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Jim Mountfield gets beached

 

© Stygian Lepus 

 

Jim Mountfield, the penname I use when I write scary stories, has just had his first fiction published in 2025.  This is a short story entitled Beach Bodies, which appears in Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus, a magazine where “readers explore the depths of imagination, where fear and fascination entwine.”

 

As its title suggests, Beach Bodies was inspired by a visit I made to a beach: Nyang Nyang Beach in the Uluwata area of Bali, Indonesia.  I’d walked a fair bit along the beach, away from its touristy part, to a stretch of it where there was hardly another human being in sight, when suddenly I came across a huge, long slab of rock embedded in the sand.  It was flat but its surface was covered in ruts and runnels that, each time a wave crashed against the shore and breakers came hissing up the beach, filled with white foam and formed strange, drizzling patterns.  There was something weird – something a bit, well, alien – about that rock formation.  And that’s how my story got its basic idea.

 

Meanwhile, most of the Western tourists I saw on the beach seemed to be busy filming themselves with their smartphones, recording clips of their hopefully-glamorous, hopefully-exotic holiday-adventures that would then be uploaded to their social media accounts.  I even noticed a Balinese guy on the shore, operating a film camera pointed at a group of surfers out amid the waves.  He’d been hired to film their surfing exploits, the footage of which would no doubt be posted online.  This influencer-style narcissism made me immensely grumpy…  That grumpiness also features in the story.

 

For the next few weeks, Beach Bodies can be read online here, while the contents page of the Stygian Lepus, Issue 22, is accessible here.  And go to this link if you’d like to sample the issue as an eBook.

 

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Eco chamber

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rob Bogaerts

 

A follow-on from my previous post…

 

Elon Musk’s stiff-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 24th – at least, unlike Dr Strangelove, he didn’t address Trump as “Mein Führer!” – inspired me to read again Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

 

This begins with Eco reminiscing: “In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian).  I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject ‘Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?’  My answer was positive.  I was a smart boy.”  It goes on to describe Eco’s hometown being taken over in 1945 first by the partisans and then by American soldiers (all of whom were African-Americans) and then muses on the nature of Italian fascism, as helmed by Mussolini, and of fascism generally.  It ends with Eco identifying 14 key traits that he believes appear in fascist movements and quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

 

Well, Roosevelt’s words seem sadly ironic now.  Under Trump, American democracy appears to be moving backwards as a dying force, and the only citizens whose lot he’s seeking day and night to better are rich, white, straight, male ones.  But what about those 14 traits of fascism?  How many of them are detectible in Trump’s America at the moment?

 

Spoilers…  A lot.

 

The American far-right’s modus operandi of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was a concept originally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new Trump-grovellers-in-chief, and is something Trump’s been doing ever since his inauguration three weeks ago: ‘Tariffs!’ / ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ / ‘Invade Greenland!’ / ‘Invade Panama!’ / ‘Make Canada the 51st state!’ / ‘Leave the WHO!’ / ‘Leave the Paris agreement!’ / ‘More tariffs!’ / ‘Abolish DEI!’ / ‘Abolish USAID!’ / ‘Abolish trans-people!’ / ‘Abolish Gaza and turn it into the new Riviera!’ / etc.  This obviously corresponds to Eco’s fascist trait number three: “the cult of action for action for action’s sake… Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection.”

 

Also Trump down to a ‘T’ is trait number four: ‘disagreement is treason’.  So too is number five: ‘fear of difference’.  I can’t see life in America over the next four years being much fun if you’re different from one of those aforementioned rich, white, straight males.  And absolutely so too is number six: “appeal to a frustrated middle class… a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

 

Number seven is: ‘obsession with a plot’.  Yup, Trump has never shut up about the ‘deep state’, whatever that is, being out to get him and he’s happily courted all those delusional QAnon believers and other conspiracy fantasists.  Number eight is the belief that one’s ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’?  Well, listen to Trump’s speeches and you’ll hear him ranting simultaneously about how shit the US has become in the face of international competition and how it’s still somehow the greatest country on earth.

 

© Lumen Press

 

Number nine, the notion that ‘pacifism is trafficking with the enemy… life is permanent warfare’?  Well, see what I wrote in my previous post, about how “when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like there’s a crisis, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.”

 

Numbers ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen, which are respectively, ‘contempt for the weak,’ ‘everyone is educated to become a hero’ (heroism is especially easy when your population has ready access to AR-15s), ‘machismo’ (note Trump’s conviction in a civil court in 2023 for sexual abuse) and ‘selective populism’?  Tick, tick, tick and tick.

 

I don’t think Trump’s smart enough to have entertained thoughts about number fourteen, ‘newspeak’, wherein, for example, “Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning”.  In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this was the project that Winston Smith’s colleague Syme was working on at the Ministry of Truth, whittling down the size of dictionaries so that people has less vocabulary to articulate such abstract concepts as free will and self-expression.  Mind you, the many social-media platforms now doing Trump’s bidding are infested with so much short, simplistic, soundbite messaging – ranting, basically – that’s there’s little room for critical reasoning in them.

 

I haven’t mentioned numbers one and two yet, which are the ‘cult of tradition’ and ‘rejection of modernism’, wherein fascists deny the “advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message” and the “Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”  But obviously, that’s written large across Trump and his operation, from his rejection of what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are warning us about, to his efforts to put the anti-vaxxer grifter Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health, to his lackey Musk getting rid of fact-checking on X and lackey Zuckerberg doing the same on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to the idea that you can turn any untruth into a truth by repeating it often and loudly and brazenly enough: Haitian immigrants are eating pets, vaccines cause autism, DEI policies caused a mid-air collision, USAID supplied condoms to Hamas and so on, and so forth.

 

And that brings me to another piece of writing I’ve encountered recently.  It’s a passage from the book The Demon-Haunted World (1995) by the late, great American astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan, which I’ve seen quoted on several people’s social-media pages.  Sagan’s mid-1990s fears about a near-future America were, shall we say, troublingly prescient.

 

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

 

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second soundbites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

 

Awesome technological powers in the hands of a very few…  Public representatives unable to grasp the issues…  Critical faculties in decline…  Dumbing down…  Soundbites…  Pseudoscience…  Superstition…  Yes, Carl, you nailed it.  I’m glad, though, that you (and Umberto Eco) aren’t around to witness the ultimate, apocalyptic celebration of ignorance that’s erupted with the advent of Trump Mark II.

 

© Random House

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You won’t ever be happy

 

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

 

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47th president of the United States.  For the 49.8 percent of Americans who voted in November 2024’s presidential election and voted for him, his previous four-year stint as 45th president obviously wasn’t enough.

 

Already those two weeks feel like two decades.  I live in Singapore, a long way away from Trump’s USA, and yet his orange visage assails me non-stop, smirking and scowling out of photos in the news websites and social media accounts I peruse.  I feel sorry for the poor folk who can’t stand the sight of him but have to live within the same country-borders as him.

 

It’s been relentless.  One moment he’s pardoning the 1600-odd dingbats who attacked the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, including 600 who were charged with attacking or impeding law-enforcement officers, and including the lunatic shaman-guy in the buffalo horns who reacted to his pardon by posting on Twitter, “Now I am gonna by some motha f**kin guns!”  The next moment he’s pulling the USA out of the Paris climate agreement (again) and halting Joe Biden’s Green New Deal – much to the delight, I’m sure, of the Chinese government, whom he blames for pushing the ‘hoax’ of man-made climate change.  They’ll now seize the opportunity to establish their country as the world’s renewable-energy superpower.

