The essay. A time honored tradition and a matter of great gravity. We—or at least many of us, including myself—look to the essays of writers we admire from years gone by in the hopes that they will shed some light onto the present, lend some perspective to the chaos of the times we live in, maybe even to help make sense of the chaos of our own lives. In some instances, I’ve been affected much more by the essays of authors remembered primarily for their fiction than for their ruminations on society and the worlds they lived in. For me, Jonathan Swift is a good case in point.

In our age though, I’m uncertain what constitutes an essay. What we hope are our profundities are governed largely by the social networks which we use to disseminate them, and many of them are governed by length. The length is dictated by both limitations of the network itself, and by human psychology as it relates to the reader and the internet.

Twitter, with a 400-character limit, forces the most succinct expression of thought that I know of. This site, International Crime Authors Reality Check, represents the other extreme, as I have no specific character or word limit. However, the habits of the typical reader of an essay on the internet dictates that there must be. I’m fairly comfortable writing in the 1200-1500 word range to express myself. Even that though, doesn’t allow room for divergence or the making of finer points, for the modification of opinions under the vagaries of various circumstances. For that, I like 5,000-10,000 words to work with.

I also write reviews, and they also typically fall in that 1200-1500 word range. I was recently asked to try to keep it down to about 800 words, as that’s all most internet readers are willing to absorb. I admit, there is something to be said for this. I think it was Pascal who wrote in a correspondence, “I’m sorry to have written you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write a short one.” But also with this, we find the difference between the blog and the essay. Most readers skim internet texts, tend to read down the middle and miss the finer points of a text.

So

If

I

Really

Want

Your

Attention,

I

Should

Format

The

Text

Like

this:

A few years back, I made much of my living through commercial writing. I charged a base rate of 50€ an hour, a standard fee here in Finland. A colleague, who wrote commercial text for the internet, charged 90€ an hour—about $140—for her time, because writing well for internet publication requires a great deal of specialized expertise.

The result of the limitations of the blog replacing the unfettered essay is a loss of nuance and subtly, the replacement of wry humor and subtext with a series of declarative sentences that don’t, and often can’t, convey the precise meaning the author intended. We all lose here. I once wrote with the attitude that the reader is more intelligent than me by at least 10 IQ points, considers a text carefully, and ascertains for his or her self why I had chosen a particular turn of phrase, what I had left unsaid and why.

I do this less and less as time goes by. Skimming readers get little out of a good article, and in my experience, often take exception to opinions never intended. I’ve learned this from feedback received after writing many dozens of blogs (or were they essays?). Post-publication, I’ve found for myself that it’s often easier to be self-deprecating than to enter into convoluted discussions based on initial misunderstandings, and just say, “Thank you for your response. Your point is appreciated and well-taken.” Sometimes it’s true. As the author of a text, misunderstanding or not, I take responsibility for these misinterpretations, because they result from my failure to make the best use of the tools I’m given to work with. I’ve failed to keep up with the ever-changing world of electronic communication.

I notice though, that this style of reading has carried over into the absorption of fictional texts. Part of this is likely due to the advent of the e-reader. It’s a little computer, so people often treat it like one, rather than with the respect they pay to a book printed on paper. Where once, I would leave a story detail open, thinking it obvious, I now try to close nearly every story question to ensure that nothing is overlooked.

With this essay (or is it an 800 word blog?), my intention isn’t to criticize anyone or anything. I’m only pointing out some of the effects, for good or ill, that the technologies of our age have wrought upon us. As with most changes, the internet has impacted our lives in both positive and negative ways. In this instance, basically a limiting of thinkers to fully express their reflections, I feel that although there is little or nothing to be done about it, we’ve all come out losers.

James Thompson

Helsinki, Finland

20.02.2012

James Thompson is an established author in Finland. His novel, Snow Angels, the first in the Inspector Vaara series, was released in the U.S. by Putnam and marked his entrance into the international crime fiction scene. Booklist named it one of the ten best debut crime novels of 2010, and it was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Strand Critics awards. His second Vaara novel, Lucifer’s Tears, released in March, 2011, earned starred reviews from all quarters, and was named one the best novels of the year by Kirkus. The third in the series, Helsinki White, will be released on March 15.

