and they’re almost white!

There was a millisecond of stunned silence. Even Epic, who, being a dog, as the late 19th Century English adventurer Rudyard Kipling pointed out in his classic childhood espionage novel Kim, could fall asleep in the road and wake up instantly just as the wheel of an approaching wagon was about to crush her, was struck dumb by the rodent’s sudden and unexpected, calamitous descent from the vegetative organism, and stood unmoving, too startled by the sudden spectacle to even bark, or whimper helplessly.

“The English have a word for it,” Brenner later recounted breathlessly in the still, humid air, “what is it, Godspell? No, that was a Broadway Jesus musical back in the Seventies. It must be something else… wait… damn it, it’s on the tip of my… oh yeah! Gobsmacked! That’s how Epic and I both felt, utterly gobsmacked by this damn kamikaze rodent plunging towards the Earth and barely missing us! Another two feet and it might have landed on my head, giving me a new, Donald T***p-style hairpiece for free, and possibly knocking me out, too!”

Epic had no comment on the situation, but her soft brown canine eyes betrayed her stress, even hours later.

But before either dog or man could so much as bat a lash, the rogue rodent recovered its senses, gathered its wits and disappeared in a blur of gray under Willy’s white Toyota truck with a camper shell on its back, the good strong fiberglass ones, not the cheap, thin aluminum ones. And then it was gone, gone for good, for better or for worse.

Brenner shook his head, recalling the rampant craziness of the moment.

“I seen them varmints jump before, and a-yup, they’re pretty good at making leaps even a cat would think twice about, and grabbing a branch skinnier than an anorexic model with bulimia, and then they’ll just skitter right on up that tree and out of sight,” Brenner recalled, “but this one was just plain GONE, man! I mean, ZOOM, gone, down on the ground right from under our noses, and that was it. Over and done with. Gone.”

His senses reeling, his mind churning, Brenner and Epic nevertheless managed to complete their morning walk without further incident. But hours later, the ramifications of the event still troubled him.

“That squirrel had no business being in that tree,” he opined. “I mean, I know they live in trees and all, but that tree… that was a bird tree, maybe even a bat tree, you know, a tree for flying things, and squirrels… they definitely do not fly! I seen ’em, they fall down just like you or me, and land with a thud. So that squirrel musta been up to some mischief there, maybe looking for his breakfast eggs or some hatchlings in a bird’s nest. Yeah, they’re supposed to eat nuts and stuff, and they look all cute and cuddly, but they’ll fool ya and chow down on some baby birds if they can get ’em! Squirrels don’t live on nuts alone!”

Two days later, the incident still left Brenner shaken, and shaking his head in disbelief.

“This world we-all are living in, what’s it coming to when a man, standing on his own property, walking his own dog on his own stretch of sidewalk, has to fear the fall of a robber squirrel from a tree? It could have hurt me, wounded me, or even crushed me, if it was an elephant and not a squirrel, and Epic let it escape without an apology, or even so much as a howdy-do!

“It ain’t natural! Ain’t nothin’ natural left except Dr. Bronner’s Soap, and I hear they make that from mary-jawanna these days. What’s the world coming to? It coulda been a burning jetliner, or a falling satellite, or even an big ol’ asteroid, roaring down to extinguish human civilization forever! But a squirrel…?”

He left the portentous words hanging heavy in the dank, thick air, and poured himself another drink. Epic lapped water nervously from a bowl on the floor.

The proper authorities have been notified, and are taking action to prevent squirrel falls from interfering with the day-to-day life, work and recreation of other Charlotte County residents. Reportedly, they are installing Chinese-made falling squirrel catchers, like a wide, plastic ring, around the trunks of every tree in the county. Further down the road, they are considering the cost and effectiveness of requiring arboreal squirrels to wear mini-parachutes when tree borne. But the shock stays with the victim.

“I can’t get over it, and neither can my dog,” Brenner concluded. “She ain’t been the same since that… danged thing dang near fell on us! She’s been whimpering and howling and keeps looking up tree trunks, like she expects a danged cheetah or something to jump down and rip her up! I don’t know what’s coming next, and I can’t eat nor sleep at night for worrying, and I can barely pour a drink of tequila to calm my nerves. It’s a regular calamity, I tell ya. A regular calamity!”