 

And the next moment again he’s halting all American foreign aid, giving Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Governmental Efficiency’ (DOGE) free rein to destroy the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or as Musk calls it, ‘a viper’s nest of radical left-Marxists who hate America’.  Again, I’m sure the Chinese government is cheering.  As the US’s disease-prevention, food security, water security, education, etc., programmes in the Global South and elsewhere grind to a halt, they’ll swoop in and replace them, thus greatly extending China’s global soft power and influence.

 

What else?  Trump’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – obviously, when there’s a deadly global pandemic, he doesn’t want medical experts interfering in how he runs his country and warning him that his proposed ‘inject yourself with bleach’ cure isn’t a good idea.  He’s banned all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in the belief that important jobs must be left to straight, fully-abled white men, who are inherently smarter than everyone else.  Why, even before the bodies of those killed in January 29th’s mid-air collision at Washington DC were cold, Trump raged that DEI policies were responsible for the tragedy.

 

He’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’.  (What next?  One wag speculated on social media that he might rename the Oxford comma ‘the Comma of America’.)  He’s tried to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland to him, as part of his expand-the-American-Empire project (no doubt inspired by his buddy Putin’s expand-the-Russian-Empire project).  And he’s also tried to bully Mexico and Canada, by threatening to slap tariffs on their goods.  I’m not a big fan of Pierre Trudeau, but his riposte to Trump’s blustering bollocks showed he has more class and statesmanship in the tip of his little finger than Trump has in his whole, gross body.

 

From pixabay.com / © StockSnap

 

However, I’m sure that for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, this is music to their ears.  They must feel like they’re in heaven.  Thanks to the antics of their orange hero, they’re now owning the libtards.  They’re bathing in libtard tears.  They’re loving the smell of napalmed libtards in the morning.  They’re achieving their number-one objective, which is to cause maximum distress to those libtard snowflakes who want to deny them their constitutional right to stockpile huge quantities of military assault rifles, and their right to go ‘rolling coal’ in their modified diesel-engine trucks, and their right to grab women by the pussy without suffering consequences, and their right to live in neighbourhoods with zero numbers of people of colour, and so on.  They’re all on Twitter, or ‘X’ as Musk insists on calling it, yeehawing their joy in their echo-chambers of MAGA-ites, incels, neo-Nazis and Russian bots at how President Trump is blasting those libtard wusses with both barrels.

 

Well, to the vast majority of Trump’s supporters – i.e., those not rich enough to qualify as being in the top 10 percent who own half the nation’s wealth – I have some bad news.  You won’t ever be happy.

 

Firstly, your lives aren’t going to improve materially.  The involvement in Trump’s project of Elon Musk, who’s the world’s richest human being and whose right arm had a Dr Strangelove-style tendency to slip into troubling, sloping salutes at the inauguration, should be a warning of that.  So too should the prominent places given at that inauguration to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.  Big tax-cuts are coming for Trump’s wealthy and super-wealthy friends.  A large part of the bill for those will be shifted onto the working and middle-classes, for example, through the extra they’ll have to pay for goods when Trump starts imposing his beloved tariffs.

 

Some of these tax-cuts will also be financed through the axing of government services, which Musk is doing in his new, DOGE-eat-dog world right now.  There’s always much whinging about how much is removed from your pay-packet and sent off to fund distant government departments.  But when departments overseeing such things as social security, medical care, education, tax refunds, disease control, environmental protection, disaster relief and so on receive the chop, and the effects of their loss are felt, I suspect people’s tunes will change.

 

Incidentally, it’s ironic that far-right-wing commentators, influencers and social-media grifters have for years belched out claims that the world’s governments are secretly controlled by liberal-minded billionaires like Bill Gates or George Soros.  They’ve also indulged in antisemitic dog-whistling by suggesting that billionaire banking family the Rothschilds are pulling the levers.  (See, for instance, a 2023 complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to GB News about their presenter and conspiracy fantasist Neil Oliver referencing the antisemitic, Rothschild-accusing document Silent Weapons for Silent Wars during one of his diatribes about impending ‘one-world government’.)  Yet here we have a billionaire who, unelected and in plain sight, is heavily financing, influencing and manipulating an elected government for his own benefit.  And there’s not a peep out of them.

 

From unsplash.com / © Larissa Avononmadegbe

 

Musk has even got access to classified US treasury files, which are full of confidential data about citizens’ social security and Medicare payment systems.  You’d think this violation of people’s private information would give right-wing conspiracy nuts the heebie-geebies.  But no, they’ve been strangely quiet.  Maybe Musk’s salute at the inauguration did it.  He showed these guys that they didn’t have to worry – he’s the type of billionaire they’d want to have controlling their government.

 

But returning to Trump, I don’t see how his antics are going to improve life for the average citizen who voted for him.  If he carries out his witless threats to impose tariffs, he’ll drive up prices.  Meanwhile, his belief that, conveniently, climate change is just a sham will no doubt see the American economy take a severe battering in the years ahead as the country itself takes a battering from increasingly inclement weather.  Imagine what home-insurance bills will be like after a good chunk of Florida tips into the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Not that I think his supporters will be loudly belly-aching about their lives continuing to be shit, or being even shitter than they were previously.  A lot of them will be conditioned by sunk-cost fallacy and keep quiet – having invested so much time and energy in backing Trump and his MAGA movement, they’ll be reluctant to admit they were wrong.  Also, Trump now has X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok singing his praises.  He also has newspapers like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times kowtowing and kissing his ring.  The bulk of the American media will spend the next four years assuring the public they’ve never had it so good, when in all probability they’ve never had it so bad.

 

And that’s not all, Trump supporters.  Even in the unlikely case of your circumstances getting better, you still won’t ever be happy.  Trump and his lackeys won’t allow you to be happy.  To illustrate what I mean, you only have to look at Britain and the nearest institution Britain has to Trumpism – that toxic far-right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail.  Paul Dacre, its former editor and now the editor-in-chief of its publisher DMG Media, once remarked that the perfect Daily Mail story was one that (1) confirmed its readers’ worst fears and (2) gave them someone to blame for it.  You can expect something similar in the US over the next few years.  (Maybe forever, if Trump can change the constitution so that it resembles that of Putin’s Russia, and politicians who might oppose him in future elections start falling to their deaths out of windows.)

 

Everything that goes wrong will be the fault of immigrants eating people’s pets, or environmentalists not pumping enough water to put out wildfires, or Democrats controlling the weather, or Jewish space-lasers, or deadly aircraft-destroying DEI programmes.  Even when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like crises are happening, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.  They’re to be riled up, permanently.

 

So, Trump people, I’m sorry, but you won’t ever be happy.  As someone once put it: “Hell is getting what you think it is you want.”

 

From pixabay.com / © heblo

Posted on

It had to be snakes

 

 

We’ve just had the celebration of Chinese New Year and, in the Chinese calendar, embarked on the Year of the Snake.

 

It’s appropriate, some would say, that the snake symbolises the year ahead.  After all, the keys of the White House and the reins of the world’s greatest economic and military power have recently been handed over to some of the biggest snakes on the planet.  Western cultures take a dim view of snakes, repulsed by their slithering physical appearance and associating them mentally with slyness, deviousness and general vindictiveness.  And if Trump, Musk and co. aren’t slithering, sly, devious and vindictive, then who is?

