Paperjam

Stop what you are doing and read Lint by Steve Aylett immediately

Literature // Jim // 28th July 2008

You have just paid £24 to get into the Ricoh Arena to watch Coventry City play Scunthorpe, so far it has been appalling. The ball has barely touched the floor, neither side has strung more than two passes together and most of the entertainment so far has come from watching some chav kids getting in a fight with the stewards.

Suddenly in a moment of near excitement Cov have won a corner. The crowd wakes up as the team shapes up for some well drilled training ground move, the centre-halves have jogged painfully up the pitch while the lumbering striker is ineptly trying to obstruct the opposition keeper. There is all manner of jostling and jockeying – the sense of anticipation builds as the corner taker runs up to the ball… and belts it straight into the stand, failing to even get it onto the pitch. “Oh for fucks sake – even I could do better than that,” you wail, coming over all italic.

It’s a mundanely depressing yet strangely comforting phenomena that seems to transcend all areas of popular culture. Whether watching very average footballers, sitting through films made by Guy Ritchie, struggling to finish some Dan Brown bollocks (flying pope anyone? Flying bloody pope?) or considering stabbing yourself in the face after paying good money for a copy of the NME – you know deep down that if you put in the hours/lost the belly/had listened in school/were given the chance/kicked the crystal meth once and for all - that you could almost certainly do better.

Personally I’ve always had the sneaking, pretentious feeling that given the right conditions, plenty of time, the love of a good woman (or several fairly average ones), independent financial support, a nice middle class heroin habit and a really good thesaurus – I could probably bang out some sort of novel/screenplay/advertising pamplet that would give a lot of the shit floating around a run for its money.

You will all realise that this is, of course, complete bollocks - much in the same way that I will never compete at the Olympics, star in a film opposite Vinnie Jones or provide backing vocals and percussion the all conquering punk/dub/lounge band that the world has been waiting for.

Still the consistently poor output that we are happy to spend our hard earned wedge on helps to maintain our little fantasies of superiority over those far more gifted or skilled.

Now and again though some piece of absolute quality comes down the pipe and puts you firmly back in your place, examples being Federer v Nadal, Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight and seeing The Flaming Lips live. Even though this should make you feel jealous or inadequate, it doesn’t because although you realise that you could never ever hope to achieve something nearly as good, you are enjoying it far too much to care.

Lint: Total, genius

You could give me all the best drugs in the world, access to a harem of Smiths-loving underwear models who find the word “Sorry” utterly and explosively arousing, a million quid and a hundred years – and I know that I could still never write anything remotely as good as Lint by Steve Aylett.

This is the life story of the deeply strange and possibly under-rated author of such pulp sci-fi classics as One Less Bastard, Jelly Result and I Blame Ferns (which featured a cover quote from Anthony Burgess that read: “There does not seem to be any story, nor any point in reading this book, nor any other by Jeff Lint and his stupid friends.”).

Aylett takes us on a surreal and painfully, painfully funny tour through the life of Jeff Lint and his various contemporaries, in a book of many highlights I’ll boringly list a few to hopefully entice you to pick up a copy as soon as you can:
- Lint got his first break with a story about a tramp called And Your Point Is? He ensured publication by submitting it under his chosen pen name: Isaac Asimov.
- His meditation on the Kennedy assassination (Rigor Mortis) in which he expanded the “magic bullet theory” to include all the political assassinations since Lincoln. A diagram helpfully plots the bullet’s 98 year trajectory around the globe.
- Lint was summarily thrown off the creative team for 2001 after he had suggested that the starchild should have tusks.
- Moving into the world of comic strips, Lint invented an action hero named The Caterer, a beaming, murderous sociopath who became obsessed with goats and whether they contain dust.

The level of research and detail that has gone into this book along with the very obvious passion that Aylett has for his subject means that Lint is easily the best biography I’ve ever read. The author writes with such compelling bravado and wit that concerns such as the reliability of witnesses, the difficult separation of myth from realty and the fact that Jeff Lint never actually lived all seem fairly unimportant and, frankly, a bit picky.

Lint links...

Jeff Lint at wikipedia

Wikipedia entry with some biographical info and a bibliography.

Pages from The Caterer

From the cult comic that caused the financial downafall of the company that published it