by Steve Aylett
For example, there exists a so-called Guild of Perfect Interruption (Hyperquills) who use The Stupid Conversation as their Bible. Internal power plays in the fan club Hyperquill Enterprises resulted in the expulsion of those participants with a sense of proportion and the former pranksters quickly became cod-occult. The Guild has lately established a sort of ‘high ritual’ Lint Mass, including air-kerning and Huskanoy photos, and a liturgical call and reply of ‘What have the walking dead?’/’A brainstem like a towbar.’ A strange side-product of this has been the production of the Arkwitchboard, a ouiji board that gives a choice of answers ranging from ‘Realize I am laughing’ to ‘I won’t prevent it’ and ‘Concealed by the background’.
Since 1997 the Jeff Lint Fan Club has held festivals as a remedy to the lunatic fringe and to the humourless scholars who appointed themselves to pick over the disputed fortune of Lint’s genius. The first conference was held at the Red Lion Inn in Portland, Oregon, historic venue for the September 1989 meeting at which U.S. military officials instructed Iraqi technicians in how to detonate a nuclear bomb. But the Lint Conference didn’t benefit from the funding of Honeywell and Hewlett-Packard—it was a shoestring affair characterized by malfunctioning projections of Catty and nervous anoraks standing to speak about Arkwitch and faked detritus. Contraband copies of Lint’s Star Trek script changed hands for large sums. The meetings have gone from strength to strength, with Alan Rouch attending twice and a certain Professor Dystrak reading from Robert Baines’ coroner’s report as gruesome evidence slides flashed up behind him. Rounds of Platypus Payback were played one year, resulting in a massive cleaning bill from the hotel. In 2002 Elsa Carnesky appeared, having only recently realised the selfish/shellfish misunderstanding.
Many commentators are harmless and touching. There is a subcult similar to the Catty dreamers, in which uberfans describe dreams where Lint crops up. He appears variously as a knowing, enigmatic and powerfully comforting presence who gives a wink and explodes away in purple light; as a ghost in agony, its skull rattling like a dried gourd; as a pratfalling angel with Victorian frame wings; as a poolside millionaire; as an inconstant, guttering image that tries desperately to dictate the opening paragraphs of a new novel; as Felix Arkwitch in the lap of the Buddha.
Gore Vidal has described Lint as entering the world of letters like a fat man jumping into a swimming pool. The ripples are spreading to this day, and those splashed by the initial impact are still standing drenched like comedy straight men.
27
THE MAN WHO GAVE BIRTH TO HIS ARSE
Saddled · scrubbing tombstones · don’t thank the shark · the claymore principle of creation · savouring regret · The Vermilion Equation · intravenous cheats · for I am the way · new colours
In Jeff Quiros Engram’s obituary of Lint, Dead, eh? How’s That Workin’ Out For Ya? he portrayed a writing career that consisted of ‘a blowtorch and one man’s dreams’. In Lint’s own unfinished autobiography The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse, Lint recalls deciding early that he’d prefer life to come out and fight rather than dropping a thousand bad luck hints a day. ‘I was saddled with this nonsense on July 6, 1928, and the minute I arrived I knew events were not going to suit me. And the advent of my ability to twitch my arms and legs a bit caused me no great consolation.’ School was a training-ground for indifference. Lint recalls that as a child he thought the word ‘imbecile’ meant some kind of beacon for traffic. ‘The easy wisdom of youth,’ he writes. ‘As one who will of necessity learn the art of conversation from his enemies, an honest man must be careful to note when a word does not yet exist to express a situation. I thought “I’ll invent a theme of my own, something about the language of future scars”.’
He cut a frayed figure in the world, a man who voluntarily spoke the truth on countless occasions, who lived for love of unnamed colours and the glee of releasing vertical bombs of resentment. ‘The problem of seeing clearly is that you find yourself surrounded on all sides by liars,’ Lint wrote, ‘and stand the chance of going completely insane.’ He would often suffer ‘firmament vertigo’ when gazing up at the stars. In response to astronomers’ observations that the universe seemed to be rushing away from us, he remarked ‘Wouldn’t you?’
Lint knew that words are counterfeit symbols: ‘A word is a photo of gold,’ he said. Satire was like scrubbing tombstones with a toothbrush, but honourable nevertheless. ‘Of course the inhabitants of this world complain in vain, but this is no reason to cease stating the truth. It seems to me we shouldn’t thank the shark and count our blessings. Nor wait for a savior, an accident or an alien the color of a Band Aid.’ His very awareness of words’ limitations made him run around like some nutter with a blowpipe, creating a career described variously as a triumph, a benchmark for defeat, a systemised kitsch torus, hell on a stick, a ferocious bluff, the revenge of the Alexandrian library, a strange honking sound, not too shabby, glyph contraband, nutty slack, exhausting, a catalogue of fevers, and ‘gear’.