 

However, snakes get a much better deal in the Chinese Zodiac.  Folk born in the Year of the Snake are said to have plenty of positive qualities.  ‘Enthusiasm’, ‘decency’, ‘sophistication’, ‘eloquence’, ‘humorousness’, ‘level-headedness’, ‘creativity’ and ‘rationality’ are among the qualities attributed to them on the various Chinese astrological websites I’ve read.  That’s a relief.  I was born in the Year of the Snake myself and would hate to think my personality is on par with that of Nagini in the Harry Potter books (1997-2007), Sir Hiss in Walt Disney’s animated version of Robin Hood (1973), Kaa in another Disney movie, 1967’s The Jungle Book (though not in Rudyard Kipling’s original 1894 collection of Jungle Book stories, where Kaa is a good guy), or indeed, Satan in the Bible.

 

 

My local shopping mall in Singapore has a big open area at the bottom of its stairwell that’s usually given over to promotions or to stalls selling cheap clothing, footwear and blankets.  In advance of Chinese New Year, however, it was devoted to a display of giant horoscopes.  Each panel told people born under each of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac what to expect in the year ahead in terms of their wealth, career, relationships and health.  These categories were given ratings out of five stars.

 

I’d naively expected that for someone born in a past Year of the Snake, the year ahead, also that of the Snake, would be a fortuitous one.  But apparently people born under an animal aren’t guaranteed a good time when the year of that animal arrives every dozen years.  My wealth, career, relationships and health prospects all look distinctly middling this year.  I haven’t seen so many three-out-of-five-star ratings since Alien: Romulus was released last August.

 

 

Just as well I don’t believe in astrology and regard it all as superstitious guff.  Mind you, I’m sure some positive astrological words at the start of the year would be nice for me subconsciously.

 

Anyway, Happy New Year again – Happy Chinese New Year this time.  And enjoy the Year of the Snake, despite everything.

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Favourite Scots words, T-V

 

From unsplash.com / © Edward Howell

 

Yesterday was January 25th and yesterday evening saw a multitude of whisky-and-haggis-fuelled suppers held across the world to honour the 266th birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet and one of its most distinguished writers in the Scots language.  This is an appropriate time, then, to publish the latest instalment of my list of favourite words and phrases from Scots.  I’m getting near the end of the alphabet now – the items in this post begin with letters ‘T’, ‘U’ and ‘V’.

 

Tablet (n) – a sweet foodstuff peculiar to Scotland, described by one culinary website as ‘crumbly, buttery fudge’.  Actually, I remember tablet being hard rather than crumbly.  At the end of its cooking process, it’d be a big solid slab in a tin, which you then cut up into little blocks.  It was also unhealthily laden with sugar, so obviously it became a popular Scottish treat.  In fact, in a short story I wrote a couple of years ago, I referred to tablet as ‘that tooth-rotting, Scottish confection of butter, sugar and condensed milk.’

 

Tackety boots (n) – hobnailed boots, the tackety bits being the hobnails.

 

Tappit hen (n) – originally a hen with a crest, although more recently it’s become the term for a type of pewter tankard or jug, with a lid, and a little knob on the lid.  I remember from my youth how the Tappit Hen was also the name of a pub in Aberdeen and, if my memory serves me correctly, it had a little nightclub called ‘Roosters’ upstairs.  Ha-ha, Roosters… On top of the Tappit Hen.  Get it?

 

Tapsalteerie (adj) – upside down.

 

Tattie (n) – a potato.  Potatoes are a staple of the Scottish diet – see the ubiquity of the dish mince an’ tatties.  If you get work on a farm picking potatoes, you are said to go tattie howkin’.  And there’s a savoury snack in Scotland, a wedge of potato flatbread that goes very nicely with a fried breakfast, called a tattie scone.

 

© Grove Atlantic

 

Tattiebogle (n) – a scarecrow.  In Douglas Stuart’s novel Young Mungo (2022), set in Glasgow in the early 1990s, Tattiebogle is the nickname that the title character, 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton, and his sister Jodie give their mother whenever she’s on one of her (frequent) alcoholic benders.  That’s when she seemingly transforms into a deranged, subhuman horror.

 

Tawse (n) – also known as ‘the belt’, a tawse was a strip of leather that had a sadistically forked tail and was an instrument of corporal punishment in Scottish schools.  Misbehaving pupils would be brought to the front of the classroom, made to stand with one hand outstretched and the other hand supporting it under the wrist, and given ‘six of the belt’, i.e., half-a-dozen whacks from the tawse across the palm.  Thanks to a judgement against its use by the European Court of Human Rights, the tawse disappeared from Scottish schools in the early-to-mid-1980s – making folk my age the last schoolkids to have been terrorised by it.

 

Teem (v) – to pour (with rain).  I’ve seen this included in lists of Scots words but I’ve only ever heard it used in Northern Ireland, where a lot of those words ended up.  “Ach, it’s teemin’!” my mum, who hailed from near Enniskillen, would exclaim when the heavens opened and rain started pounding us.

 

Teuchter (n) – a derogatory word used by Lowland Scots towards a person from the Highlands and Islands (often one who speaks the Scottish Gaelic language).  In Robin Jenkins’ 1979 novel Fergus Lamont, the title character describes the word as “the most contemptuous name a Lowlander can call a Highlander: it implies, among other things, heathery ears and sheep-like wits.”  I’ve also heard Aberdonians use teuchter in reference to anybody from the surrounding countryside of North East Scotland.

 

From ebay.co.uk / © B. Feldman & Co

 

The day / the morra / the nicht (adv) – today, tomorrow and tonight.  The nicht is immortalised in the saying It’s a braw moonlicht nicht the nicht (‘It’s a beautiful moonlit night tonight’), which comes from a song called Wee Deoch and Doris by the popular Scottish music-hall performer Sir Harry Lauder.  The song includes the lines: “There’s a wee wifie waitin’ in a wee but an’ ben / If you can say, ‘It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht’ / Then ye’re a’richt, ye ken.”

 

Thirled (adj) – being bound to something, by law, by contract, by loyalty or by habit.  John Buchan’s novel Witch Wood (1927), whose action takes place in the 17th-century Scottish Borders, contains the questioning line: “Or were they so thirled to their evil-doing that his appeals were no more than an idle wind?”

 

Thrapple (n) – the throat or windpipe.

 

Thrawn (adj) – stubborn, obstinate and bloody-minded, inclined to do the opposite of what everyone urges you to do.  However, there’s a macabre short story called Thrawn Janet (1881) by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the word has a different meaning – ‘twisted’ or ‘deformed’.  The title character is described as having “her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit…”

 

© Charles River Editors

 

Tod (n) – a fox.  The Scottish author James Robertson once translated Roald Dahl’s children’s book Fantastic Mr Fox into Scots, where it sported the more Caledonian-friendly title Sleekit Mr Tod.

 

Trauchle (v) – to walk slowly and wearily.

 

Trews (n) – tartan trousers, once worn by Scotland’s southern regiments and regarded as a traditional garment of the country’s Lowlands (although in reality, like kilts, trews originated in the Highlands).  I’ve heard it said that trews were the prototype for the tartan plus-fours that golfers used to wear.

