by Steve Aylett
Caul Pin, the eccentric false Lord who once ran down a conference table kicking everyone seated there, has informed opinions on Lint’s performance: ‘The mere fact that Lint was kicking them all at the same time was as good as proof that their faults were related. As he himself wrote, “Paradox results from artificial boundaries.”’
This was also the time of Lint’s attendance at the LA Sci-Fi Convention and his strange collapse during a Q and A session. At the emergency ward he was discovered to have a wristband stating that he was ‘Batman Intolerant’.
Caterer the Movie is in turnaround limbo to this day.
Soon after the publication of The Phosphorus Tarot of Matchbooks Lint got the hell out of LA and rarely looked back at it from Taos, New Mexico. ‘Forgive California,’ he wrote. ‘A bit of land more sinned against than sinning.’
22
ARKWITCH
Thousand Mile Gun · the slug correspondence · mindmapping · satire as sacrament · sheer visual quantity evokes the magical resonance of the tribal horde · behind the text
Incredible, mindbending scenes of the spirit form Felix navigating septic vertices and unscrambling amid tricky standoffs are two-a-penny in the Arkwitch books, which are regarded, along with Jelly Result and Clowns and Locusts, as Lint at his dismissive best. An atomic equation in skin, Arkwitch samples one heaven a week while phasing through blast walls and wrecking everything. Thorough detection-evasion technology means that oppression changes his body from instant to instant. He can appear as a coppersmith ruining a porpoise talisman, a grimly staring Secoya Indian or a mere ornamental oaf. His adventures are punctuated with glimpses of a sort of angel depot, arcane scenes of Arkwitch consulting with Acres (a Victorian robot with a face like a giant postage stamp), and the sheer primal terror unleashed when he fires his Thousand Mile Gun (only once in each book), as in Fanatique when he punishes humanity for treating certain species as if they were the amateur parts of nature.
The Stupid Conversation kicked off the series. Knowing that Tom Delay will be instrumental in the destruction of the world, Arkwitch traps him and a colleague in an etheric syntax loop, whereby they talk bullshit endlessly and cannot leave the house. But Arkwitch himself becomes trapped with them and must plot his escape without their detection in a classic closed-loop crime scenario:
FELIX: I suppose if you must amuse yourself you could put some underpants on that hen over there and watch it walking about. Don’t let it get in the sink.
DELAY: Wow, thanks Mr. Arkwitch.
FELIX: I mean it. Don’t let it get in the sink, all right? And don’t do anything stupid like … dressing up as a woman or something.
DELAY: Why would I do that?
FELIX: Because the safety of the world depends on it.
‘This Conversation is Stupid all right,’ declared Babs Mueller of the Los Angeles Times. ‘Just once I’d like to see Lint try harder than a grape. Just once. He isn’t even looking at what he’s typing anymore.’
But Felix Arkwitch was a hit with the readers. He was a hero they could relate to because he flirted with cattle and wore failure like a badge of validation. Sometimes Arkwitch decides his day should be spent ‘kerning’ the air around his head, which involves his doing strange swirling hand motions while chiding the atmosphere with the words ‘Now now, none of that!’
Arkwitch’s clothing is always detailed in full, even when he is not wearing it—thus every day the entire content of his wardrobe is listed, with only occasional additions altering the otherwise identically repeated paragraphs. Sean Eaglestone of the London Times described these passages as ‘the worst kind of appalling self-indulgence, deadly to the soul—I’m afraid I used torn pages from The Stupid Conversation to flick a fairly small slug off the path. And it came back.’
Lint wrote to Eaglestone saying he suspected him of merely stamping on the snail and kicking it away like the coward he probably was. ‘Stare at yourself in the mirror long enough, your face disappears,’ wrote Lint. ‘And good riddance.’