Call me an old Luddite, a woman more comfortable with absinthe and arsenic than with iPhones and cyber crime – call me Carmen Miranda if you like, I really don’t care. But… Facebook. I know I’ve wanged on about this before but I seem to have been followed around by it, or rather the outfall from it, for the last month. In court, there it was, on the TV, ‘you said this on your Facebook’, Facebook being talked about on the radio, in the newspapers, I’m amazed I haven’t had any dreams about the damn thing! Now in Turkey there’s been a crime of violence. A 36 year old man stabbed by a 25 year old man over comments made by him on Facebook. Apparently – shock, horror – expletives were involved!

Now I know that I am becoming an endangered species in this regard but when it comes to swearing I think it’s big, clever and sometimes extremely creative. My son actually knows a chap who is a ‘swearing consultant’ (for TV and film) and a jolly intelligent, fun and inventive guy he is. He’s also very caring and sensitive. Like me he believes that a good old swear up is good for the stress levels – it certainly makes me feel better. By ‘swear up’ I don’t mean swearing ‘at’ anyone, just letting off steam at the ether using favourite combinations of dirty (and other) naughty words.

But then maybe it’s all that bit more offensive when it’s written down on Facebook. It certainly may be actionable according to laws governing libel. But what’s the point? From what I can gather (as a non-Facebook person) most of this ‘offensiveness’ operates at a very low level. Correct me if I’m wrong but I think we may well be in the realms of ‘Danielle down the chip shop says you’re a slag’ or ‘My girlfriend doesn’t fancy you, she never has, in fact she says you’ve got a face like a gibbon’s bum. Lol.’

Now I admit that the last example was probably a tad sophisticated but you get the gist. You also, I hope, like me, are inclined to think, ‘well who gives a shit.’ With Syria in danger of dissolving into civil war, the spectre of some sort of conflict taking place either in or because of Iran’s nuclear programme as well as the global financial situation, can I bring myself to give a toss what Danielle down the chip shop thinks? Further can I take the time to go out and get a knife and stab someone who said some dodgy things about me or used the word ‘fuck’ in some Facebook inanity?

No I can’t and nor should anyone else. A friend of mine who has, over the years, had quite a bit of fun using ‘social networking’ said to me the other day, ‘I don’t think I can cope with this any more.’ And that’s sad.

Social networking should be fun. It should be an easygoing and casual leisure activity that allows you to keep in contact with old friends and also make some new ones. It shouldn’t be used as a weapon and it most definitely should not be used to bully, harass, stalk or drive people to suicide. When I was at school there were always the girls who bullied others and sneered in groups on street corners. But when you got home you got away from them. Now that isn’t so easy.

Of course I don’t know what to do about this problem – luckily for me I’m not a politician or an IT specialist. But what I do know is that when people start stabbing each other because of sleights and swear words, something needs to be done even if that thing is only telling those involved to get a bloody grip.

Baldur Gudlaugsson is starting a prison term. A judge handed down a two-year sentence to be served, not suspended, on the former civil servant convicted of some fairly blatant insider trading. Prison in Iceland is fairly comfortable, compared to say, a prison in South America or the Far East. He’ll probably have a room to himself, his own TV, computer (no internet), books, and a good few luxuries brought in from outside.

He’ll be joining the rest of Iceland’s growing prison population and will make an odd figure among the usual villains at Litla-Hraun prison where a high proportion are there for drugs-related offences, before he’ll undoubtedly be transferred to a more open establishment.

What is interesting about Baldur Gudlaugsson’s conviction is that he is first of those sentenced following Iceland’s post-Crash turmoil, as well as being a pillar of the establishment and a lifelong Independence Party man of the kind parachuted into top positions to ensure that everything was running along party lines. It was as a senior Ministry of Finance official that he attended meetings in London that demonstrated just how shaky the ground was under Landsbanki – remember IceSave, anyone?

Using the information he was party to, that wasn’t available to the general public, he hastily sold his holding in the bank shortly before its collapse and doubtless few people in his own circle thought any less of him for having done so.

This is corruption, Icelandic style. It’s the way business has been done for years, behind closed doors, with the party faithful rewarded for toeing the line and keeping things ticking over. I hasten to add, this isn’t something that only the Independence Party and its people have been guilty of, but the IP has long been the largest power in the land with a strong hold on politics and business in Reykjavík. The Progressive Party, and to an extent the other political camps, have all been involved in patting people’s backs and giving them a helping hand in antics that range from a job for m’boy to a bank loan that wouldn’t otherwise be available, to giving the right people a bank of their own to play with.