 

At modern Scottish gatherings, kilts tend to vastly outnumber trews, although I can think of a couple of famous people who had a liking for this form of Scottish legwear: the late Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland from 2007 to 2014, who once got involved in a stushie when he went on an official visit to China, forgot to pack his trews and then bought an emergency pair at the cost of 250 pounds to the Scottish taxpayer; the late and much-loved rugby player, Doddie Weir who, off the rugby field, was rarely photographed not in his trews; RuPaul, host of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present), who wore them the day he got a star on Hollywood Boulevard; and, if yellow trews count, the British children’s cartoon character Rupert Bear.

 

Tup (n) – a ram.  Supposedly this term is used in the north of England too, but I’ve only ever heard it used in Scotland.

 

From unsplash.com / © Wolfgang Hasselmann

 

Turnshie (n) – a turnip.  Somewhat less common than neep, the other Scots word for turnip, turnshie has nonetheless spawned a couple of memorable compound nouns.  A turnshie-gowk is another Scots word for a scarecrow, while turnshie-heid is a term of abuse meaning ‘turnip-head’, i.e., a glaikit Liz Truss-style idiot.

 

Unco (adv) – very.  Robert Burns used this word in the following lines from his epic poem Tam O’Shanter (1791) to show the extreme happiness felt by Scotsmen whilst drinking alcohol: “While we sit bousin, at the nappy / And gettin fou and unco happy…”

 

Uisge beatha (n) – the Scottish Gaelic word for ‘whisky’, this has been commandeered by Scotland’s non-Gaelic speakers as an admiring term for their nation’s famous firewater.   Uisge beatha is sometimes spelt in Anglicised form as usquebaugh and it gets its poetic force from the fact that it means ‘water of life’.

 

Vennel (n) – an alleyway or narrow lane, the word being derived from the French one ‘venelle’.  Scottish terms with similar meanings include wynd and close.  Probably the most famous vennel in Scotland is one simply called ‘The Vennel’, which threads upwards from the southwestern end of the Grassmarket in Edinburgh and, at its highest point, provides a good vantage point for viewing and photographing Edinburgh Castle.

 

From unsplash.com / © Ross Findlay

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Haw Par Villa: a special place in hell

 

 

Donald Trump has been inaugurated as 47th President of the United States of America. With social-media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and now TikTok acting as his cheerleaders and fascists like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and those deranged January 6th rioters he’s just pardoned acting as his law enforcers, he looks set to transform the USA into a combination of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Benito Mussolini’s Italy.  That’s while his administration abandons science and embraces paranoid conspiracy fantasies, superstition and stupidity, pumps umpteen more billions of tons of carbon into our already-poisoned biosphere, and conspires to destroy what democracies remain in the modern world.  Therefore, it can be said we are now living in hell. 

 

With these hellish things happening, I thought it would be appropriate to devote a blogpost to the most vivid representation of hell I have ever seen: that at Haw Par Villa, Singapore’s most remarkable museum.

 

Haw Par Villa was originally built by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, who developed and marketed the famous analgesic remedy Tiger Balm.  They relocated from Burma to Singapore in 1926 and purchased the site – today on the West Coast Highway, just along from the Haw Par Villa MRT Station – in 1935.  The villa was designed in an Art Deco style and completed in 1937, but its original incarnation didn’t last long, being bombed and occupied by the Japanese during World War II and demolished after the war ended.  Its gardens survived, though.  Up to his death in 1954, Aw Boon Haw installed statues and dioramas there that he hoped would help instil ‘traditional Chinese values’ in those who viewed them.  Subsequently, the gardens became a public park popular among Singaporean families.

 

By the 1980s, the place was losing its lustre and efforts to repackage it meant it underwent several name changes – from ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ to ‘Haw Par Villa Dragon World’, back to ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ and finally to ‘Haw Par Villa’ as it is today.  No doubt the Singaporean Tourist Board understood it was special, thanks to those installations Aw Boon Haw had made to promote his vision.  Yet it surely seemed too traditional, and too eccentric, to compete with the city-state’s more modern visitor attractions.  A study in 2014 reported ‘low tourist interest’ in it and made the melancholy observation that it was ‘rather rundown and not very well maintained’.  However, Journeys Pte Ltd acquired it in 2015 and closed it for a period at the start of the 2020s to make renovations.  Since reopening, the latest version of Har Par Villa has won acclaim.  In 2023, for instance, it was a finalist in the Singaporean Tourism Awards for Outstanding Attraction.  Let’s hope its future is now secure.

 

 

A while back, accompanied by my partner and a couple of friends, I visited Har Par Villa.  Approaching its entrance, we went past the place’s name in blood-red English letters and Chinese characters raised against a tableau of artificial rocks.  Then we went through a traditional Chinese paifang with a prominently-displayed picture of a tiger – appropriately for the home of Tiger Balm – and then found ourselves passing a gamut of strange statues.  These included big, spooky white rabbits with red mouths and eyes, mad-looking sheep with black horns and black-rimmed eyes, and a freaky humanoid pig in britches, cap and shirt, the shirt peeled back to reveal a fat belly and sagging man-boobs.  A couple with human bodies and tiger heads, wearing dungarees and a pink dress, held forward tins, boxes and packets of Tiger Balm.  And a pot-bellied Buddha with a wide cackling mouth resembled one of the Blue Meanies in the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine (1968).  It was all wonderfully, charmingly weird.

 

 

Our intention today was to visit just one part of Haw Par Villa, its most famous part – the attraction announced by a banner at the entrance, which said: ‘Hell’s Museum: Visions of Death and the Afterlife’.  From all accounts, there’s much more to see there, but that would have to wait until another visit.

 

After buying tickets at the ticket desk / gift shop – whose door had a sign saying ‘No food, no drinks, no pets (pets go to heaven)’ – we ventured into the first section of Hell’s Museum.  We discovered a corner where we could stand by a backdrop of red-hot lava, orange flames and grey smoke and have photos taken so that it looked like we were in hell; and a room where a short documentary film about religious concepts of death and hell played on a loop. Thereafter, we entered a modern and reasonably sober museum.  Haw Par Villa is famous for some over-the-top, properly hellish depictions of hell, but those would come later.

 

The museum contained displays and charts giving information on such things as different cultures’ and religions’ beliefs in the afterlife, the history of ‘handling death’ in Singapore, ‘Singapore’s industry of cremation’ and, courtesy of a large map, the locations of all the cemeteries in the city-state – Chinese, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Baha’i, Parsi, Burmese, Japanese and ‘War’.  Among many other things, there were verses on the subject of death and hell from various sacred texts, such as the Buddhist Dhammapada.  (Chapter 9, Verses 126-128: “Some are born in the womb; the wicked are born in hell…”)

 

 

I particularly liked a replica of a Mexican Day of the Dead altar with all the traditional paraphernalia: photographs of the deceased, butterflies, flowers, bunting, candles, water, food, alcohol, cigars, salt, incense, mirrors, crosses and little skulls made of glass, ceramics, plaster and sugar.  There was also one of ‘a traditional Chinese void deck funeral’.  Void decks are the ground floors of the Singaporean Housing Development Board (HDB) apartment blocks that rise all over the city-state.  These floors are normally untenanted and have communal spaces and, according to the museum, create ‘opportunities for residents to interact and bond over activities…’ and let them ‘…stage social functions, weddings, and of course funerals.’  Coincidentally, I’d lately read a short story entitled The Moral Support of Presence by the Singaporean writer Karen Kwek, about a woman having to organise and sit through a void-deck funeral for her mother whilst coping with grief.