Among local mammalogists, exactly what the squirrel was doing in the tree that morning remains a matter of intense speculation. Was it gathering an innocent, vegan breakfast of palm berries, or were its furry jaws slavering in anticipation of a bloody meal of baby birds? Or maybe even something unthinkable, unguessable, unimaginable, something that only a hunger-crazed rodent would contemplate?

Only the squirrel knows for sure… and he or she isn’t talking.

(###)

This real photograph of a bizarre sex ritual observed by squirrels in their native habit may have been behind the near fatal man-dog-squirrel encounter. Film at 11.
This real photograph of a bizarre sex ritual carried out by actual squirrels in their native habitat may have been behind the near fatal man-dog-squirrel encounter. Film at 11. Photo by uSuck.

Editor’s Note: John, what are you trying to do to me? I need more copy on this! You’ve given me 6 paltry inches, and we’ve got a hole the size of Alaska on page 3 because Numbnutz pulled their ad over the dolphin sex story on page 4, and they are now threatening to cancel their whole year-long contract with us! I know this is pretty thin, but can you somehow stretch it to 30 or even 40 column inches? Come on, guy, pad it out a little like you did with that story about the overweight chick in Spandex. I know you can do it by deadline, just give it the old college try, and for once get it in on time! My wife is threatening to leave me and take the kids if I don’t make it home in time for supper tonight! Mama Mia! — Ralph

Signs O’ the Times

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

I keep track of interesting, relevant or stupid bumper stickers I see. Here, randomly selected, are the ones that have drawn my iPhone’s attention in the past year.

  • The stickers on the tailgate of a neighbor’s truck. Funny guy!

“Keep on truckin’!” – Mr. Natural

Why I Write

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

With apologies to famous Hollywood feature director Frank Capra, who joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps in WWII (the same branch my father, a radar operator, and Ray Harryhausen, a stop-motion animator were in) and made a series of seven documentaries collectively called “Why We Fight,” which are studied to this day in film classes as brilliant, virtuous pieces of propaganda, unlike Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 Berlin Olympics documentary “Triumph Of The Will,” which everyone agrees is a brilliant, evil, racist piece of propaganda, because we won. Right?

I write to exorcise my

DEMONS

I write

to keep myself from

killing people

who richly deserve it

I write instead of screaming, instead of therapy

I write to slowly winch myself out of the muck

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I just write because I have to, okay?

“La Reve des Chevaux Bleu,” © 2011 Malcolm J. Brenner Model: Cay Small

Another Interview: Extra Funk Sauce, Please!

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner

“Debuting Friday, September 18th 2020
The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show
Runtime: 11.5 minutes
It’s an animated “late night” talk show!“

WARNING: 1-800-FUNK-SAUCE is not a working number!

Do not call it, expecting any kind of an answer! I do not know what would happen if somebody actually picked up that phone, but I suspect you’d be worse off than if they hadn’t.

“With new episodes appearing on www.1-800-Funk-Sauce.com every Friday night, starting 9/18, The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show will feature interviews with guests from all walks of life, musical performances from bands from all over the country/world, and various other adult comedy elements. 
The pilot episode will feature an interview with Malcolm J. Brenner and his former lover, Dolly the dolphin, to discuss their love affair. Musical guest Billy Summer will perform afterwards.
“Find your comfortable spot, relax, get into the zone, and tune into The 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com Show, on Fridays starting on 9/18, on 1-800-Funk-Sauce.com.” — Press Release, Joe Seul

Let me explain. Joe Seul is a good guy I met through a bad public-relations contact. At the time, about mid-2017, he was a New College student majoring in music who proved very friendly and helpful in getting the audio book of Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair ready for publication by equalizing the sound and adding a little reverb to my flat, nasal voice, so I sound less like Boris Karloff and more like Morgan Freeman. And it worked out really well, so I was grateful to him, because he didn’t ask for any payment.

“What a swell guy!” I thought. Little did I know what EVIL lurks in the hearts of men!

Well, a couple of years went by when I didn’t hear a lot from Joe. He finished up his work at New College, moved out of the roach-infested hovel that passed for off-campus student housing there and upward and onward to better things in St. Petersburg (the Florida one, not the one in Russia, you know). And then came The Great Covid-19 Lockdown of 2020, and, like a lot of musicians, poor Joe didn’t know what to do with himself.