Icelanders grumble about it, but have generally grudgingly accepted that this is the way things are. This is the downside of the delightfully compact society in which everyone knows someone who knows someone or has a cousin who knows just the right person. 300,000 people is about right for a sizable market town anywhere in Europe and Reykjavík is one of the smallest capital cities in the world. This tiny society allows levels of contact that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. If you’ve a gripe with a government department, ring them up and if you’re patient and forceful enough, or simply persuasive – or properly connected – there’s every chance the Minister will take your call. If that doesn’t work, the Minister’s home phone number may well be in the single volume of phone book that serves the entire country, and failing that, he or she will more than likely be happy to be your friend on Facebook.

The dark side of the same coin is that in such a small society, conflicts of interest aren’t just rife, they’re virtually unavoidable.

For an outsider, it’s very difficult to pick up the subcurrents of connection that run through society. Family ties are stronger than they tend to be in other, more dispersed societies, and it’s also the case that virtually everyone is related to everyone else if you dig back half a dozen generations. The fact that a purchasing officer somewhere may be giving a contract to a supplier who is his cousin is nothing unusual and the assumption is that blood is thicker than water, so what do you expect? That’s the way it goes. People grumble and take it on the chin.

Almost any aspect of society and business can be a minefield of interconnections, made more difficult by these connections being ingrained and accepted in a way that would not be possible in many countries. It’s hard work if you want to do business in Iceland, but for a crime writer, it’s all thoroughly fertile territory.

So far Baldur Gudlaugsson is the first to be sent to prison as part of the investigations being carried out by the Office of the Special Prosecutor appointed to look into the bizarrely complex ramifications of the 2008 Crash. It’s yet to be seen if he’ll be the only one. But the Special Prosecutor has now also levelled charges against four senior former Kaupthing banking executives with offences relating to market manipulation. The bones of the story are that a Qatari sheik bought a 5% holding in Kaupthing – but it since emerged that he wasn’t risking his own cash at all. It appears that the bank had lent him the money to buy shares in the bank that had lent him the money to start with in a mad financial merry-go-round.

It’s the tip of the iceberg and a significantly more complex case than that of Baldur Gudlaugsson’s insider trading. A great many Icelanders are watching with interest to see how this one goes, as while Baldur Gudlaugsson was a government mandarin who abused his position and was caught, he wasn’t one of the clique of businessmen who bankrupted the country.

The case of the Kaupthing four, all wealthy men with permanent homes overseas, strikes much closer to the heart of the group who really did drive the country’s financial system over the brink. It’s all fertile ground, but the trouble is that much of it is so far-fetched that it goes beyond anything you could get away with in fiction.

Barney Rosset died in New York City on Tuesday 21 February 2012. I received an email from Barney’s son, Peter, this morning. A couple of days ago I sent Astrid and Barney an email. I told them that I loved them. Which I do. But I didn’t get a real chance to say goodbye. That is one of those regrets that stays with a person. This is my way of saying goodbye, Barney.

I lost someone who was a mentor, a father figure, and a friend. Our friendship started around the time my dad had died in the early 1990s. Barney’s death came within ten days of the 20^th anniversary of my dad’s death. In many ways, Barney became my substitute father. Barney came to Bangkok to see me and I traveled to New York to see him and his wife, Astrid.

One year Barney brought along his son Peter to Bangkok.

We had a family dinner at Pan Pan on Soi 33 Sukhumvit and Peter and Barney swapped stories about personalities inside left-wing movements in Latin America and Cuba. On another trip he brought his daughter Chantal and again we had dinner, same restaurant, same menu. Barney ordered the pasta. He didn’t eat anything that night. I rarely saw him eat anything in Bangkok or New York in all of the years that I knew him. He always took the (it is hard to call them leftovers) home for the next day. Astrid reported that he ate the meal the next day.

Barney loved Bangkok and Pattaya. He’d always find a place with a good pool table. He also played tennis. I have the video footage.

You can read his obit in the New York Times for all of the public accomplishments and they were many covering a long span of time. If you love reading novels, then light a candle in memory of Barney because without the determination, resources and bull-headed sense that you should be able to choose what you want to read, what you’d have to read would be much poorer, filled with lies and distortions.