 

 

Immediately past the modern museum was another area of Haw Par Villa eccentricity.  The dioramas here included a mass of rock whose multiple folds and clefts were adorned with severed heads, their faces ghostly pale, tongues protruding, mouths and eyes leaking blood.  An even more bizarre display was a rocky landscape where rats and rabbits were depicted at war with each other.  I don’t know what story or legend inspired this, but to my Western eyes it resembled the title creatures of James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) taking on the rabbits in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) – after those rabbits were infected with rabies. One rabbit chomping bloodily on a rat’s neck was an especially nasty detail.  Meanwhile, I felt sorry for a pair of rats wearing medic armbands who were trying to carry away an injured comrade on a stretcher.

 

 

Finally we came to a structure housing Haw Par Villa’s most celebrated attraction – a series of dioramas representing the Ten Courts of Hell of Chinese mythology and Buddhism.  Guarding its entrance were the demons Ox Head (a minotaur holding a trident) and Horse Face (an equine-headed being clutching a spiked club).  These guardians, an information panel explained, were “…part of the netherworld’s bureaucracy.  They form a network of attendants and jailers responsible for escorting souls through the ten courts…”

 

 

Inside, things started fairly innocuously with Court 1, where ‘King Qinguang conducts a preliminary trial for the deceased.’  The diorama here showed a recently-deceased soul cowering in front of King Qinguang while demon guards with superlong tongues and bird’s claws, or heads shaped like malformed gourds, looked on.  Having been assessed according to the deeds they did alive, with the help of such judging tools as ‘the Book of Good and Evil’, ‘the Scale of Good and Evil’ and ‘the Mirror of Souls’, the souls are divided up: “Virtuous souls… may cross the Golden or Silver Bridges to either attain the Tao, become immortals or deities, or be reborn as humans blessed with good lives…”, whereas “…sinners will have to go through further judgement and punishment in the rest of the 10 courts.”  Needless to say, it’s the ordeals of that latter group that gives this attraction its ghoulish zest.

 

 

Thereafter, we learnt what types of miscreants are dealt with in Courts 2-9 and what punishments are meted out to them.  In Court 2, for instance, people who’ve caused hurt, cheated or robbed get ‘thrown into a volcanic pit’, those who’ve indulged in corruption, stealing or robbery (again) get ‘thrown into blocks of ice’, and those sullied by prostitution get ‘thrown into a pool of blood’.  By Court 9, robbers, murderers, rapists and those responsible for ‘any other unlawful conduct’ have their ‘head and arms chopped off’ while anyone guilty of ‘neglecting the old and the young’ gets ‘crushed under boulders’.

 

And the dioramas showed the courts’ demonic bureaucrats carrying out those punishments in bloody, gory detail.  We saw hearts being extracted (as punishment for ungratefulness, being disrespectful towards one’s elders or ‘escaping from prison’); writhing bodies disappearing under giant grindstones (that’s what you get if you’re disobedient to your siblings or don’t show enough ‘filial piety’); folk being graphically impaled on the branches of ‘a tree of knives’ (your comeuppance for cheating, kidnapping or using bad language); and tongues being removed (the price you pay if you spread rumours or cause discord among your family members).

 

 

Fabulously, the chopping, severing, gouging, crushing, impaling, disembowelling, dismembering and decapitating going on in Haw Par Villa’s 10 Courts of Hell have encouraged generations of parents to bring their children here in order to instil moral values in them – or, putting it more bluntly, to terrify them into being good.  They’ve forced their offspring to look on these horrors while warning them, “See what happens if you’re naughty!”  Indeed, one of my Singaporean colleagues told me she was brought here when she was eight years old and suffered nightmares for the next fortnight.

 

I found myself wondering, meanwhile, what chastisements the 47th President of the USA would face when he passed away and entered the netherworld.  From what I knew of his misdeeds, I calculated he’d be thrown into a volcanic pit, into blocks of ice, into a tree of knives and into a wok of boiling oil; have his heart and tongue cut out and his head and arms chopped off; and be grilled alive on a red-hot copper pillar, sawn in half and pounded by a stone mallet.  Oh, and dismembered.

 

 

Lastly, in Court 10, we saw King Zhuanlun making a final judgement on the souls who’ve been through hell’s punishments, deciding “what forms they will take upon their rebirth.  This will depend on their karma – the good and bad deeds committed in life.”  In this diorama, there were two sinners on their hands and knees before the king, and already the animals they’d become in their next lives were taking form on their backs.  One was metamorphosising into a black goat, the other into a white rabbit.  Before being reincarnated as those creatures, they had one more port of call – ‘Meng Po’s Pavillion’, where their  memories of previous lives, and presumably of hell, are erased.

 

With all this glorious, phantasmagorical barminess on display, it doesn’t surprise me that the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, who worked in Singapore at various times between 2014 and 2020 and whose Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) is about ghosts, demons and the afterlife in late-1980s Colombo, cites Har Par Villa as one of Seven Moons’ major inspirations.

 

As I’ve said, there was a great deal more at Haw Par Villa we didn’t have time to see that day.  I can’t wait for our next visit to this splendidly baroque place.

 

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The man from another place has gone to another place

 

From wikipedia.org / © Georges Biard

 

For the past few days, I’ve felt like wearing a black armband while I sip my cups of coffee.  That’s because David Lynch, visionary maker of movies, short films, TV shows, web series, music videos and commercials, and artist, musician and actor to boot, passed away on January 15th.

 

In his cinematic output, Lynch was surely one of the most American of film directors. His work was suffused with Americana, both the cosy variety populated by porches, picket fences, lawns, sprinklers, diners, coffee, pie and kindly, neighbourly folk; and the flashier variety whereby bequiffed, leather-jacketed Elvis wannabes and peroxide blondes cruised along endless highways in big, finned sports cars.  This being Lynch, though, submerged beneath the Americana and frequently bubbling to its surface were things altogether weirder, darker, more surreal and twisted.  There was as much Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and William S. Burroughs in his work as there was Edward Hopper, Frank Capra and Ray Bradbury.  Meanwhile, though Lynch’s themes, motifs, imagery and stylistic touches felt unique – no wonder ‘Lynchian’ became a word – he wasn’t afraid to dress his visions in the clothes of familiar genres: horror, thriller, crime noir, science fiction and – something Lynch didn’t get enough credit for – comedy.

 

Anyway, here’s a guide to my favourite parts of the David Lynch film-and-TV universe.

 

Favourite Lynch cast

Lynch’s version of Dune (1984) was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics.  (Dung, I remember the New Musical Express calling it.)  Unfortunately, Dune’s old-school producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted the doorstop-sized and labyrinthine Frank Herbert novel on which it was based crammed into a regulation two-hour movie.  The condensed result didn’t make much sense.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

But Lynch never worked with a better troupe of actors.  It even outshone the cast that, four decades later, Denis Villeneuve assembled for his telling of the story in 2022 and 2024.  The Lynch Dune features Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and Dean Stockwell.  Oh, and Sting – more on him in a minute.