Not having anybody to jam with drove young Joe nearly insane (am I hitting too hard on this, Joe?) and he began experimenting with new programs, new apps. One of them, he told me, was a rudimentary computer graphics app that allowed him to make 3D animation that looked like an Amiga game in 1990, only not quite that good.

And then, like the skilled lurker, he is, he sprang the question: “I’m using it to do a short interview podcast, a different topic each week and some music, and I’d like you to be the first guest. What do you say?”

What could I say? Joe had me eating out of the palm of his paw, er, hand. I agreed, and since I haven’t had much success lately giving a recording of an interview that’s worth listening to, I was glad hear it would be recorded on regular old cell phone (I’m sure I’ll be able to get that Blue Yeti from my daughter to work right the next time).

It was late on a July afternoon, I think, when the westering sun shines into the house and the central AC struggles to keep it at 83ºF/28ºC against the greater heat outside, but I turned the fan off so the background noise wouldn’t interfere with Joe’s recording. A little hasty, I called him up, but there was some glitch and he called me back a little after 5 p.m.

There were a lot of things I want to talk about. The two other books I’ve written. My telepathic experiences with Dolly, which ended up on the floor of the Dolphin Lover cutting room (except these days they’d be taking up space in your Trash). My thoughts about the venerable age of the bottlenose dolphin species, 12 million years as compared to our +/- 250,000 years. What that means to the evolution of their sonic communications. How their predictive theory of mind abilities, which let them second-guess other dolphins and ourselves, evolved. And so on.

But Joe just launched right in. After a brief introduction, he said “Tell me what happened with you and Dolly at Floridaland.”

Well…

Ya know, Joe, it’s like this: You have an extraordinary experience, and you decide to let others know about it, so you spend 37 years writing, editing, printing and publishing a book about it so you won’t have to repeat it over and over and over. And then you go to distribute the book, and what do interviewers ask you?

“Tell me what happened!”

But, gentle reader, I didn’t do that. Instead I sat back and I spent the next little while telling Joe the story of my experience with Dolly, but this time trying to work in as much of my non-dolphin experience, and recent conclusions regarding us, the dolphins and whatever the fuck causes the UFOs as I could while still threading back to the occasional sweaty-palms narrative.

Forty-five heatstroked minutes later, Joe finished up by asking a few questions. “How did you get consent from the dolphin?” was the one I remember.

I didn’t give him my flip answer, either, which is “When was the last time you got a pig’s consent to turn it into a ham sandwich?” That’s flip because most of us do it without giving it a second thought, and also because it begs the question, Why is getting consent from a non-human partner only important when the human’s sexual pleasure is involved?

Because, not to put too fine a point on it, animals are chattel under most laws, and I can do what I want with chattel, provided if it’s an animal covered under the law (I don’t think many of us are going to lose a lot of sleep about the fates of mosquitoes, bedbugs or fire ants) I treat it humanely, even to the point of killing it humanely. And the law spells out how you do this.

I can breed that animal to another animal that may not be its natural choice, and I can, if necessary, hobble an unwilling female animal so that she cannot injure an unwanted male who rapes her. So it’s not whether the female animal (and, BTW, I submit that, in the eyes of the public, ONLY female animals can be the true “victims” of a bestialist) is enjoying it, or really even whether her body is her own, she is going to be used by her owner as a reproductive vehicle! The choice of a mate isn’t hers and her owner’s interest in her pleasure from the act can be accurately measured in micro-give-a-shits.

But suddenly, if I want to step in, and, knowing what I know about the animal’s species, characteristics and habits, not harm the animal, not hurt the animal, not even rape the animal, but just have sex with the animal — “normal” interspecies sex, for want of a better term, you know, the old in-and-out — for our mutual pleasure, THAT IS A HORRENDOUS, UNSPEAKABLE “CRIME AGAINST NATURE” AND WE MUST DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO PREVENT IT, OR PUNISH THE BESTIALIST IF IT HAPPENS!

To which I answer, “Where’s the harm?”