That’s Barney’s legacy for me. Freedom of expression matters. Criminalization expression is the way authorities imprison and murder thoughts and ideas they don’t like. In Barney’s world, thought and ideas and their expression should always be free from oppression. He believed that to the core of his soul. While a lot of people believe in freedom, very few would have sacrificed their wealth in its service. In a world that Barney leaves behind a man’s worth is assessed by the amount of wealth he accumulated. On that measurement, Barney’s passing wouldn’t have been noticed. The fact the New York Times devoted three pages to Barney is a testament that there are other measures beyond wealth and money.  Barney will long be remembered after the super rich are dust and forgotten. No one who cares about literature can ignore the debt owed to this one man.

I have so many Barney stories. I flew to New York in 2008 and was at his personal table when the National Book Award gave him a special award in recognition of his importance to literature. Barney had asked me to read his speech in advance. I made a couple of suggestions. Barney used one or two of them. Two years, Barney and Astrid, along with Galen Williams and Harvey Shapiro, the bard of New York, dined at the Harvard Club in Manhattan. There was a band that night. Barney and Astrid danced and danced. The band wanted to go home. Barney didn’t. I saw him eat an entire bowl of ice cream that night. Galen is my witness. Barney was 87 the night he forced the Harvard Club to pay the band overtime because it was a night to dance.

I spent countless hours in his loft apartment on the Lower East Side. Going through the old photographs, the memories, and his plans. He held a big party for my wife and me five or six years ago and invited editors, agents, and reviewers. That was Barney, the father figure, always trying to find a way to get someone in New York interested in my work. When finally Grove/Atlantic contracted to bring out four of the Calvino novels, he was the first to congratulate me.

Barney was a natural storyteller. Being half Jewish, and half Irish he inherited the story telling genes from both of his parents. I have hours of Barney on video telling stories. I want to go back and watch Barney again, and again, weaving tales of the great names in publishing in Paris, Havana, and London.

He told me over the years many stories about Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett. One of Barney’s Henry Miller stories is included in a story I wrote called “The Star of Love” and is part of a book called Chairs. I wrote the occasional essay and short story for Evergreen Review. For many years I was the Review’s Correspondent from Thailand. We were always hatching plans for Barney and Astrid to return to Thailand for one more round of pool.

There is one Barney story that comes to mind on this very sad day. When he was a child of 8 or 9, Barney set out in the company of his parents for what in those days would have been a journey of high adventure. They left Chicago and traveled to California where they board a ship that took them to Hawaii. Barney, the boy, had the full run of the ship, exploring the cabins, engine room, captain’s quarters and the decks. It was his first time at sea. It was his first real journey. In World War II, Barney was a young officer in the army and he was assigned to a film crew in China. He filmed and photographed the war from the area in Yunnan Province, around Kunming . At Barney’s loft, I’ve spent hours over the years studying the photographs of war in China. Together we look silently at the dead soldiers on dirt paths, their sandals still on their feet. I listened to his stories of traveling through the bombed out villages.

After the war ended, Barney found himself on a ship sailing home. He was a young man, but a war veteran. He’d seen war up close and photographed the brutality that war brings. The ship was packed with other veterans who were also returning home. Not long into the voyage, Barney discovered the name of the ship. He found a place where some child had written under a hand railing: BR. It was the same ship that Barney had taken as a kid. The ship was delivering him back home for a second time.

Somewhere out in that great beyond, Barney’s back on that ship, sailing the open seas, carving his initials into the hand railing. And for those of us who love literature, take a moment to remember that the boy who set out on that journey is the man who returned so that truth could be spoken and those in power had no force to sink the ship that Barney captained.

*(Readers often write to ask me how I came to be an author. Over the coming
weeks, I shall be writing a series of autobiographical vignettes which
shall, I believe, demonstrate the mélange of neuroses, ambition, talent,
chance, mischance, place, and alcohol that goes toward the creation of a
writer. This one, at least. The tales may be instructive or proscriptive.)*

Writers ought not to think identically with most of the people around them.
It usually comes quite easily to me. For example, when Ayatollah Khomeini
announced his fatwa on Salman Rushdie, I thought: “Serves you right for
looking down your nose at me, you smug sod.”