 

Favourite Lynch collaborator

That would be Jack Nance, who played Henry Spencer, lead character in Eraserhead (1977), the film that put Lynch on the map.  With his impassive features, bouffant, tight suit and peculiar gait, Nance contributes as much to the film’s atmosphere as the elements that today we’d regard as typically Lynchian – the mutant baby, the lady in the radiator, the flickering lights, the industrial noise.  Thereafter, he was in all Lynch’s film projects (apart from 1980’s The Elephant Man) up to 1997’s Lost Highway.  He most famously played the amiable, fishing-and-chess-obsessed Pete Martell in Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lynch and Mark Frost’s oddball, sometimes barmy, occasionally confounding TV murder whodunnit, which coincidentally was a soap opera, comedy, horror story and science-fiction drama too.

 

© AFI Center for Advanced Studies / Libra Films

 

Nance’s life was hardly a bed of roses.  His film work was intermittent and in the mid-1980s he worked as a hotel clerk to make ends meet.  His second wife Kelly Jean Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s niece) committed suicide.  And he had severe alcohol problems.  During the filming of Blue Velvet (1986), he was in such a state that Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper! – had to drive him to a rehabilitation centre.  In 1996, Nance died of a subdural hematoma, resulting from a ‘blunt force trauma’.  The previous day his face was bruised and he told friends that he’d been punched during a brawl he’d got into with some strangers in a doughnut shop.  Lynch said in tribute: “There’s not another actor I can think of who could fill his shoes.  I had roles in my head for future films that I was saving for Jack.  I cannot think of anyone else who could do it.”

 

Favourite Lynch funny bit

The other day at work I was discussing Lynch’s passing with a colleague.  I started enthusing about the sequence where Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe try to rob a feed store in Wild at Heart (1991) and how funny it was: “Willem Dafoe trips and falls on his shotgun and it goes off and you see the top of his head flying up in the air…  Meanwhile, there’s a wounded clerk who’s had his hand blown off at the wrist…  His colleague comforts him by saying modern surgery can reattach his hand… And then you see a dog running away outside with the hand in its mouth…”

 

At this point I realised my colleague wasn’t laughing with me, but was looking decidedly queasy.  He didn’t seem happy to be reminded of that sequence.  Which shows humour is subjective.  Still, I think the attempted robbery in Wild at Heart is Lynch’s funniest moment.

 

© PolyGram / Propaganda Films / Samuel Goldwyn Company

 

Favourite Lynch musical bit

Lynch was a musician, so music played a big role in his films – right from Eraserhead, when the lady in the radiator sings In Heaven.  In his final major work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the long-awaited third season of his celebrated TV show, music wasn’t so much an element as a fixture.  Each episode ended with a scene in the Roadhouse, the bar / concert venue in the town of Twin Peaks, where a musical act would be performing.  Given Twin Peaks’ small size and remote location, the Roadhouse attracted some unfeasibly big names: Julee Cruise, the Cactus Blossoms, Rebekah Del Rio with Moby on guitar, and one Edward Louis Severson – Eddie Vedder to you and me.

 

But in my opinion, the act that rounds off Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return is best of all.  It’s the fearsome electro-metal juggernaut Nine Inch Nails, whom the Roadhouse MC introduces as the Nine Inch Nails, no less.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

Favourite Lynch musician in an acting role

Lynch was also fond of putting singers and musicians in his casts.  Many remember Sting playing Feyd-Rautha Harknonnen, evil nephew of the equally-evil Baron Harkonnen, in Dune.  I’m not a fan of Sting’s acting but visually, with his spiky blonde hair, lean frame and daft codpiece, he was striking.  Indeed, when I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 and Austen Butler strolled into view as Feyd-Rautha, my first thought was: “Oh look, there’s what’s-his-name in the Sting role!”

 

© Twin Peaks Productions / New Line Cinema / CiBy 2000

 

However, my favourite Lynchian musical-cameo comes in the middle of Twin Peaks’ cinematic prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).  This is when David Bowie pops up as Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who’s been mysteriously missing for two years.  One morning, he suddenly steps out of a lift at FBI headquarters.  He proceeds to babble gibberish at FBI agents and Twin Peaks regulars Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenthal and Gordon Cole (Kyle MacLachlan, Miguel Ferrer and Lynch himself): “Who do you think this is, there…?  I found something.  And then there they were!”  Then he narrates a trippy dream montage involving dwarves, killers, masks, disembodied mouths and long-nosed spectres.  And then he vanishes into thin air.  “He’s gone!” squawks McLachlan.  “He was never here!” retorts Ferrer.

 

Bowie died early in 2016, before Twin Peaks: The Return began filming, which seemed to rule Philip Jeffries out of the third series’ storyline.  However, Lynch did include Jeffries.  Only now the disappearing agent is a giant teapot voiced by an actor called Nathan Frizell doing a Bowie impersonation.

 

David Bowie turned into a teapot.  Only David Lynch could do that.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

 

Favourite Lynch sad bit

Because of the nightmarish aspects of his works – it’s not the majority of their content, but it’s the stuff that lingers in viewers’ minds – Lynch isn’t readily associated with pathos.  Yet there are moments in his films that I find incredibly sad.  In The Elephant Man, for instance, it’s when the titular character John Merrick (John Hurt) escapes from the freak show owned by the evil Bytes (Freddie Jones), with the help of the show’s other inmates.  A dwarf, played by Star Wars’ Kenny Baker, remarks ruefully: “Luck, my friend, luck.  Who needs it more than we?”  Or in Twin Peaks: The Return when Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) says a final goodbye to the ailing Margaret Lanterman, aka the Log Lady.  This is made more poignant by knowing that Log-Lady actress Catherine Coulson died early in the third season’s production.

 

But my number-one Lynch sad moment is probably the ending of The Straight Story (1999), when Alvin (Richard Farnworth) finally makes it to the shack of his unwell brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton).  They’re two old codgers, one using walking sticks and the other a Zimmer frame, and clearly aren’t used to expressing their feelings.  But Lynch, with some basic dialogue (“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” “I did, Lyle.”), some silence and some anxious, exhausted looks and expressions from his actors, conveys a huge amount of emotion.

 

© Asymmetrical Productions / Film4 / Buena Vista Productions

 

Favourite Lynch scary bit

Obviously, there are lots of scary bits in Lynch’s oeuvre.  I imagine he’d have been miffed if you described his works as ‘horror’ films, but he more than earned his entry in any ‘Encyclopaedia of Horror’.

 

Particularly freaky to me were several things in Twin Peaks and its 2017 sequel.  The image of Killer Bob (Frank Silva) crawling over a sofa in the original series was terrifying.  Twin Peaks: The Return featured in its first episode a strange experiment involving a big glass box and a mass of surveillance equipment that eventually conjures up a phantom entity.  Unfortunately for the guy monitoring the experiment – who’s inopportunely chosen this moment to have it off with his girlfriend – the entity is equipped with kitchen-blender fingers and It proceeds to reduce their heads to bloody confetti.  Also horrific is a sequence in a later episode wherein Deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) tries to calm a hysterical woman at the wheel of a stalled car and a convulsing, vomiting zombie-like creature slowly rises out of the seat beside her.  This is never explained or referred to again – a perfect, scary Lynchian moment in other words.

 

And I remember sinking into my cinema seat, not wanting to look at the screen too much, during Lost Highway (1996), when Lynch’s camera starts prowling deep – deep – into the black recesses of the house belonging to Fred (Bill Pullman), the film’s initial hero.  That sequence had a real primordial chill to it.

