by Steve Aylett
Prepare had a sort of shark jaw structure, new barbs folding forward as the previous were spent. Lint later said the book was ‘as simple as a scalpel’ and knew its fate was to be ignored in the tradition of Algren’s Nonconformity. ‘My clenched assertions do me no favors,’ he admitted and in retrospect critics have accused Lint of ‘fiending for pariah status’. Some of it is very tough going, as when he declares ‘An earwig’s progeny will not grieve.’
‘For less than a single sentence,’ says Bojinka P. Richardson today, ‘it resembles the grey blocks of archetypal opinion, then takes a slight turn and leads you into what you realise too late is the diatribe of an ailing moron who spends his time eating hay and, perhaps, living human flesh.’ Not all critics are so damning. Mac Baginski claimed that, upon opening the book, a ‘blast of merit’ burnt the eyebrows from his face.7 ‘But it was hardly a manual of forbearance.’
‘Civilisation is the agreement to have gaps between wars,’ Lint stated, describing a world for the belligerent and the forgetful. ‘A shelter of immense preoccupation keeps off reality. On the cusp of learning, you know humanity is about to be blindsided by celebrity again. As if Atlas cringes under a baseball. Our corner controversies will not be remembered.’
Lint identified the media’s Vacuum as Policy positioning which would later manifest in the ‘subsistence literature’ of the 80s and, had he but known it, the early 2000s. ‘We make the bureaucrat and thus the atrocity.’
There are three bits of fiction in Prepare, forming an A-frame for the caustic essays—these are the parable-like SF stories ‘Glove Begs for Skeleton’, ‘Bloodbath at Feeding Time’ and ‘The Kennel is for You’ (this last about a hotel of which each floor is located in a different year—creaking floors seem to foreshadow the structure’s collapse into postmodernism but when it does fall the ruins are entirely real and present, and people are really hurt).
‘Bloodbath at Feeding Time’ begins with a consideration of sustenance. ‘The ideal sandwich contains both disease and medicine. There’s a fraction of human life that is virus luggage. How electrifying to think that a pitiful waiter may nevertheless condemn us to a quick death.’8 Warming to his theme, Lint ponders poisons: ‘A poison can kill the living—what, then, of the opposite of a poison, and what will it do to the living?’ This leads into the story of Dr. Hammurabi, the mad professor who measures the difference between dead and alive and, applying that measurement to his own life in the plus ratio, becomes ‘hyper-alive’: the drabbest circumstance sears the eye with psychochrome colours, movement is through an easy field of pellucidant blood, beset by ability. He later applies the same measurement to something dead, but toward the minus, making it ‘hyper-dead’: sand under the skin, waiting room dust and thought by court notification never received. Inevitably it occurs to him to measure the difference between hyper-dead and hyper-alive, apply this to his own hyperlife in the plus ratio and thus becoming hyper-alive to the second power. By the time he has reached hyperlife to the eighth power he is a blinding magenta globe that ricochets around like a pinball. This entity appears at people’s windows and delivers Lint-like diatribes about ‘the transferable heavens of dogma; propaganda with its strangely boring air of assumptive encouragement; standard-issue opinion as dull as a Caucasian’s comeuppance—these and other items condemn us to a quick clean lifetime of casket bargains and undreamed innovation’ and so on until people’s heads explode in spectacular clouds of inky blood. ‘One must certainly break out of a corpse,’ Lint concludes, ‘these crackpot bonifaces.’
‘Bloodbath’ is immediately followed by backup material in the form of the ‘Commemoration Intercourse’ essay: ‘Any description of a great truth will reduce it, like describing a ship by its anchor. But even at a hint we’re sent storming to our polarities with hands over our ears. Stubbornness is not wise—it has no other qualities than itself. Stubbornness is not wisdom or courage. Those who ignore the problem by means of a saviour may realise that rather than the merely good shepherd, Yeshua ben Joseph was an individualistic asterisk of informed speculation, insulted by the company of sheep. There are too many novelties in his nobility—he will not do for the purpose of mental cowards. Corridor morning; work filigree into the coffee surface, you poor sap.’
‘“Commemoration Intercourse,”’ marvels fan Simon Gilbert in Parasite Regained Zine. ‘How amazing was that. Lint just went totally off his tree.’