Ordinarily I’d have very little in common with the unlamented (by me,
anyway) Ayatollah. However, in this case, he happened to catch me at the
right time. The previous night I had experienced Rushdie’s disdain. I
wouldn’t blame Salman, because I was drunk at the time and a bit rude.
Except that I was at an age when I blamed other people for everything. So,
yes, I blamed him.

It was February 1989 and I was in my first reporting job at United Press
International, a once-mighty newswire which now has considerably less
influence than even a dead Khomeini. I had written a few stories about the
growing controversy around Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses.” British
Muslims had burned the book for its supposedly blasphemous portrayal of
Muhammad. The novel was up for the Whitbread Book Award, one of Britain’s
premier prizes. My bureau chief suggested I attend the awards dinner.

Having written a story in which Rushdie won (as everyone expected) and left
it at the newsdesk, I went off to the Barbican for the dinner. I needed
only to gather a couple of quotes from Rushdie when he won, so that I might
phone them in and have an editor plug them into my story. So I decided I
was free to otherwise enjoy the evening.

Imagine a 22-year-old youth from a less than sumptuously endowed background
who finds himself placed at a press-table laden with better food than his
mother cooks for him and free red wine. He is seated between two lovely and
solicitous public relations ladies who laugh at his jokes, wear low-cut
evening dresses, and who, he imagines, appear to find him sexually
irresistible. What would you have done?

Well, I acted unprofessionally. I became quite drunk and raucous. This
failed to impress the BBC correspondent across the table, or the other
bored hacks waiting to file their “Rushdie triumphs in face of controversy”
stories.

Late in the evening when the judges arose to pronounce the winner, I was
giggling into the neck of one of the patient p.r. girls.

“And the winner is…”

I nuzzled. She giggled. Patiently.

“…Paul Sayer, for ‘The Comforts of Madness.’”

“Oh, fuck!” The applause was rapturous, so people more than two tables away
probably didn’t hear me curse.

Paul Sayer spoke engagingly of his joy at winning. At least I gather he
did. I was occupied, telling the p.r. ladies I couldn’t believe “fucking
Rushdie didn’t fucking win.” As Sayer left the podium, I leaned across to
the BBC man and said, “What did that fucker say?” He recited a quick quote
for me.

I stumbled down the stairs to the press room. (Why would you serve
journalists free wine and then put the press room down two flights of
stairs?) I phoned my bureau chief. “Karin, fucking Rushdie didn’t fucking
win. Fuck it.” She inquired, with considerable amusement in her voice, if I
had obtained a quote from “fucking Rushdie” or from the judges.

I labored up the stairs to the hall and barreled to the front tables, where
I ignored the ebullient Paul Sayer and headed for Rushdie. He lingered
beside his table, standing with his second wife, an author whose work I had
not then read, Marianne Wiggins. (I still haven’t read it.)

Rushdie was otherwise alone. I assume all the sober or less drunk hacks had
by now obtained their quotes and were filing their stories. As I reached
Rushdie, I noted that I appeared to be unable to stand straight. Or to talk.

I managed to ask him, “Are you happy about the fuss over your book, because
it’ll help sales?” (I was 22. If you weren’t crass at 22, then I pity you.)

Rushdie looked at me with amused contempt –– amused, because he saw that he
would be afforded an opportunity for a bon mot. I didn’t manage to write
down the bon mot and I don’t remember what it was. It amounted to: “I’d
prefer to have lower sales and not to have the controversy.” He turned to
his wife and gave her a little hiccup of smug amusement which went like
this: “Hah-hnh.” I remember that. Word for word.

“Hah-hnh-hnh,” said Marianne Wiggins. (From what I know of her novels, she
sometimes writes like that, too.)

In that moment I conceived a great hatred of Rushdie. An unwarranted
hatred, much like my mother’s aversion to mustachioed men. But a hatred
nonetheless.

I shuffled to the next table. Two of the judges stood there. I approached
them. They were both Conservative cabinet members. Douglas Hurd was Foreign
Secretary (He later became Lord Westwall, which sounds to me like a frozen
foods conglomerate). Kenneth Baker was Education Minister (He’s now Baron
Baker of Dorking, which is surely a title made up by unimaginative
satirists). Both appeared to be extremely tall. Or I was getting closer to
the ground as Rushdie’s “hah-hnh” rang in my ears.

“Why’d you vote for Rushdie to win?” I slurred.