 

But for my money, the scariest Lynch moment is the ‘Winkie’s Diner’ sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001).  A man sitting in the diner (Patrick Fischler) recounts two dreams he’s had, both of which take place there.  In each dream he’s been possessed by an inexplicable fear – and a man with a hideous face living behind the diner, whom he can see ‘through the wall’, seems to be responsible.  When a companion suggests he exorcises the memory of the dreams by checking behind the real diner, he reluctantly complies.  So they venture along the side alleyway, and…  What follows is one of the very few jump-scares in cinematic history that actually made me jump.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Spelling Entertainment

 

Favourite Lynch speech

Miguel Ferrer’s Albert Rosenthal, the arrogant FBI pathologist who assists Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, gets my vote here.  During the first season, Albert is very vocal about his low opinion of the town of Twin Peaks, which results in him getting punched out by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean).  During the second season, when Truman’s ready to punch him out again following a cutting jibe – “You might practise walking without dragging your knuckles on the floor” – Albert responds to the threat of violence with an impassioned speech explaining that he’s happy to be a knob-end if it helps him in the greater scheme of things, i.e. in the struggle against evil.  Oh, and he’s a committed pacifist too.

 

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet-man in the fight against violence.  I pride myself in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King.  My concerns are global.  I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation.  The foundation of such a method is love.  I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

 

No wonder Cooper tells the dumfounded Truman afterwards, “Albert’s path is a strange and difficult one.”

 

© De Laurentiis Entertainment Group

 

Favourite Lynch villain

There are a good many contenders for this too: Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, and Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen in Dune, who’s basically a levitating, leering sack of pus.  But at the end of the day, my ‘Favourite Lynch Villain’ award has to go to Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.

 

The scene where the black-clad, slick-haired Frank assaults Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) whilst acting out a deranged sexual fantasy, screaming things like “Baby wants to f**k! Baby wants to f**k blue velvet!” and slurping gas out of a canister is astonishing.  It’s made even more harrowing by the fact that the hapless Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is hiding nearby in a closet and has to witness it all.  This is the moment when the preppy, clean-cut Jeffrey discovers life is a lot more complicated, in a bad way, than he thought.  No wonder he laments: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”

 

So, thank you David Lynch.  Your oeuvre was sometimes comfortingly genial, sometimes perplexingly weird, sometimes shockingly dark – but it was always fascinating.  I raise a damn fine cup of coffee in your honour.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

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My 2024 writing round-up

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

 

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!”  No future historians will say, ever.  Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians.  Not any future, full-stop.

 

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation.  Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore.  We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state.  We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean.  It’s so much nicer.  For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them.  Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods.  Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

 

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing.  Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print.  This has been my best writing year to date.

 

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024.  Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call.  Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style.  However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last.  Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
  • In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street.  Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

  • April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
  • And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony.  This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels.  Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion.  Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme.  Nothing at all…
  • The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs.  First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true.  And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls.  The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press.  As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.”  The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill.  It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures.  Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books.  A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks.  The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland.  Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
  • The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me.  This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore.  As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore.  But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture.  The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
  • Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms.  However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024.  This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin.  It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland.  Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
  • The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024.  As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass.  The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022.  The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024.  On January 1st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine.  This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale.  And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024.  It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war.  This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
  • The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly.  This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100th short story I’ve had published.  The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues.  However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too.  Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

  • August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons.  Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar.  (What, I wonder, inspired this?  What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?)  Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine, now purchasable at Amazon here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024.  In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31st, the final day of the year.  It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone.  It’s accessible here.

 

And finally…

  • This is cheating.  Self-publishing doesn’t count.  But on September 18th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result.  A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published.  (Still, even if I say so myself, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.)  Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

 

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever.  I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however.  That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.

 

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world.  I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab.  And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk…  Oh well.  My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

Posted on

Steve Cashel gets malkied

 

© Close to the Bone Publishing

 

Malkied – a Scottish word meaning ‘murdered’ – is the title of a short story of mine that has just appeared today, New Year’s Eve 2024, on the website of the crime and mystery fiction publisher Close to the Bone.  It’s attributed to Steve Cashel, the pseudonym I use when I write Scottish stories, often with a crime-related bend.

 

I suspect Close to the Bone scheduled Malkied for publication today because it’s set in Edinburgh, and Edinburgh is famous for its Hogmanay Street Party held every December 31st to welcome in the New Year.  However, by a sad irony, this evening’s Edinburgh Street Party has just been cancelled on safety grounds.  The weather forecasters have warned that the city tonight is going to be dangerously stormy.  A few Edinburgh Hogmanay events are still going ahead, though.  These include the New Year’s Eve concert at the George Street Assembly Rooms featuring the excellent indie-rock band Idlewild, whom I’ve seen play live on no fewer than four occasions; and, also at the Assembly Rooms, the New Year ceilidh – among the ceilidh bands providing music for it is the brilliantly-named Jimi Shandrix Experience.

 

Malkied is inspired by a real-life incident that involved my brother…  And that’s all I’m saying, because I don’t want to give anything away about its plot.  It can be accessed here.

 

And meanwhile, a Happy New Year to you all.

Posted on

The wave

 

 

For the last decade I’ve lived in southern and southeastern Asia.  During that time, the shadow cast by the tsunami that struck 14 countries on December 26th, 2004, has never seemed far away.  Triggered by an earthquake off the coast of Aceh in Sumatra, northern Indonesia, the tsunami claimed approximately 228,000 lives.  The worst devastation occurred in Indonesia, Thailand and Sri Lanka, all three countries recording the tsunami as the worst-ever natural disaster in their histories.  Today, December 26th, 2024, is the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.

 

My partner and I lived in Sri Lanka from 2014 to 2022.  We weren’t there long before we began to notice memorials to, see lingering traces of and hear people talk about the tsunami, which slammed into the island’s eastern and southern coasts, claimed over 30,000 lives and displaced over 1,500,000 people from their homes.

 

For instance, in 2020, we stayed briefly in the southern town of Tangalle, where we hired a local tuk-tuk driver, going by the nickname of Dash, to take us to the tourist attractions in the neighbourhood.  Dash told us his house had been destroyed by the tsunami and now, 16 years later, he was still trying to build a replacement house further inland. Its ground floor was complete but something had delayed the construction of the first floor.

 

Also, my work required me to stay a few times in the same hotel in the northeastern town of Trincomalee.  There, I got to know the barman, who was a southerner.  His tsunami story was that he got trapped by rising waters whilst on a bus east of Galle, southern Sri Lanka’s biggest town.  Despite the water, the bus passengers decided it’d be safer to stay on board the vehicle.  He disagreed with them, climbed out through a window, started swimming and made it to safety.  From what he heard later, he believed the other passengers had died.  The disaster disabled the local mobile-phone network and he recalled afterwards having to beg coins off someone, then having to stand in a long, long queue at an old payphone so he could contact his family to let them know he’d survived.

 

However, what really brought the horror of the tsunami home to us happened while we were having a weekend break in the seaside town of Hikkaduwa in southeastern Sri Lanka.  We heard about the village of Peraliya, a few miles up the coast.  The statistics of the tsunami’s carnage were so tragically overwhelming that they hid a more particular fact – that because of it, at Peraliya, Sri Lanka also experienced the world’s worst rail disaster.