Lint was reportedly shouting with laughter as he wrote the letter, but Eaglestone seems to have taken umbrage and his response was printed on the letters page next to Lint’s missive. Claiming that the only other Lint book he had seen was the DAW reprint of Jelly Result, Eaglestone described that work as a contributing factor to his failing health, that it reminded him of a small useless hammer carved out of a potato, and that a yellow stain was vibrating in the air before his eyes. Lint wrote back recommending an exercise suspiciously similar to Arkwitch ‘air-kerning’, at which Eaglestone replied two days later that he was famished, all colour had ‘fled the garden’ and everything was now just falling away from him like grey feathers. Eaglestone’s dismal obituary appeared in the following issue. In his essay ‘Not Fit For the Barn’, Dan Mitrione has opined that the entire correspondence was a set-up and that Eaglestone was in fact Lint’s friend ‘Lord’ Caul Pin, who was back in England at the time and bursting with life and energy.
Fanatique begins with an episode in which a group of politicians holed up in an Arctic station try to discover which one of them is actually a human being in disguise. ‘No smartass New York lawyer can stop me doing this!’ shouts Ollie Seacoal, a zany welder with connections. His violent solution to his guests’ dilemma leaves the pole drenched in gore. But ice has a memory and Arkwitch, carrying out a mellow inspection in some kind of Arcadian drug mill, is alerted to an equally malign presence approaching humanity. His solution involves his travelling back in time to ride through portions of history with irony generators mounted on donkey carts. The book’s best moments are in the firefly feedback of time-pain and the cinematic dazzle as Felix walks through the stereo avarice of the city. Through his silver eyes, flesh and commotion is the mere paraphernalia of the soul.
Lint was by now getting a rep as a fearsome fella and that interpersonal scariness manifested in the writing of Fanatique, which contains some of the creepiest set-pieces of any Lint book. A kid tries to sleep as he watches a developing water-stain on the ceiling that resembles a face—the attic is of course filled with a massive child’s head the size of a whale, and when the eyes slip open the childhead asks in a child’s voice to be fed on ‘new blood’. Elsewhere, a husband turns out to be not a living creature but a deception of anatomical junk and gutting mined from dolls. A strange cinema projects the silent decay process of a dead celebrity in real time for select patrons. A hospital customer returns screaming, night whistles plugged in his eyes—other death candidates are not so lucky.
Lint’s mid-seventies wedge experiments had got him to thinking about mindmap programming and he finally put this to work in The Phosphorus Tarot of Matchbooks (published in 1988). In the book he establishes in the reader’s mind a system of notion placement in various zones of the brain. Throughout Matchbooks these notions and their mindmap placement are repeated until the reader not only comes to accept them but becomes snug and comfortable with them to the point of no longer noticing them atall. In the final chapter Lint abruptly places several of the notions in the ‘wrong’ parts of the reader’s mindmap—some readers reputedly suffered brain haemorrhages as a result (or at least, as Koryagina reports, ‘psychotic breaks’). It is as though the brain tries to fold over and contorts to place the notion in the ‘correct’ position. Lint organised it so that all the necessary contortions were impossible to perform simultaneously, so that the brain literally tore.
Though Lint was running a psyche game behind the text, the story gives plenty for the reader to look at. It was satire as sacrament, as Arkwitch storms heaven in search of a cipher key. God had overlooked something—sinning honours personality. ‘The heaven penetration program was a tesseract looking several ways so it could recall the way out. It set down on roots like bent cigarettes, the stay short lived.’
‘You didn’t know god very well before coming here,’ said the angel impassively. Behind it, undecanted angels in rows. ‘You should have done more research prior to dying.’
So the angel thought Arkwitch was dead.
The Phosphorus Tarot of Matchbooks is a flashbook of angelic schematics and Sacred Strategy, a sort of herringbone cypher flowing behind the text. That pattern is reproduced in the fabric of a disoriented Arkwitch’s re-entry—time-exits are fringed with hooks, tearing his armour away. Landing in a forgotten colony of vines and scrub, Arkwitch crawls into the lap of a gold Buddha and is blanketed in butterflies. The end of his sanity is like a sunrise.
23
EASY PROPHECY
Oppressive smithereens · gently meddling with the future · prophecy humour · America’s make-believe · ‘Reality is the thing that doesn’t need to be asserted’ · Nous sentant des ailes · cramming
Whatever happened to the prophecies that never happened? Where do those beauties go? This was the basic premise of Lint’s most all-American books, the Easy Prophecy series: Die Miami, Doomed and Confident and the uncompleted Zero Learned From Nero. Lint pitched the series as a high blown concept franchise like Dune and tried not to laugh. No-one could contact his agent Robert Baines, but Doubleday waved the deal through.