The two ministers shared a look they must have picked up from studying Mrs.
Thatcher in a bad mood. “Actually I rather preferred the Tolstoy book,”
said Hurd. (A.N. Wilson’s excellent biography of Tolstoy was also
shortlisted for the prize.)

I tripped to the press room. By the time I had managed to decipher my
meager notes and dictate them to the newsdesk, the Underground had stopped
running. I spent the night on a bench outside the Barbican tube station.
Without a coat. My shirt sweaty from the alcohol and the humiliation. In
London. In February.

The next day, as I sat at the newsdesk, a story came through about
Khomeini’s fatwa. Grimacing through my hangover at the ticking newswire, I
pondered the notion of karma, developed in Rushdie’s ancestral land. It had
struck. “Don’t mess with me,” I thought. “Hah-hnh.”

–
The wait for a successor to *Amadeus* is over.
*MOZART’S LAST ARIA *by Matt Rees
www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com/

I went to Central America as a freelance journalist in August 1982. One of the moments that triggered that decision was reading a Washington Post article in which a reporter recounted crossing the Mexican border on foot, entering a nearby Guatemalan village and finding dozens and dozens of dead Mayan Indians –men, women and children. They had been slaughtered by members of the Guatemalan Army who at the time were trying to eradicate a twenty-year old guerrilla insurgency. Before the Guatemalan civil war was over some 200,000 people would be killed. A United Nations study later calculated that 93 percent of those people were killed by government forces, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

By the time I arrived in Central America the man who had taken over the country and that slaughter was dictator General Efrain Rios Montt. Rios Montt had very publically declared that his government would follow a “scorched earth” policy against guerrillas. The insurgency had based itself in the Mayan highlands and the earth that ended up being scorched was Mayan villages. Many were wiped off the map. In effect, Rios Montt followed the same strategy employed by the Salvadoran Army next door in El Salvador. There they employed a different description of the strategy. The Salvador military referred to guerrillas as “fish” and said in order to kill the fish you had to dry up the ocean those fish swam in. In other words, you killed the civilian population that might help conceal and nourish the fighters. The notorious massacre at the Salvadoran village of Mozote in December of 1981, where hundreds of men, women and children died, was an example of the Salvadoran military in action.

But back to Guatemala. I remember going there in the mid-1980s. I had been reporting for three years from Central America at that point, first from Honduras and then Nicaragua, with assignments in El Salvador as well. I hadn’t been asked to report from Guatemala, but I wanted to see it. Despite the mayhem there, my reporter friends would often talk about just how beautiful the Guatemalan mountains were. They said it was the most beautiful of the Central American nations. I went with my girlfriend and we spent several days, visiting those mountains, at least the parts where the war was not currently being fought. And, yes, the landscape was gorgeous –deep, deep green with higher peaks and deeper valleys than I had seen in Nicaragua or Honduras. It was especially beautiful when you saw a group of Guatemalan women dressed in their traditional woven huipil blouses – often in bright reds with matching skirts—passing down a trail with those mountains as a backdrop. Those ladies looked like flocks of gorgeous tropical birds –macaws, quetzales–against the majestic mountain backdrop. The fact that so many of them were dying at the hands of the Army was a crime against nature, beauty and humanity.

At the very time I was in Guatemala, a young Guatemalan indigenous woman named Rigoberta Menchu had recently published an autobiography and was starting to become known as a fighter for the rights of indigenous people in her country. She eventually won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize and did as much as anyone to divulge the crimes against her people.

But from that visit to Guatemala I also remember vividly a moment far from nature, far from indigenous women in the gift shop of an upscale hotel in Guatemala City. I and my girlfriend, who was a photographer, entered into conversation with the owner, a woman descended from Spaniards, light skinned, a member of the Guatemalan elite. When she heard that we were visiting journalists she decided she had to set us straight on what was happening in her country. She told us that accounts of massacres were all fiction and that the guerrilla insurgency had it all wrong. That the Mayan Indians didn’t want schools, didn’t want health clinics, didn’t want a higher standard of living. Yes, there was dire poverty and disease, but “They don’t want anything different. That’s the way they are.” The whole history of the Mayans having been forced into the most remote, inhospitable regions of the country by the Spanish Conquest had been lost on her. The fact that this educated woman could say that to us demonstrated just what Guatemalans of a certain class were saying to each other and how they could accept and justify the slaughter being perpetrated by their government.