 

I’ll let Wikipedia relate the details: “The 2004 Sri Lanka tsunami rail disaster is the largest single rail disaster in world history by death toll…  Train #50 was a regular train operating between the cities of Colombo and Matara…  On Sunday, 26 December 2004, during the Buddhist full moon holiday and the Christmas holiday weekend, it left Colombo’s Fort Station shortly after 6.50 AM with over 1,500 paid passengers and an unknown number of unpaid passengers with travel passes (called Seasons) and government travel passes…

 

“At 9.30 AM, in the village of Peraliya, near Telwatta, the beach saw the first of the gigantic waves thrown up by the earthquake.  The train came to a halt as water surged around it.  Hundreds of locals, believing the train to be secure on the rails, climbed on top of the cars to avoid being swept away.  Others stood behind the train, hoping it would shield them from the force of the water…

 

“Ten minutes later, a huge wave picked the train up and smashed it against the trees and houses which lined the track, crushing those seeking shelter behind it.  The eight carriages were so packed with people that the doors could not be opened while they filled with water, drowning almost everyone inside as the water washed over the wreckage several more times.  The passengers on top of the train were thrown clear of the uprooted carriages, and most drowned or were crushed by debris…

 

“…the Sri Lankan authorities had no idea where the train was for several hours, until it was spotted by an army helicopter around 4.00 PM.  The local emergency services were destroyed, and it was a long time before help arrived…  Some families descended on the area determined to find their relatives themselves.  According to the Sri Lankan authorities, only about 150 people on the train survived.  The estimated death toll was at least 1,700 people, and probably over 2,000, although only approximately 900 bodies were recovered, as many were swept out to sea or taken away by relatives.  The town of Peraliya was also destroyed, losing hundreds of citizens and all but ten buildings to the waves.  More than 200 of the bodies retrieved were not identified or claimed, and were buried three days later in a Buddhist ceremony near the torn railway line.”

 

 

Today, when you enter Peraliya along the coastal road from the south, you’ll see a monument to the victims called Tsunami Honganji Viharaya  on the right-hand, inland side.  It consists of an 18.5-metre-high Buddha statue rising from an islet in a rectangular pond, built on the spot where the tragedy occurred.  Although the statue was erected with donations from Japan, it’s actually a reproduction of one of the Bhamian statues in Afghanistan that were dynamited and destroyed by those ignorant bigots in the Taliban in 2001.

 

When we visited the monument, there was – and perhaps still is – a small building by the entrance with the words TEMPLE OFFICE painted on its side.  Inside, we found a gallery of photographs taken in the tsunami’s immediate aftermath.  Some of them recorded such carnage they were difficult to look at.  Among the less graphic photographs, one showed the local rail-tracks after they’d been twisted into steel squiggles by the strength of the water.

 

 

A little further, on the road’s left-hand, seaward side, there’s a non-religious memorial to the victims, consisting of a plaque, a column and a scene carved onto a wall of grey and rust-orange stone representing the destruction immediately after train and village had been hit.  It shows piles of bodies, masonry and smashed palm trees, sections of wrenched-up and misshapen rail track, and upended train carriages, some with corpses hanging from their windows.  It’s startlingly candid – indeed, it probably shocks some Westerners, accustomed to such memorials in their own cultures avoiding explicit details and being discretely abstract, so as not to upset traumatised survivors and grieving relatives.

 

The 2004 tragedy at Peraliya has two poignant footnotes.  The locomotive that’d been pulling the carriages, and two of the carriages themselves, were eventually retrieved from the disaster scene, rebuilt and repaired and now, every year on December 26th, they return to Peraliya to take part in a religious ceremony held in remembrance of those who lost their lives.  Secondly, one of the small number of survivors was a train guard called W. Karunatilaka.  His sense of duty was such that following the disaster he continued to work on the Colombo-to-Galle train service.  He was still serving on that coastal route in the mid-2010s.

 

A much more personal record of what the tsunami did in Sri Lanka that day is provided by Sonali Deraniyagala’s memoir Wave (2013).  This records how she lost her husband, two sons and parents when the tsunami swept into Yala National Park on the south coast and how she dealt with – often couldn’t deal with – the emotional and psychological devastation that followed.  Indeed, the ‘wave’ of the book’s title may refer to the massive grief she felt during the ensuing years as much as to the tsunami itself.  I found the book a tough read indeed.  However, it’s worth noting William Dalrymple’s appraisal of Wave when he reviewed it for the Guardian.  It was “…possibly the most moving book I have ever read about grief, but it is also a very, very fine book about love.  For grief is the black hole that is left in our lives when we lose someone irreplaceable…”

 

I only realised a few days ago that the 20th anniversary of the tsunami was coming up.  By a coincidence, my partner and I spent a pre-Christmas holiday in Khao Lak, the part of Thailand that suffered most in 2004.  The area’s death toll was officially 4000, though unofficial estimates put the figure higher.  We learned that a tsunami museum had opened in 2022 in the nearby village of Ban Nam Khem and decided to visit it.

 

 

Ban Nam Khem Tsunami Museum manages to be informative about 2004’s events, and convey their dreadful emotional impact, without wallowing in the death and horror.  For instance, there’s a display of photographs from the disaster’s aftermath, showing scenes of mangled, waterlogged chaos – boats, vehicles, trees, parts of wrecked buildings dumped on top of each other – but the more upsetting images have been pixellated out.  One terrifying photo shows the tsunami about to strike a bay, the sea swollen but still weirdly blue, clear and serene-looking, whereas the palm trees on shore are silhouetted against a crashing white wall of foam.  On the premises outside the museum-building, the sense of the tsunami’s gargantuan power is reinforced by the presence of two salvaged trawlers.  One was smashed a kilometre inland and deposited in the village’s centre, the other ended up with its prow stuck in the roof of a house.

 

The museum also has an auditorium where visitors can view a film about a Western tsunami survivor, now an adult, but a kid when he holidayed there with his family in 2004, returning to Ban Nam Khem to search for the fisherman who saved him from the post-tsunami floods.  It’s obviously highly fictionalised, but at least it tries to show how something positive can develop out of the very worst of situations.  The film also serves an educational purpose, warning local children not to be complacent and to take the area’s regular, tsunami-emergency drills seriously.

 

 

For me, the museum’s biggest impact comes from its displays of objects salvaged after the tsunami.  Again, there are a few big things giving a sense of the huge, brutal force unleashed that day, such as the shattered prow of a boat or a pulverised car that looks like it’s been in a hydraulic compactor.  But the small, everyday artefacts have the greatest poignancy: domestic ones (toys, handbags, purses, crockery, chairs, parasols, footballs, shoes), nautical (snorkelling flippers, broken fishing floats, pieces of netting, crab and lobster traps) and cultural (a spirit house, a Buddha’s head, urns, a Christmas tree).  The fact that, 20 years on, some items – a portable CD-playing stereo, a manual typewriter, a box radio, a box camera, an adding machine from a shop – have an antiquated look gives the displays the feel of a time capsule.  Yet this time capsule is from the moments before disaster struck and countless lives were ended or turned upside-down.

 

 

It’s a reminder that, though our brains are hardwired not to think such about things, our safety and security depend upon the whims of nature.  And if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, we can be suddenly engulfed in tragedy and chaos on a colossal scale – as happened to hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people in this region of the world two decades ago today.