The premise of the books is simplicity itself. Transported from a free America to one very closely resembling that of the 1980s, nervy draughtsman Helio Lashpool tries to prove to everyone that he does not belong in this pseudo-USA. But as the years pass, he comes to feel that every nation traverses different versions of itself over time, and at the end of the first book he stands gutted and dazed before blanket hypocrisy and a media made up of oppressive smithereens. In an apparent foretelling of Bush Junior’s reign Lashpool remarks: ‘Better than a leader smart enough to lie, is a leader stupid enough to genuinely believe what he’s saying.’ There’s a little bit of Kafka about Lashpool. Lint’s interpretation of Kafka’s The Trial was that the guilt felt by K—and depended upon by the state—derives from his having allowed the state to become so powerful in the first place. K therefore ultimately accepts his punishment.
In the second book Lashpool is trying to send messages across the reality bands or back in time to himself. Lint wondered at the lack of humour in prediction (which he put down to the fact that humour requires precision) and at how the style of a particular prophecy changes slightly each time the date for it is set back. ‘I got the idea for that from Die Miami’s deadline. When they first told me the deadline, I assured them I wouldn’t be able to meet it, yet when the deadline arrived and I told them again that, no, I couldn’t meet it, they acted surprised. They weren’t surprised the first time they heard the facts, but were surprised the second time.’
Lashpool’s messages range from the obvious, that human civilization will end (‘Sapphires and salt will reunite’), to the evaded, ‘Most people approach the subject of suicide determined to be baffled.’ He sends the messages back by emitting them in imitation of a reverse-echo building up to the loud and clear message itself. At the sub-patternist level the reverse-echo continues into the past.
‘From the midst of the future you call to your present self,’ Lashpool thinks, ‘whining of the lack of wonders.’ He sets about tracking down others who may be misplaced like himself, and locates Calvin Bridges, an obscure author with an oxygen fetish and a gift for making a merely old idea look classical. ‘Masks in collections have no blood,’ the old man tells Lashpool. ‘Night done by scientists would be a bit flat and taste of powdery lead.’ He shows Lashpool a clock of iron, gas in its veins. He has created a literary alkaloid that pours through counterweights and says it reproduces the present culture in that it is a system so fragile that it really may be safer to sustain the problem than to solve it. ‘We put history behind us so we can more convincingly exhibit surprise when it bites us in the ass. Poison be merry, you are due to inherit a world.’ The most-quoted line from the two published books is: ‘America’s make-believe is more dangerous than its reality.’ Truth is unpopular because it doesn’t have a dependent need to be liked or believed—its independence seems like unfriendliness. Doomed ends in a sort of showdown between two Lashpools in the Nevada flatlands.
In the unpublished Zero Learned From Nero a Lashpool-led revolution creates a downpour of blood into the underworld as those above finally find expression. One politician explains to the firing squad that he followed a particular policy merely because it was eleven times more interesting than common sense. Lint’s notes describe Lashpool ‘emerging on top of dogma like a boy on top of a haystack’. He isn’t really convinced by the revolution—he just wants to speed up whatever history is in progress toward human extinction. ‘This planet won’t breathe easy till weeds conquer the corridor.’
One critic noted that Doomed was so ‘stupid’ that he refused to explain it. Another quipped that the book was ‘for novelty purposes only’.
In Taos, Lint was writing steadily and building a winged and sailed vimana in the yard. Failing to find a church that did not demand he repent of his imagination, Lint flirted with Bahai and finally settled into a nameless one of his own invention. ‘Reality is the thing that doesn’t need to be asserted,’ he yelled at a barber the one time he visited the local hairdressers and caused such fear and concern that he never visited again, allowing his beard and hair to grow large and scary. This did not deter the increasing number of fans who showed up to hear some sort of wisdom or just bathe in a guru’s mysterious securities. Some erstwhile fans seemed to be simply following the trend—Lint was stalked by a misguided groupie (Ann Coulter) who had never read his work but repeatedly demanded ‘lobster sex’. ‘She went way over the top,’ says Chris Diana. ‘And she didn’t really understand what it was about. It was embarrassing for the rest of us.’ Apparently she was convinced she was married to Lint.
