[Editor's Note: Here you will find the other Dispatches From Smaragdine columns.]

Installment #4

A Genuine Smaragdine Literary Hero
Lint Unglued: An Interview with Steve Aylett
Fiction Reviews: And Your Point Is? and Fain the Sorcerer by Steve Aylett
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A Genuine Smaragdine Literary Hero

In Smaragdine -- this far "suthron happie plaice" as the lay goes -- Steve Aylett is king. You cannot pass a bookstore, laundromat, grocery store, smekelmater or bageldorf without encountering his books. The covers of his books here are wild and bold and plentiful. Smaragdine ideas of copyright being what they are, you might find ten published editions of the same novel, often under different titles or containing insignificant textual changes. In this way, either Aylett or his multitudinous publishers "game the system," as under Smaragdine laws all of this is legal -- so long as each separate edition is in some small way unique.

I mention all of this because in late January, Smaragdine holds an Aylett Literary Parade. I have never seen anything quite like it.

Readers of his work create vast papier-mâché Aylett heads that they hoist over their own (with the help of rope and scaffolding) and lurch their way down the parade route, outriders in an insanely fetishistic display that, at times, borders on outright debauchery. Every detail of the celebration is Aylett oriented, from the "Lint for President" buttons to the flags embroidered with Slaughtermatic and Bigot Hall logos. Little girls and boys eat Aylett Moon Pies and lick Aylett-shaped popsicles. Interpretive dancers doing routines based on the more esoteric chapters of Shamanspace and Lint take up about a third of the parade, while the rest consists of floats depicting various scenes from Aylett's short stories. The smell of "magic" mushrooms and pot is heavily prevalent in the air. Some people appear to have entered a trance state. Those children who lick Aylett pops long enough will find an Aylett phrase printed on the stick, such as: "at first the warlock seemed to be a pillar of innards."

At the culmination of the parade, local officials hand a huge metal key dipped in honey to one of the Aylett Heads, after which everyone sits in the nearby bleachers and listens to a speech piped in over a rather rickety intercom system. This is always a pre-recorded message from the great man himself, Steve Aylett. Sometimes the message consists of a long rant about the state of Aylett's apartment. Sometimes, famously, it is a ten-minute repetition of a single word, such as "dangling" (1999), intoned with a slightly different emphasis each time. This year, Aylett sticks to a simple message of atonement and forgiveness, mixed with fervent pleas to "buy my books," then immediately contradicted with statements such as "my books aren't worth buying -- buy something else. Buy a damn dictionary for god's sake. Buy a juicer. Buy a ham sandwich if you must."

Oddly, Aylett has never visited Smaragdine, has expressed loathing for the idea, and yet still they worship him.

Anonymous, I pass between the shadow of the dangling Aylett heads and search for some sort of enlightenment.

Lint Unglued: An Interview with Steve Aylett

Photo © Irina Rzhevskaya

Clute referred to the 'interleaving' of me and Lint, by which he meant he was simultaneously leaving both me and Lint for someone else to think about. I reckon a lot of things apply to Lint's writing and my own, like the pointillist method of packing in information, the claymore principle of creation and bitter burlesque. He's a walking version of vividness and individuality in a bland wasteland and, in being original at a time when that quality is abhorred in the marketplace, he's like a bit of antimatter. That's something to shoot for.

Since Lint I've become known as the foremost authority on Jeff Lint and so was the obvious choice for editor of And Your Point Is?. There's no monetary gain in the world of Lintian studies. With my bare bloody hands I've been restoring portions of Lint's mid-60s cartoon Catty and the Major, some of which can be seen here -- www.steveaylett.com/Pages/aylettLINTcattyMajortoons.html And the UK edition of Lint from Snowbooks is a beautiful thing, it's a beautiful, rich object, that. I'm very into Snowbooks.

As a synaesthete I can say that the name 'Lance Olsen' looks like a smooth grey gourd in frictionless syrup. I envy him that.

No. There's one sentence in Lint and one sentence in And Your Point Is? that mention critics, so the subject's been fully covered.

What inspiration have you taken from the study of Lint's life and work?

That contrary to New Age principles of flow, true creativity will always lead to stuck-ness and poverty unless by chance it coincides with a fashion. Also that a house can be adequately heated with wasps.

I find a lot of it uninspired and lumpen, and these days it seems to have got stuck on repeat without any real content, so that even what raw qualities it originally had have been diluted by repeated impersonation.

I can read Gene Wolfe's New Sun stuff, and some of Moorcock's sword & sorcery (not Elric but the Bek stories), but I prefer Moorcock's Cornelius, Bastable and End of Time books. I've never got very far with Tolkien. Where magical-ish fantasy is concerned, I prefer stuff with more innovative, tricksterish individuals like Vance's Dying Earth characters -- people who aren't on rails -- and Fain the Sorcerer ended up a bit like that. In the sword-&-sorcery chapter of Lint ('My Goblin Hell') I talk about how oftentimes old codgers will claim to be wise by the mere fact of their age, while the 'wizard' under discussion in the chapter is in fact an appalling and dangerous old git who has only one lesson to teach: to tolerate him only so far and no further.

No.

I am going to write two more small books set in Fain's world, but they'll be as short and concentrated as Fain, and even more bitter. I've found some moral colours that haven't been named before, by putting everything further into the negative than has been previously recorded by a sane man. The three books will end up collected in one volume. In regard to selling out and writing something bland, I've realised only very recently that's what I was supposed to have done when Orion paid me a lot to write the Accomplice quartet. But it was one of those 'unspoken' understandings, so I didn't know anything about it. Consequently I happily wrote four of the strangest books ever written, and that was the end of my big-money career.

Put simply, the characters have in common the fact that they're trickster figures -- the only characters who aren't working to a script, so they're dodging around the other characters and walking behind the scenery and so on. But there can also be a loneliness to that trickster position.