Lint - some lazy linking

There's more for fans of Lint on YouTube. First, the following brief monologue by Bell Ectric, which regrettably sheds almost no light at all on either Lint's "Belly" phase (if phase it was) or his alleged period of regular lemon consumption:



Second, the following work by "Seven Inch Stitch" entitled "I eat Fog" (a reference to one of the first works Lint published under his own name, rather than by the expedient of submitting stuff to Sci Fi publishers as 'Isaac Asimov' or 'Arthur C Clark'). It's closer to the Beach Boys in idiom and content than the famous and difficult to find acoustic (the term 'musical will not suffice) efforts of "The Energy Draining Church Bazaar". Still, it shows genuine admiration of Lint. We must assume that the "Jeff Lint" identified as a collaborator on this is someone else of the same name:

Lint: The Movie

The details of the production and scheduling of Jeff Lint: The Movie are foggy at best. Those non-waiters and mimophobes who are waiting expectantly can pass the time with the teaser trailers that have recently become available.

The Sorting Room

Steve Aylett is undoubtedly the best of the Jeff Lint impersonators currently stalking the earth. Here's an extract from "Only an alligator", volume 1 of a series called "Accomplice". It describes the misery of a group of individuals (not all human) who work in a basement facility called the sorting room. Chew on this, Max Weber:

It just kept coming, every day. Miscellaneous objects wrapped in paper and card. Magazines. Notes and forms full of writing. But none of it related to anyone here in the basement. Nothing was mentioned but strangers and their obscure affairs. Why were these objects turning up? What did it all mean? And what, above all, what was expected of them here?

They had devised a number of means of disposal. Some they burnt as they covered their faces with rags. Other stuff they tried to eat. The big objects they sculpted into an angular sentinel in a conical hat, which they pelted with cans until everyone became sort of embarassed and fell silent. Fang would stuff it all in a car boot and drive it over a cliff. Gregor had taken to baking the things in a high-tech ceramics kiln. He would remove the ingredients before the process was complete, and form this mush into a poultice for his arse. Near the cabinet was an open corner, a stale etheric fold gaping into seemingly bottomless space - this blot of shadow they called the Drop and it was invaluable, swallowing just about all the stuff they could dump there. But throughout they suspected that there was something more specific and important that they should be doing with it all, and sometimes, in private, they wept with the build-up of sheer, unspoken stress. At other times one of the group would go into a hysterical screaming jag at the unstoppable flow of stuff sliding down from the chute above. They never openly communicated their doubts. Inadequacy, depression and fear of discovery grained the gloomy air.

For more, you'll need to get hold of the books. A decent place to find out what they are is here, at SteveAylett.com.

Lint? Or one more bastard?

I suspect this one of being an amatuerish piece of fakery.

The Caterer

You can now buy volume 3 of the ill-fated and enraging Jeff Lint comic "The Caterer" in a reprint edition. And I, for one, think that you should. I've got several copies. Here's some of the boilerplate that the peeps in marketing came up with:

Described by Alan Moore as “the holy barnacle of failure”, The Caterer dragged Pearl into a legal hell when its hero spent the whole of Issue 9 on a killing spree in Disneyland. The smirking Jack Marsden became a cult figure and role model for enigmatic idiots in the mid-70s. His style and catchphrases were such an insider code that hundreds of people got beaten up by baffled or enraged onlookers.

Add it to your cart here.

Lint interview

Well, my cup runneth over. There's also an interview with Jeff Lint in this issue of All The Rage (opens as PDF).

Choice excerpts include:

LINT: [...] So my idea of an acceptable hero is some sort of a spider with multiple eyes like rally car headlights who, when issued an order, will jet tears of hilarity from the entire bank of eyes and tell a friend later while adapting a submarine for spaceflight: 'I hadn't the heart to obey such a moron.' You know. This means that a different sort of story happens - the characters aren’t blandly reactive and the story isn’t a machine.