Before starting in on the last installment of the Easy Prophecies, he got into a book he had planned throughout the eighties, the lush opus Clowns and Locusts. Lint seems to have been cramming, as though aware that he didn’t have much time. But in his last years he stated an absolute conviction that his work would make no difference. ‘Like snow,’ said Twain, ‘satire lasts a while on firm ground.’ But Lint knew satire was less than weak and that even a convenient church was shelter from it.
24
CLOWNS AND LOCUSTS
Soylent scream · garnet · acceleration · UltraLint · The Jarkman · cause I’m done dead already · UFO flap
Lint says in Arse that when he suggested Clowns and Locusts to John Harklerod, the Doubleday editor walked away at twenty miles an hour. But it was a gift to fans, who view it not so much as a book as a gold-geared reliquary case. Others see it as the living quartz Zohar from his ‘Glove Begs for Skeleton’ story.19 At first seeming to be a sort of shirt-tails sequel to Matchbooks, it soon goes totally berserk with a toytown intensity.
The book begins with Barry Soylent, a fella whose higher self doesn’t seem to be keeping up its end of the bargain, explaining to his nervous nephew that his forehead is about to ‘anabolically scramble’:
‘My every waking moment is dedicated to perfecting this scowl. See?’
‘It’s … good.’
‘Yes it is good. It’s just about the best by now, why not?’
The old man becomes increasingly belligerent about the condition of his frown until, standing suddenly, he exerts forward strangely, forcing a blast of pure assertion from his brow. ‘An idea hot as a garnet sizzled out through his forehead, leaving a mystery burn like a bullet hole.’
Lint says this was an account of birthing the book itself. And it seemed he’d entered an awful influence—a white-matter ride down some oblique airstrip where the landscape of notions suddenly bottomed out into stomach-lurching chasms. Gem-yellow eye-blasts kicked neon through his head, trail-stains containing dense information like code brew. Green gold leaf was rippling across the page like the liquid wisdom in a peppermint bible. Lint couldn’t believe this shit was still happening to him at sixty-four. Stupendous megaverse glimpses in the corner of the room were a young man’s game. He says he later found some of
the sentences branded into the adobe walls as though pressed into soft wax.
‘The book accelerates so suddenly it blows the eyebrows off your mind,’ says fan Simon Gilbert in Parasite Regained Zine.
After a seeming eternity sampling gem-quality pains Soylent winds up cramping in a crusty phone booth, developing the reptilian skin of a pineapple. But in the alkaline flush of the window reflection he sees his face young against the night. Behind him is simpleton paradise, the burning sweetness of the world, an acid street. When he looks again he sees a portrait of a dried man, nervy hands over the brain as his own thinning hair slips through his fingers like a lifeline. The man-thing is found in diced green glass, the situation pulling away into miniature—the world is nothing but a black theory in space, crawling with professionals. It’s a vision of relaxed, natural injustice. God fights us on his own turf—everywhere. One ever-deepening commandment saves time and ink, and this is how Clowns and Locusts itself operates—you can unpack it forever. Every sentence expands in all directions at once and it becomes immersive to the point of hallucination. The story falls away into a heavy feverdream, a sort of constant metamorphosis parade. Ideas turn corners on themselves and thump axes in their own backs. It jams everything so far over that many fans refer to the book as UltraLint.
‘And would it kill you to give it a plot?’ says a note from John Harklerod at Doubleday.
Some readers would call the whirling screed a compound miracle. Some were embarrassingly enthusiastic, as when William West said: ‘It’s so forward-thrusting it ought to be fitted with a cowcatcher!’ and added ‘Really!’
Pat Scarlett (whose by-the-numbers bestseller Snow Falling on Hot Chocolate made her a bundle in the mid-nineties) called it ‘the sort of book that sets you thinking of all the things you’d like to do if you get out alive.’