Far from basking in disapproval, Lint was usually unaware that he was being disapproved of. ‘Pause sheet lightning and scrawl on that,’ the young Lint advised himself while indulging in highwire affrontery and cipher psychosis. ‘I’ll tear my words and body till they bleed into each other.’ He considered a career conducted at a velocity that, even if he blew apart, meant the end of the enterprise would be of adequate interest. But this claymore principle of creation is belied by his long quiet work on the Arkwitch trilogy. In regard to bad reviews he said ‘Hopefully such expressions of disapproval are stages in the journey toward being cut loose entirely.’
There are chapters of historical interest in Arse, such as the one on his JFK experience, ‘The Trauma That Passed Me By’, and his summary of theories regarding the Fantastic Lemon: ‘Luminescence to one side, luminescence to the other—you ask why I was on the verge?’
Lint described sleep, writing and sex as his greatest joys in life and expressed bitterness that the last so often fell victim to some larger and less interesting scheme of the Almighty.
‘Does the chance exist after the failure to take it? The missed opportunity like a mineral fish preserved in cliffs?’ Lint savoured regret like a fine wine. ‘It does in fact serve as a sort of file reference system,’ he said, ‘or mental diary, as it gives me at least one thing to remember with clarity from every day of my life.’ But Lint is not maudlin in Arse and expresses the wish to be caught in some kind of golden Vedic crossfire until ‘refined to a knob of russet gore’. To some observers it seemed Lint had hastened the death schedule. Lint described the transition as like stone steps going down into water. He imagined his debut underground: ‘My first day in the reverse-nursery of the grave!’
At his death Lint was working on something called the Vermilion Equation, by which almost bottomless amounts of retrievable information could be sunk into minute bits of text. The equation seems to hinge on the notion that nothing is so strange that it can’t be true. Adjunct to his calculations were mandala-like schematics resembling the paintings of Paul Laffoley. One is labelled ‘The Alontvashid. This particular page. In the shuffle of eternity even this was once perhaps the flushed centre of something.’
Lint compared the internet to pulps such as Weird Tales—that magazine was now all but lost to decay, releasing the scent of cinnamon and sandalwood, and he wondered what would become of thoughts, correspondence and stories dependent upon continual support and electric current. He factored this into his legacy when, referring to Shelley’s Ozymandias and seeming to forebode events after his death, he remarked that he had always found it overly optimistic to expect the two towers to remain standing. Would he be remembered as a treasure trove of heaven access cheats and intravenous smarts or, as he suspected, left out of the history of literature for screwing up the continuity? There were those who set about paving this literary sugarfield immediately. ‘I saw a book by Lint once,’ said Frederick Weisberg, ‘but it was called Nose Furnace, and there was no question of
my reading it.’
‘He was like an hour of technicolour film showing up in 1900 then going missing forever,’ says Simon Gilbert. ‘An urban myth. And who can be a legend more than once?’
Fellow synaesthetes understood Lint when he said he’d seen a new colour at the point where green turns into orange, and that it felt like the vinegar-flavoured singing itch he got in his arm-marrow sometimes. There were reversed acidic blue golds, green golds and purple golds that show up in music and certain suburban garage doors at twilight. There were chemicals essential for the operation of time, words redefined to permit atrocity, atrophy speeded up and termed employment, unrecorded love under asphalt, slavery too close for the eye’s focus, whole lives impaled on society like carousel horses, and the hook throne of approval.
To those who value these truths, Lint remains the child who tried to unearth the bruises underground.
APPENDIX
LINT QUOTATIONS
‘Civilization is the agreement to have gaps between wars’
Prepare to Learn
‘Of course the government want us to kick heroin. And they’re not asking us to do anything they haven’t done
themselves.’
Die Miami
‘Television is light filled with someone else’s anxiety.’
Zero Learned From Nero
‘An optimist has nothing but miracles to rely on.’
Slogan Love
‘Has murder ever been patented? There’s a cash cow.’
Prepare to Learn
‘Modern architecture is about endurance on all sides.’
I Blame Ferns
‘Waxen saviors hang on the dash and I buy a hot dog. Such are the inequalities of charisma.’
‘The Harrowing Squid’
‘Pain is god trying to be funny. That’s how out-of-touch It is.’
Interview, 1992
‘I seem to be outliving my ears.’
Kiss Me, Mister Patton (screenplay)
‘Cold wind and candidates—that’s Washington to a tourist.’
‘An Ominous Mirth’
‘Water is Italian—it persists by adapting to everything, then slipping away.’
Prepare to Learn
‘When the abyss gazes into you, bill it.’
Interview, 1979
‘All cities are designed for the same scenarios.’
The Man Who Gave Birth to His Arse
‘A shame that the solutions to this world’s problems are so lacking in glamor. There are no explosions or big noises involved. … Patience and planning don’t look plucky.’
Interview, 1992
‘War—the meaning of the term has diversified to exploit more markets. You’ll notice the same hasn’t happened for terrorism.’