‘We are the slop of the divine,’ Lint observes in ‘Intercourse’. ‘How many poems are in a hill? How many inequalities are in a celebration? Which amount of fanatics is like a beehive? For the mouth, grimaces are an entire philosophy. Reparation? Authority after the fact is no authority at all.’ At times Lint became unanchored from earth like a dervish.
Many have stated a view on Lint’s ‘unresolved anger issues’. After the publication of Prepare, eleven psychiatrists wrote to Lint offering their services as a result of reading the sentence ‘Plants grow in retaliation to external stimuli.’ Rouch says that Lint was in fine spirits at the time of writing the book. ‘He gave people presents and was generally very friendly, though it was the kind of aggressive affability that was just a step away from biting your nose.’
In ‘The Horror of Opulence’ Lint was already preshadowing his Easy Prophecy visions: ‘Responses link like paper monkeys, losing all power. America will see an age of liberation—but it will be a liberation stripped of all content. America Immaculata.’
Themes in ‘Opulence’ were picked up in the penultimate story, another fiction, ‘Glove Begs for Skeleton’, in which an administration imprisons its people in the comfort of gold robots and need do nothing more. Care becomes wiring and anti-inflammatory drugs. A needle sharp nose, a screwdriver neck, something cold and perfectly tooled—for the days the inhabitant takes to starve and beyond, it is a fine item and on the outside there is no change from one with a live inhabitant and a dead one (recalling Lint’s rebuttal to Schrodinger, ‘The cat does know the difference.’). Later the administration discovers it needn’t have the robots really made of gold, nor need they really function. Soon leaden and untooled, these small tombs are cheap and easy. A man placed in an old-style case with functioning limbs wanders out into the arid landscape, collecting plain gut and shells out of vestigial curiosity. The pattern he apprehends in the clinking shells is clear, and made clearer by a kind of quartz Zohar he finds in an abandoned bunker. It is inscribed with warnings against a future that even their author did not truly believe would arrive: ‘The horror of opulence is the lack outside of it in space, before and after it in time, within it in mind and morality.’ The man spends days reading the ancient stack. ‘Preacher-dead and suspicious of questions, a government may at one moment appear to be an orifice of a fuzzy fly, the next an ordinary fashion designer trying on a platitude, or a highwayman, or an unexceptional night. Yet when you approach it, it resembles nothing so much as a dry toxic husk in faded elephant sleeves.’ And ‘Simplistic geologists pray for causation. The angelic tooth is offering us a way forward, but the obliteration offered by such a Darwinian tooth is not merciful. What we will find is the deadline of our soul, forever extended.’ As the man dries toward death, he scratches his own thoughts upon the inside wall of his casing, knowing that these scratchings are similar to thoughts, never to be seen by anyone. ‘I call home to language, love and the truth of looking humanity in the eye.’ His call is not heard.
The last essay was a summing up. ‘I’ve established to my personal satisfaction that rifles feel obliged under cinematic exposure. Has murder ever been patented? There’s a cash cow.’
In his final ever review of a Lint work, Cameo Herzog described him as ‘a twist of chattering rags’, ‘a devious eccentric who has somewhere laid his hands upon a typewriter’, and ‘on the manifest as “company clown”.’
‘This book is liquidation stock from Lint’s collapsed mind,’ stated Herzog with finality, and it is true that, though Prepare was written in one flow, it comes across as a
disparate collection of chest-clearing rants.
‘Lint called them “pragments”,’ says Caul Pin today. ‘I suppose because he couldn’t be bothered to explain himself.’
Wilson Herring wrote of Lint: ‘The kindest thing to think is that he is a crackpot of shimmering principles,’ which seems either a contemporary compliment or an insult ahead of its time.
‘This is a craftsman at the top of his voice, who happens to want to bury us in a steamy load of despairing and accurate words,’ wrote the respected Washington Post critic Simon Henwood. He concluded: ‘It is impossible to imagine what Jeff Lint will do next, but whatever it is it ought to be good.’ When Lint was seen naked riding a spaniel a few weeks later in Albuquerque, Henwood denied having read anything by Lint, or having written a review of anything by anybody at any time. ‘I’m just a corporal in the Royal Navy,’ he stated, quitting the Post all smiles.
Another reviewer described Prepare as merely ‘some sort of commotion’.