I bring this all up now because Rios Montt has finally been brought before Guatemalan courts on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. He is formally charged with 266 separate incidents of official mayhem that resulted in 1,771 deaths, 1,400 human rights violations and the displacement of 29,000 indigenous Guatemalans. That is a drop in the bucket when compared to the crimes committed, but enough to bring him to justice and give a sense of the scope of the tragedy. It is ironic and contradictory that this is happening at the same time that Guatemala just recently elected a new president, a former military officer, Otto Perez Molina, who served under Rios Montt.  The fact that Guatemala has of late been besieged by big time drug cartels made his military background attractive. Along the way, Perez Molina has denied any massacres or genocide occurred in the civil war. In that regard, he is a throwback to that lady who owned the gift shop.

But Rios Montt, 85, is still in the dock. The judge in the case is a woman, Judge Carol Patricia Flores Blanco, and she has been very aggressive in insisting that he stand trial for genocide. I don’t know her ethnic background, but she appears to be Guatemalan woman more in the spirit of Rigoberta Menchu than the gift shop owner. In that sense, the people of Guatemala still seem to be wrestling over who writes their history, still wrestling over the country’s soul.

Last week and the week before, I was on jury service. That was the big secret I couldn’t tell anyone about. In this country jury service is viewed as both an obligation and a privilege. It is also looked upon as a burden and that, I must admit, it was.

In order to qualify for jury service in the UK you have to be a person with no criminal record who is over 18 and under 70. Apart from that, anyone is fair game and jurors are chosen randomly to attend their local Crown Court for at least a two week period.

Everyone worries about what they will do if they are selected to be on a jury panel but the reality is that a lot of cases don’t actually come to trial at all. Sometimes the defendant changes his or her plea to guilty before the trial and sometimes the case is dropped by the Crown (prosecution). There is a lot of waiting about and so a good book and/or lively company are essential. I was very fortunate in that my fellow jurors were lively, interesting and as fascinated by our legal system in action as I was. That said, there were a few very long fruitless days when we all found ourselves resorting to the plethora of daft celebrity magazines that had been provided for our entertainment. Somehow the lives of over-privileged royals, pouting ‘glamour’ models, reality ‘stars’ and rash inducing pop Svengali’s seemed even more ridiculous in the context of an anodyne Crown Court jury suite.

But one way or another we all had our day/s in court and everyone I was on service with got to see our adversarial legal system in its full bewigged and ‘your Honour’ peppered panoply. That may sound flippant but it isn’t. Our system is very flawed – the cases I was asked to adjudicate related to incidents that had happened at the beginning of 2011. It’s slow and unwieldy and  expensive. But the system of trial by judge AND jury is a good one. The judge gives the jury legal direction and the Crown and Defence barristers interrogate the case. But 12 brains have to decide upon innocence or guilt of the defendant and it is incumbent upon the Crown to convince the jury of this. In other words the defendant is innocent until proved guilty.

Jury service makes you think. Cases I was on the jury panel for didn’t involve serious offences like murder or rape, but adjudicating them did require us to decide whether or not a person will be marked by the taint of having a criminal record. They also involved the notion of delivering a verdict based simply on facts and facts alone. Not an easy task by any means and one that prompted much discussion and some disagreement. Avoiding speculation is a difficult thing to do but it is something you HAVE to do if you are on a jury panel.

Clearly I cannot tell you about the actual cases that I was involved with. But I can tell you about the impression they have left on me. I live in a part of the UK that is very beautiful, a bit wild and is near three large northern English cities. We have areas of fantastic wealth and commercial success but we also have vast areas that are characterised by urban blight and poverty. Some parts of some northern towns and cities look as if they’ve been bombed. They haven’t, they’ve just been left to fall apart. This has happened for all sorts of reasons but it is not being helped by the recession our government still claim isn’t a recession.