Harm. The concept of injury or damage, usually to someone else. Remember that? HARM? In Harm’s Way, famous WWII book & movie? “Evidence of harm,” legal concept? Self-harm, disturbing behavior? Armie Hammer, star of the disastrous 2013 Lone Ranger remake?

But I digress.

Joe did ask one memorable question, which was “How did you get consent from her?”

To which I answered, “Are you kidding? She had to get consent from me!” Which is true, and she spent most of the preceding five months figuring out how to do it! Was there a need to elaborate? Maybe another time.

We concluded the interview and Joe went back to his lair for a couple of weeks to edit. Then he sent me an email with a Vimeo address and a password. And what to my wondering eyes should appear…

I don’t want to spoil it for you, so just let me say that Joe has honored my request to revive Dolly the dolphin in animated form, and chosen to portray us in a highly… COMPROMISED SITUATION.

Let it never be said (by me anyway) that I lack a sense of humor about myself. I acknowledge the many funny actualities in my relationship with Dolly, and point some of them out in the novel, including a photo of her mashing her snout into my would-be girlfriend’s face, while staring straight into the camera. It’s a wonderfully funny picture now, 50 years later, and I’m glad I still have it!

In this regard, let me say that I think Joe has exploited the humorous aspects of my relationship with Dolly in a way that nobody else has done before, and for this I congratulate him! He has also speeded up my voice by about 15-20% to make more of my interview available but doesn’t advise you of this before the interview begins, so I sound a little bit like a lost member of the band Alvin & The Chipmunks, but I mean, hell, Brenner, what do you expect for free? I didn’t really mean to insinuate that Joe was EVIL, just that I was a little… uh… SURPRISED by his… IMAGINATIVE PORTRAIT of myself and the dolphin together, VERY together, in the altogether.

Please check out the 1-800-FUNK-SAUCE.com website starting Friday evening, September 18 and let Joe and me know what you think, if you choose to. Thanks!

With some effort, dolphin-human love story regains its lost “Premium” status

Posted on by Malcolm J. Brenner
It's a book cover, dudes! MY book cover!

PrimeStatus

PUNTA GORDA, Fla., USA – “The role of the self-published author is not an easy one,” Malcolm J. Brenner said, sliding onto a dingy leather couch that might have once been white.  “In addition to successfully writing one’s magnum opus, one must also bring it forth into the real world, where it will grow up to compete in a ruthlessly Darwinian struggle for readers and reviewers.”

Brenner sipped iced tea – his habitual summer drink, with the occasional hard cider thrown in for historic, recreational and religious reasons – and relaxed. He had the furrowed brow of a man who has a lot on his mind, and no wonder. He recently finished re-formatting a 113,000-word Microsoft Word file for the ebook version of his most famous, or infamous work, the 2010 autobiographical novel Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover.

“It’s basically a re-telling of a torrid love affair I had with a female bottlenose dolphin in the summer of 1971,” Brenner explained.  “I just changed the names and a few details so that living people on whom the characters are based couldn’t sue me.  Even though I’m publishing it as a novel, it’s much closer to Tom Wolfe-style ‘new journalism’ than it is to fiction.”

Author Malcolm J. Brenner at home.
Malcolm J. Brenner in his trailer in Punta Gorda, Fla.

An admitted procrastinator since childhood, Brenner said that Smashwords, which publishes and distributes the ebook edition of Wet Goddess, alerted him last November that changes to their Premium Catalogue distribution system might require revising the file, which he first uploaded in 2011.  “I wasn’t clear on the details of what exactly the problem was, but apparently the old file no longer satisfied the new requirements, or so they said,” he said.

The Smashwords Premium Catalog puts the book into the hands of all the large ebook distributors, including iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, OverDrive, Tolino, Gardners, Odilo, Baker & Taylor Axis 360 and more.  “I’m interested in sharing my experiences with dolphins as widely as possible,” Brenner said.  “They are non-human people, so it behooved me to take care of this update issue sooner or later.”

After receiving warning emails for several months, Brenner finally pulled up his socks and tackled the problem himself.  This versatility, he said, demonstrates the technical virtuosity required of successful self-published authors in the 21st Century.

“If you’re an aspiring author and you’re lucky enough to land an agent or a publisher these days, you can thank a higher power,” Brenner scoffed.  “I knew a controversial book like Wet Goddess would be a hard sell even for a successful author.  I made a few stabs at finding a publisher without success, and an agent took me on for a while.