And:

AG : You killed a stranger.
LINT: No I didn’t kill him. I sort of barreled into him on a sunny day and broke the front end of his face.
AG : His nose?
LINT: He’d probably call it that. Anyway, it was hard work and paid nothing. The situation didn’t allow either of us much latitude. And it wasn’t very encouraging.

There's also a page of adverts from an issue of The Caterer that are bound to evoke uneasy nostalgia here.

LINT the Movie

Fans of Jeff Lint (and who wouldn't be one) will be pleased to hear that there's a forthcoming movie about the author of such baffling and remarkable works as "The Stupid Conversation". You can check out the MySpace page of the movie.

Note that it is the movie, and not Lint himself, who is 92 years old and in the South of the United Kingdom. Lint's age, not to mention the number of times he has died and the precise circumstances in each case, remain hotly disputed. It is unlikely that the film will shed any light on these matters, although it is to be hoped that it stokes the flames with suitable lack of effort.

(The inclusion of Chekov in the poster is unlikely to settle ongoing arguments over Lint's never filmed episode of Star Trek, that so vexed Gene Roddenberry.)

Effortless Incitement readership update

So here's another roundup of the Effortless Incitement readership (the first one is here). This is a matter that likely doesn't interest anyone except me, but there's no better place to write about it. Since I started tracking with Google Analytics, I've now had 714 visitors, and 1063 page visits, from 50 countries, still only two of them African countries. The USA and UK account for about 50% of traffic so far, and including South Africa the three account for nearly 2/3rds of visits.

My technorati rank has grown steadily - back on August 3 it was 787,635, up from 1,287,256 when I first registered there, and now it's at 518,149. The'authority' of this blog has reached the dizzying heights of 13. Only a tiny fraction of visitors comment - I'm not sure what that's about, and don't know what ratio of visits to comments to regard as healthy. (That last sentence is a very flimsy pretext for posting the Bristol Stool Chart.) The blog itself, or individual articles have been picked up at sites that I admire, which is gratifying. The fraction of visits that are referrals is picking up as well.

Take Spurtotox!!!

So, there's a moderately amusing tool to create a spurious advert for a non-existent drug over at CEDRA, which is kinda fun to play with. It's worth going through the process once to see how your choices are used. Here's the ad for Spurtotox, a highly desirable cream.

And here's Jeffitol, a Jeff Lint tribute that rather strains the limits of the canned humour that the site is based on.

Sadly there's no option to save the result as an image file, or even a decent print option. Always a drag to see a decent idea with its own bootlaces wrapped around its neck.

Effortless Incitement readership

So this here blag has been running for nearly two months. According to Google Analytics, it has had a bit over 400 visits, a bit over 600 page views, and a bit over 300 unique visitors. (Yes, you are all individuals.) The most viewed individual article so far is The Coghill Challenge - Part 2, mostly on the back of it being featured in the most recent Skeptic's Circle blog carnival. The daily maximum readership has been 54 so far, and 18 subscribe via feedburner.

The visitors mostly come from the USA, UK and South Africa, but 39 countries in total have sent traffic so far, including most of Europe and Asia, but only one other African country, and nowhere South of the USA in either the Americas or Caribbean. Maybe I should write something en Espanol. Most of the traffic is direct or via referral (from blogger, and the blog carnivals I've participated in, as well as research blogging in the case of articles on peer-reviewed research). Only a small fraction so far is from search results, with 'effortless incitement' being the most common way of getting here by searching.

I can also report the following:

63.4% of visitors are using Firefox.
83.8% of visitors are using Windows.
83.8% of visitors are using 32 bit colour, and 96% have Java support.

Technorati seems to have been wobbly for a while, and the page for this blog there has persistently been a few days or more out of date for a while. Still, since Effortless Incitement got listed, its Technorati rank has climbed from 1,287,256 to 787,635, and its 'authority' from zero to 8. It's one person's favourite there (thanks, Michael).