‘Between the dark of trouble and the light of disaster,’ said Lint, ‘we pass our days. And if this is our condition, it cannot be taken away. Paradox results from artificial boundaries. Experience can’t be derailed.’
Lint was too creative to be considered dangerous. But he was annoying. The book’s cerebral convulsions yielded up what has regrettably come to be one of Lint’s most often-quoted phrases: ‘The Id is a dude.’
12
CARNAGIO
Lint Trek · originality still abhorred · Consolation Playhouse · carnagio · Thrown stones were once stars · The Converse Bell · Now whatever you do don’t touch that one · The Coffin Was Labelled Benjy the Bear
By 1967 Alan Rouch was a script commissioner at NBC and felt justified in asking Lint to create an episode for the second season of Star Trek. He had previously tried to get Lint involved in the Peace Kids Summerama Show and Lint himself had pitched an idea for a Miss Marple-like series, Interfering Old Hag. But Star Trek seemed a more likely fit for the vintage pulpeteer.
Lint’s episode was at first entitled ‘Planet of Brittle Understanding’, later shortened to ‘Brittle Planet’, and finally, when he’d decided what it would be about, ‘The Encroaching Threat’. Due to the Catty debacle he was obliged to submit the script under the pen name Fred Flick and delivered it in disguise by dressing as a man.
In ‘The Encroaching Threat’ the smug, unoriginal blandness aboard the Enterprise finally reaches such an unnatural pitch that it triggers an event horizon, heightening exponentially the vividness of everything else in the universe by way of compensation. The Enterprise itself is the one drifting bubble of grey in an exuberant hyper-evolving fizz-scape of boundlessly creative fertility. An infinite supply of original ideas batter against the hull as the crew within stands grim and concerned. Kirk warns all aboard against looking outside for fear of infection. ‘Wipe that smirk off your face, mister!’ he tells a cadet in a red top. All are agreed that the cosmos beyond must not be allowed to continue in such an excited condition, but how to reverse the effect?
When the cause of the singularity is explained to them by a kindly exposition alien, Spock suggests that they open the airlocks with a semi-permeable containment field in place. By osmosis, material from the weaker environment will draw through the membrane into the stronger environment, while retaining artificial life-support. Kirk reluctantly agrees to allow a few minor ideas aboard from outside—a sacrifice necessary to equalise the pressure. Too late, a pop-eyed McCoy realises that the stronger environment is outside, and the crew is sucked outward against the containment fields, which bulge dangerously into the polymesmeric exuberance of the universe at large.
Here Lint describes a series of hypervivid visuals to be superimposed over Kirk’s sweating face—he undergoes a sort of 2001 Stargate experience unachievable by weekly television budgets of the time. McCoy sees the treacly release of enzymes in redemption orgies of polarity breakdown, all matter flushing with an eternal blush of realisation. Spock, eyebrow raised, watches fiery loops reconnecting in escalating scales and asks himself in echoey voice-over, ‘If you had an idea that was complexly ironic enough, could it become independently self-aware?’ Scottie, with orthogonal schematic blossoms flurrying over his face, begins laughing and shouts that the ship can handle anything. Uhura calmly gives Kirk a week’s notice, her thoughts elsewhere.
Kirk, newly infected with originality but still influenced by his military programming, devises a plan to empty himself of all ideas and switch off the containment field, firing himself into the endless fertility and shocking it into a momentary withdrawal—the only place it can withdraw is into the Enterprise, thus reversing the situation like a glove turned inside out. Then in the nick of time he would close the airlocks, thus trapping everything of interest within the ship. The Enterprise would then be placed into quarantine forever.
Of course, everyone else is also sucked into space when the containment field is terminated, their own inner life cancelling out Kirk’s attempt at sterility. The little bubble of blandness has been burst, the environment within absorbed into the richness at large. ‘My god,’ Kirk whispers before dissolving into crimson-gold fields of rippling paradise code, ‘what have I done?’
Upon reading the script, Gene Roddenberry is reputed to have said ‘This isn’t prose, it’s gnats in formation!’ and Rouch recounted that for three hours Roddenberry was ‘unable to unfold his arms’. Upon hearing of these responses Lint felt more confident than ever that the episode would be the season’s highlight, and Rouch was forced to describe in detail why he was mistaken.