Doomed and Confident
‘Drugs suffer so.’
Die Miami
‘No one is blander than a jeweller, have you noticed?’
Turn Me Into a Parrot
‘Employment is atrophy speeded up.’
The Stupid Conversation
‘Your wife is positively radiant with repression.’
Frightful Murder at Hampton Place (screenplay)
‘You Must Be This Gullible To Vote’
Die Miami
‘Gods will be dragged screaming from the ether.’
The Caterer
‘Every ten seconds somewhere in the world, someone is realising I’m right.’
Interview, 1970
‘Debt circulates, the most emphatic form of communication.’
‘Cats Receive Broadcasts’
‘I never met a challenge I didn’t.’
‘Epidermal Dawns’
‘Lying is the new black.’
Doomed and Confident
‘Most people approach the subject of suicide determined to be baffled.’
Doomed and Confident
‘The devil is god found out.’
‘Dove in Head’
‘Exile is relief disguised as penance.’
I Blame Ferns
FOOTNOTES
1. Rouch has suggested that this was the origin of Lint’s wearing women’s clothes when submitting work to publishers. Campbell supposedly said ‘Pop it through the mail, you know our address’ and Lint thought he said ‘Poppet, for a male you know how to dress’ and somehow got the notion that presentation was crucial. Most Lint scholars reject the theory.
2. The three books are One Less Bastard, Nose Furnace and the story collection I Eat Fog. It may appear that Lint delivered books 2 and 3 at a leisurely pace, but he seems to have made a genuine attempt to give Jelly Result to Rodence, finding the Never Never offices starkly empty but for a litter of unbound pages and unpaid bills. By the time Rodence surfaced again, trading as Furtive Labors Books, Jelly Result was part of a deal with Doubleday.
3. PULP WRITER’S PUMP-ACTION HEAD CLAIM probably originates from several people’s description of Lint as resembling a duck, with accompanying impersonations. SF AUTHOR IN ‘CHARMED WONDERBOY’ OUTBURST derives from his appearance at the LA Sci-Fi Convention during which he had some sort of seizure and told the crowd a totally different version of Jelly Result, topping it with the pronouncement that he was ‘alarmed and overjoyed’ to be there. WRITER IS MADE OF CHIMP MEAT seems linked to his mention of evolutionary theory while visiting New England.
4. The resulting stories included ‘Chestdeep in My Own Jelly’, ‘My Jelly is Fantastic’, ‘The Jelly Cannot Lie’, ‘Woe Unto My Jelly’, ‘Jelly Invasion’, ‘My Jelly is an Eye’, ‘My Eye is a Jelly’, ‘Fearing My Jelly’, ‘I Married a Jelly’, ‘Look Out—Jellies’, ‘A Punch to the Jelly’, ‘Rest Your Beer on My Jelly’, ‘Jellying Out’, ‘A Jellyful of Murder’.
5. It is not known why Lint didn’t give Ferns to Doubleday, but his lack of input probably contributed to that company’s conviction that he was dead in the mid-sixties.
6. ‘Hanna Barbera’ll have our balls for a bolus,’ Arnie Waldheim is said to have shouted in the narrow corridor outside Lint’s office.
7. Blast of Merit became the title of a Lint fanzine published in Austin, Texas in the mid-eighties.
8. Lord Caul Pin has claimed that he was unaware of this sentiment when constructing the massive—and massively poisonous—‘Earth Sandwich’.
9. Among Lint fans the term ‘flirting with McCoy’ is used in regard to someone who is not taking the situation entirely seriously.
10. In reality a delegation of political leaders had proposed to Ingersoll that he would receive the governorship nomination provided he concealed his opinions, to which he replied ‘A good man should not agree to keep silent just for the sake of an office. A man owes his best thoughts to his country,’ and ‘Good-bye, gentlemen.’
11. It was later proved that Ferrie trained Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol.
12. Lint’s ‘clown in the trunk’ theory falls down here, as Garrison was too large a man to fit into the trunk of a Plymouth coupe.
13. NormanMailer-earcrack.mpg.
14. See the Zombie Supply Teacher track ‘Diamondhead Driver’ on the Eye in the Belly album, and of course the band Crystal City Martyrs.
15. According to an early Lint fanzine (Belly Hazard), the Omen-like Sadly Disappointed was actually the work of Alan Rouch, Lint writing Rouch’s well-received I Am a Centrifuge in exchange. Rouch is silent on the matter, but Centrifuge does bear many of Lint’s characteristic flourishes, such as the assertion that ‘If you freeze gruel you have a sculpture of J. Edgar Hoover’s face.’
16. Some commentators have suggested that this was the terrified shrieking of the Smile Group themselves.
17. After adjustments the toy was released as Hungry Hungry Hippos.
18. Some fans have made a connection between the Arkwitch movie and Buckaroo Banzai, but the latter is actually far more inventive.
19. I disagree.
20. The coffin supposedly contains a ‘dirty bomb’.
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