So it's early days yet. I'll get good and liquored up when daily readership passes 100, and when unique visitors passes 1000.

A Woman a Day

There's suggestive evidence that "A Woman a Day", generally attributed to Philip Jose Farmer, may have been a mash-up of a rough draft by Jeff Lint, with each of the (many) scenes in which all the characters gathered in a hill and screamed until they lost consciousness removed, and the waiter-dog protagonist pair transposed into a man-wife combo. The remaining references to both pasta and tentacles are now simply silly, where they were previously baffling, and the "man" occasionaly muttering "stick with me" no longer properly references Jack Marsden, the pointless and hostile hero of "The Caterer".

It's well known that Lint's first work was most likely published not on its (it is generally agreed) slender merits, but as a result of his decision to submit the manuscript under the name "Isaac Asimov". It appears that further obstacles confront the project of identifying the real Lint. On days like this I'm pleased not to be one of the editors of the planned scholarly edition of Lint's collected works.

More sleazy SF covers are available here.

Intermission

I'm about to take a short break. This will involve plenty of sleeping, epic eating, reading at least one novel (I'll finish Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing" and I've got an issue of "The Caterer" by Jeff Lint as well), and some breakfast-time alcohol consumption. I'll just fritter the rest of the time away. This much needed R&R will take place in an undisclosed and rather primitive location with no access to the Interwebs. I figure I'll be back on the Tubes in about a week, and already scared to think of my inboxes upon my return. But I figure there won't be any blagging from me until about 11 July. Good thing hardly anybody reads this (yet).

Aylett on Lint

Some readers of this blag have expressed frankly dismaying scepticism about the existence of Jeff Lint, in the face of the evidence of his involvement in major works of popular culture such as the films 'Patton' and 'Funny Girl', his scripting of an episode of 'Star Trek'(*), as well as the many books and smaller selection of comics, not to mention the records of his forays into theatre and involvement in unpopular music.

I refer such doubters to the first two chapters of the careful biography by Steve Aylett, that are freely available here. Lint himself, who may or may not be dead, has a profile on MySpace here.

(*) The episode was never filmed, partly because of its wild creativity and unfilmable special effects. Apparently the MS led Gene Roddenberry to exclaim, "This isn't prose, it's gnats in formation!"

Atrophy speeded up

No doubt many of you have heard the rumours that a late and unpublished manuscript by Hatchjaw relating to the work of Jeff Lint has been 'uncovered' and may be going up for auction in the near future. I for one find little grounds for joy in the prospect of reading an account of Lint by the paranoid and opinionated vandal who previously added so little to serious de Selbiana. I'd rather watch a film version of "I Eat Fog" directed by James Cameron. Lint was if anything the opposite of paranoid, harbouring a pugilistic yet somnolent hostility to the little sense the world apparently made from time to time. I therefore hope very much that the rumours are false.

"Effortless incitement"?

When we were growing up on the farm one of the few avenues of escape we had from the soul-crushing tedium of rural life was a crate of tatty old Sci-Fi titles by Jeff Lint, including a pile of novellas and one precious number of the comic "The Caterer" (one page shown below). There was no television reception in our valley, and so we heard only garbled rumours of the animated children's entertainment 'Catty and the Major' (the Major's death scene is pictured to the left) and the nearest towns were nowhere near important enough to warrant the attentions of the rare tours of the Consolation Theatre Company. So all we had were those books and the comic. They gave us a disturbing glimpse of an exotic and glamorous world of tentacles, violence and waiters.

Lint aspired, with universally accepted success, to 'effortless incitement' in his own life, and some of his most baffling and memorable characters, especially Jack Marsden, exhibit to a very high degree the capacity to drive others, including readers, into near apoplectic fury without apparent exertion.

If anyone has an original vinyl copy of 'The Energy Draining Church Bazaar' I would be very interested to purchase it.