“She wined and dined me once at a book fair in Tampa, then, with no explanation, stopped communicating.  Months went by with no word.  It was only when I threatened to sue her to recover my manuscript that I learned from an irate family member she was still recovering from a near-fatal car crash months before.

“In publishing, like anywhere else, sometimes shit just happens,” Brenner concluded, with a hint of resignation.  After more rejections, he responded by abandoning the idea of conventional publishing and taking on all the tasks himself.  “It required me to become a jack-of-all trades, but the fact that I don’t get along well with many people actually makes that a good way to work,” Brenner admitted.  “If I work for myself, I may have an asshole for a boss, but at least he understands me.”

Brenner pre-sold copies of Wet Goddess to family and friends to raise funds for the initial press run of 50 copies.  A sympathetic friend contributed necklaces made from fossilized sharks’ teeth as premiums for advance sales.  The worst problems came from trying to get the manuscript proofread before it went to print.

“Don’t get me started,” Brenner fumed.  “I hired a so-called proofreader from a local community college, but she could only proof in academic style!  Book manuscripts require what’s known as Chicago style, and besides, Wet Goddess has a lot of colloquial dialogue in it,” he recalled.  “Every time a redneck character used the word “ain’t,” she flagged it – more than 300 times in the manuscript!  You’d think that if she was professional she’d have called me up and asked me what my intention was, but no.”

As a result of this and other unforeseen difficulties that cost him the original author’s proof copy of his debut novel, the first press run of Wet Goddess shipped with about 250 typos in it, including one whole, and rather crucial, paragraph repeated, Brenner admitted.

“It appears very close to the, uh, shall we say ‘climax’ of the novel, and it was very embarrassing to find it,” he explained.  “I hope I’ve got it stuck back in the right place now.”

For a cover, Brenner was able to rely on the talents of his daughter, Thea Boodhoo, an advertising industry professional and college-trained artist.  “I was going to use a B&W photo of a dolphin that a friend in New Mexico colorized many years ago,” he said, “but Thea thought she could do better, and when I saw her finished work I knew she was right.  I only made a couple of very minor Photoshop changes to the file she handed me to make the title stand out more and add the subtitle.”

wet-goddess-cover

A friend who owned a small desktop publishing business referred Brenner to Royal Palm Press, a nearby print-on-demand company, for production services.  “I had no idea what the local reaction to the book would be, so I had a chat with Tom Lewis, the press’s owner at the time, to make sure he wasn’t blindsided,” Brenner said.  “Tom said ‘As long as it’s between consenting adults, that’s fine with me,’ and that was that.”  Brenner also served as his own layout artist, an experience he described as “a mad blur of on-the-job training.”

With book in hand, Brenner ventured onto the soggy ground of marketing.  “Here, I got terrifically lucky,” he said.  “I didn’t have the money to hire a public relations firm to distribute a press release, but I found one that had a reverse-charge policy. The media outlets who received the press releases paid for the service, not me, so my initial publicity was free!”

Upon its release in January 2010, the novel received intense press coverage due to its taboo-shredding themes of interspecies sex, zoophilic love and a dolphin character smart enough to out-think a human.  “For a while it was frantic, but very gratifying,” Brenner recalled.  “I was doing several interviews a week, sometimes two a day.  A few of the interviewers were skeptical or harsh about what they thought might have been going on, but the majority were genuinely curious to know what happened, and to learn more about dolphins.”

Since then, the book has enjoyed sales surges whenever some news gatherer gets curious and wants to know about his experience, Brenner said.  One came in 2011, when a New Zealand TV producer, David Farrier, released a videotaped interview with Brenner he’d recorded the year before.  Others don’t conjure such pleasant memories.  Brenner felt humiliated by shock-jock Howard Stern’s 2015 obsession with his zoophilia, and a 2011 interview with Bubba the Love Sponge cost him a gig with a local slick when its advertisers threatened to withdraw unless the magazine dropped him.

Brenner’s most recent foray into the murky waters of self-promotion was somewhat less melodramatic.  “When I finally got around to looking at the Smashwords file, it said there was a problem with one of the book’s photos, but I couldn’t find it with a self-diagnostic program they offer,” Brenner said.  “So I took a chance and asked Smashwords’ customer service, citing the warning notices they sent me.”