But as Lint explained much later, the only problem he himself had with the never-filmed script was the description of events aboard the Enterprise. ‘Even when a story demands that a bunch of characters be boring and unimaginative,’ he would mourn, ‘I somehow end up making them interesting.’ Thus Kirk’s sudden, frighteningly convulsive dancing in utter silence and Spock’s constantly stated ‘wish to be laminated’. For the duration of ‘The Encroaching Threat’, the new character Chekov is said to be ‘flirting with McCoy’9 and Sulu is repeatedly seen ‘lurking’ near a doorway while ‘sinister theramin music’ plays.
The one time Lint met Roddenberry he asked him where the drones’ toilets were on the Enterprise, or if such a human need had been eliminated. Roddenberry thought Lint was asking for directions to the toilets on the Paramount lot and pointed the way, leaving Lint deflated. ‘Foiled by others’ happy ignorance again,’ he said later.
But Lint was to find a great gasping release from the rigid strictures of television drama. Two or three times a year he would journey to New Mexico to ‘re-ground’ himself and to visit his mother. It was on the train to Albuquerque that he met Bob Prince and Jane Boutwell, who had performed a radical minstrel/mime version of Frankenstein on the streets of Los Angeles. Lint admired the young couple’s bravery and the authentic look of Bob’s scars, which he discovered to be the result of a number of beatings received from passersby. The couple were committed to anarchist/pacifist principles and the idea that there should be no separation between art and life. Lint was flattered when they asked permission to perform a theatrical version of his story ‘Consolation Hedgehog’, and he was soon writing plays for the newly-christened Consolation Playhouse on Seventh & Central, Albuquerque. He also performed, painted sets and even cajoled some funding from Caul Pin, whom he had met through the Herzog slaughterhouse incident. Young actors gravitated to this outpost of sixties experimental theatre and found a group that believed in collective creation, where the most extreme interpretations were given reign. In the case of Lint’s hairy texts this often meant a conservative toning-down of his directions, as when he stated that someone should ‘explode into fanning gore’ or ‘say every word at once’. (Lint was said to have given ‘the stage direction that cannot be pointed to.’) But many times they tried, and the results were a spectacular and unceasing assault upon the front and sides of the audience’s faces. Consolation’s philosophy
was that the audience should contribute to its own trauma. ‘I have high hopes of this device,’ wrote Lint. ‘Unhappiness replaces melodrama.’ The average performance in the tiny upstairs theatre was like some boiler-room psychodrama designed to wring a confession. The tickets were said to be stamped from human tissue. The doors were locked and audience members, terrified that they would be asked to join in, were asked to join in. Ushers made up to look like zombies would shamble by with trays of liver. Dragged onstage, a quailing gran from the audience would be vise-gripped by an actor who seemed to be undergoing horribly violent convulsions, pointblank and screaming. ‘Your mischievous remedies have smashed us all!’ shrieks Alger Lattimore in The Coffin Was Labelled Benjy the Bear, as blood streams from his eyes. The Consolation style came to be known as carnagio, ‘the theatre of collapse too long resisted’. At the start of The Ravaged Face of Saggy Einstein the curtains opened to reveal a dozen rocket-launchers aimed at the audience. Black powder flumed into the seating area as an amplified voice stated ‘Cerebrospinal fluid is great for kids!’
‘Rehearsals and exercise sessions were pretty tough,’ says Richard Thomas today. ‘We were set tasks to pretend to be anteaters and stuff. Dredge up hassles from our childhoods and paint it on our bellies, like that, then press it against the wall like a potato print. Leastways that’s how I remember it.’
‘We were working a lot with lurch energy,’ says Bob Prince.
Lint encouraged individual actors to perform different plays at the same time during performances, so that one actor would mount the stage to enact Born With a Double Skull while his fellow actor might be working from Make a Wish Piranha and another from Slave Labor For Lovers—their interaction more closely resembled the chaos of real life than anything he could have scripted. ‘Many of you lost a darlin’ during the war,’ states Jack at the start of Blame the Mouth, at which a patchwork donkey ran on shouting ‘There are too many imbeciles in the bucket!’, the opening line of Certainly You Will. Lint loved these random intersections, and the ill-lit gasps and dreadful conclusions of the audience thrilled him. The theatre was a realm of constant change and instant reaction, faster and more physical than the book world. He roped in the Unofficial Smile Group to play during some shows, drowning out the dialogue.