Editors Note: I feel it important to state for the record that I did not complete this book review before the deadline, and as such, I'll be forced to buy dinner for Beau Dashington, Peartree and LoganLodez. Why did I join this god damn club?
Wet Goddess: Recollections of a Dolphin Lover is the semi-fictitious memoir of a man who fucked a dolphin. It chronicles Malcom J. Brenner’s experience working as a photographer at a dolphin exhibit, a period during which he manages to fall in love with – and fuck – one of the show dolphins. In addition to the dolphin banging, the book also details Brenner’s difficulty maintaining relationships with female humans, his far-out experiences getting stoned and transcending the physical plane, and finally, his academic rejection by the scientists who are ethical enough to study dolphins without fucking them. There’s also a shower scene where he reminisces about fucking his parent’s poodle when he was 13. I don't know.
The book
opens with an always-promising apology its his poor-quality writing. “I am
sure that almost anybody could write a better novel than this,” Brenner states,
and I am inclined to agree with him. It’s a curious thing that he chose to
apologize for his writing rather than for fucking a caged animal, but after suffering
through 350 pages of his rambling, I’m honestly not sure which was Brenner’s
worse crime. Sentences like this: “I was
the smoked turkey in a student hoagie, eleven layers of meat and cheesiness
sandwiched in a crunchy old station wagon, marijuana mayo, hold the onion,
rumbling down Orange Avenue toward the Gulf Beaches of Siesta Key” made
me wish he’d just hurry up and get to the dolphin-banging part - until he did.
And so
the majority of the book is simply a nostalgic, burnt-out old fuck trying to
wax poetic paragraph, Brenner details rolling up a joint on the beach as such: “And suddenly – I was [watching a nature
documentary]! My hands became alien arachnoid appendages, grotesque white crabs going about their business, detached from the mind observing them. That mind
didn’t speak, but it was keen, and if its thoughts could have been put into
words…” blah blah blah, weed is pretty far out, dig it, man? The book is
basically a case-in-point for why the revelations you have while tripping balls
do not a good story make.
This
brings me to the next major portion of the book - Brenner’s attempts to
rationalize and justify his fucking of a dolphin. He feigns innocence by
claiming that the dolphin came on to him, and spends way too much time describing
how exactly the dolphin would do so. But the fact
that a caged creature, separated from its normal social structures and trained
by humans to be affectionate in exchange for fish, may get confused and aroused
when its captors play with it doesn’t really justify fucking the thing, does
it? Isn’t this justification at best hopelessly cynical and at worst pure evil?
No, you
idiot, because the dolphin could communicate with Brenner telepathically. On
many nights during his tenure at the aquarium, Brenner would go home, get
stoned and naked, and then jerk off while pretending to be a dolphin. During
these episodes, the dolphin would enter Brenner’s mind and speak with him –
professing love, teaching him about dolphins and learning about humanity. It
was only after several mind-sexting sessions that Brenner finally decided he
should go fuck the dolphin in person. I couldn’t find telepathy listed as a
form of consent under any legal system anywhere in the world, but whatever. Classic
case of The Man keeping us down.
Brenner
also spends a lot of time taking pot-shots at researchers for rejecting his story
as bullshit. It seems that interspecies telepathic communication and
plane-transcending love is not a priority for cetologists, or biologists, or
anyone, really. And this is where the book gets really depressing, because at
the end of the day it’s the tale of a lonely dolphin-fucker who believes in magic.
But magic doesn’t exist, and I really wish this book didn’t either.
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