He quickly received a courteous reply from a guy named Kevin, explaining that the problem was probably due to the use of colons in his chapter titles and sub-sections.  “I was glad it was so easily resolved,” Brenner said, “until I downloaded the file onto my computer to make the corrections and realized what a mess it was.”

In the interim between uploading the file in 2011 and downloading it in 2018, Microsoft had changed Word and given it a new file extension, .docx instead of the original .doc.  “That one little ‘x,’ unfortunately, made a hell of a lot of difference,” Brenner said.  “When I had to add a couple of pages to the print manuscript of Wet Goddess, converting the book from the old to the new file format inserted blank spaces more or less at random between paragraphs.  I had to start at the beginning and re-do the whole layout, including throwing in a couple of new photos to fill some yawning blanks.”

The problems with the ebook file were similar.  There, many words were unnecessarily hyphenated, and photos had to be re-aligned to make sure they didn’t obscure the text.  Brenner said the process took him about two weeks, including a couple of days off when he wasn’t feeling well, but he’s glad he did it.

“I don’t have the money to pay somebody else anyway,” he complained, “so I might as well do it myself, because being retired I do have a fair amount of time.  Besides, whenever I master a task like this, I improve my overall word-processing skills, which helps me find work in the freelance job market.”

In the eight years Wet Goddess has been in print, it has sold about 1,500 copies in 18 countries, mostly in the English-speaking world, due to Brenner’s unflagging self-promotion efforts.  When a fan in Russia contacted him  three years ago to inform Brenner he’d undertaken an unauthorized translation, the author responded by granting him permission to publish it there!  “It hasn’t taken off yet, because the translator, Anton River, lives in a very conservative northern city,” Brenner said.  “He’s planning to move to a better climate soon, and I hope he’ll renew his efforts to promote the book when he does.”

In addition to Wet Goddess, Brenner has written and self-published two other books.

orgone-box

Growing Up in the Orgone Box, published in 2014, is an unflinching memoir of his torture and sexual molestation at the hands of Dr. Albert Duvall, an “orgone energy” therapist and close associate of the late Dr. Wilhelm Reich, and the dysfunctional family structure that allowed this to happen.

mel-khyor-01-copy

His 2016 novel Mel-Khyor: An Interstellar Affair is a more light-hearted romp through the mythology and culture of the UFO scene, told from the point of view of a young woman determined to live up to her family’s expectations of her, no matter what it costs her personally.  “There is, again, inter-species sex, but since the other species is bipedal, mostly humanoid and obviously sapient, nobody should blow a 50 amp fuse over it,” Brenner said.  “After all, ‘Star Trek,’ Edgar Rice Burroughs and countless other science-fiction writers have only been doing it for about 100 years.”

Sales on these two books have been nowhere near those of Wet Goddess, Brenner said, and he’s had difficulty getting them any kind of publicity or reviews.  “That’s because, while they’re both sexually radical books, they’re not as radical as a man and a dolphin making love,” he said.  “Somehow, that just blows people’s minds.”

Having just turned 67, Brenner hopes to see his work more widely appreciated before he dies.  Asked if he thought his writing would endure beyond his lifespan, he waxed philosophical.

“My daughter might take it on, but she’s not planning to have children, so who knows what will happen over the course of time?  We only know of the Greek poet Sappho’s beautiful writing because it was used to wrap fish,” he noted.

“Let us remember that from the point of view of a book, which may endure for millennia if it’s an epic, humans are fleeting things who read it at some point in their limited lifespans, devoting to it some portion of their precious time,” Brenner said, drawing on an eerie theme reminiscent of the ambiguous Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.  “For this reason, books, especially long-lived books like Epic of Gilgamesh, Tao De Ching and Cattle Raid of Ulster, are grateful for the time their readers spend with them.  The books try to compensate the readers through a symbiotic relationship that informs you with a novel set of ideas, or supports your need for entertainment that doesn’t require batteries, WiFi or 3D glasses.

“I think that we humans, as a species, have a lot to learn from our dolphin cousins,” Brenner concluded.  “As for my writings, they will survive if people find value in them.”

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