The upshot is that we have a large number of people, both young and old, who cannot find work and who are ‘told’ by the media every single day that there is no hope. On the one hand ‘there is no hope’ of getting a job while at the same time the government are cutting welfare benefits to the sick and unemployed. So a lot of people are caught between the rock of unemployment and the hard place of reduced welfare benefits. It’s not a nice place to be especially in view of a statement made by the Mayor of London a few days ago about our young people having to lower their aspirations with regard to their career ambitions. This from a man who lives in luxury and whose own children are doing very nicely thank you very much. ‘Unhelpful’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

The offences I was required to adjudicate were crimes that involved cheap alcohol and the inflation of small sleights that come about when people have nothing but their most basic survival instincts to engage their brains. Although there was only one person in all these cases who actually performed the criminal act at question, there were very few people who were not victims in that court room. Caught in cycles of hopelessness and sometimes addiction that they couldn’t control, they lashed out. In their shoes, with a gut full of vodka, I’d probably do the same. So I’ve done my duty, I’ve done it to the best of my ability but I’m left with a sadness that will take some time to go. At one point in my life I used to wish that I’d studied for the law rather than take a degree in psychology. Now I’m not so sure.

That time of year is approaching yet again. It’s a major cultural event, and of course it has to be the Eurovision Song Contest. For the non-Europeans reading this, count yourselves fortunate that it’s something you’ve probably never encountered.

It’s more or less what it says on the tin, an annual contest run by European broadcasters in which performers bang out a three minute pop song composed for the occasion. Then there’s a vote afterwards to decide the winner, normally followed by some bitching and backbiting, as well as accusations that various groups, such as the Nordic or Balkan states, vote to ensure that one of their number gets close enough to the top for a stab at being the winner.

Eurovision is dire. The quality of the music is determinedly poppy and sticks to the white lines running down the middle of the road, produced to a strict formula as if cheesy blandness were something to aspire to. There are few off-the-wall entries now and then, as if there’s a need to prove that the organisers really do have a sense of humour kept in reserve for emergencies, but it’s still kept firmly in check.

If you’re really up for the full horror of Eurovision, YouTube is probably your best starting point. But for the sharpest Eurovision parody there is, which also supplies the full flavour of it, look no further than here.

It’s been going for years and has gone from being a fairly good-humoured, camp affair in the past that wasn’t taken all that seriously, even though it was Abba’s springboard to fame, to today’s grotesquely over-the-top schlockfest. The transformation is down to the new Europeans, the nations to the east that came to Eurovision late as the Iron Curtain came down. They take it all extremely seriously, pumping some big money into getting their formula just right.

Iceland also came to Eurovision late, being admitted to the fold sometime in the mid-1980s, and Iceland adores Eurovision. From the interminable televised heats and voting to decide the national entry to the whole televised bad-taste-fest, Iceland stays glued to the box.

Now there are questions being asked about the rightness or not of taking part in this year’s event. The convention is that the winning nation hosts next year’s event, conjuring up mental images of harassed TV executives pouring themselves relieved triple brandies with every ‘nul points’ their entry gets, as these days it’s a lavish and ruinously expensive thing to stage.

Last year Azerbaijan won. Not exactly a European state, one would have thought, but Turkey and Israel have already long been part of the Eurovision circus. The problems lie with the fact that Azerbaijan is a very far cry from being a free and democratic state and the seriousness with which Azerbaijan’s rulers take Eurovision is such that a new concert venue in Baku is being specially built – with the houses and blocks of flats surrounding the designated site being bulldozed while the occupants have been subjected to offers of derisory compensation, while subjected to a campaign to encourage them to leave their homes as rapidly as possible by cutting off water and power supplies.

There have been a few calls for this year’s Eurovision to be boycotted, but it’ll undoubtedly go ahead anyway and the calls for justice for those losing their homes for the sake of internationally-broadcast terrible music have hardly registered.

In Iceland, one of the loudest voices has been that of Páll Óskar Hjálmtýsson (who abbreviates his name to Paul Oscar), a singer and TV personality who is Iceland’s number one Eurovision fan and who could hardly be camper if he went to live in a big pink tent in Brighton or San Francisco.

His name is also one of those that has been mentioned in connection with the upcoming presidential elections – along with numerous others – none of whom has yet decided to say yes or no. Is Iceland ready for a gay president? Why not? Iceland was the first to have a female president, as well as first to have a gay head of government. So it could be fitting if the terms of an outgoing gay prime minister and an incoming gay president could overlap.

But back to Azerbaijan, a resources-rich nation with a distinctly dismal human rights record and a dictatorial clique in power that prefers to keep dissent quiet and the press under its thumb. There are some forlorn hopes that the glare of the Eurovision spotlight will force a little more political openness in Azerbaijan, where forced evictions and trampling on ordinary people’s rights are nothing new or unusual. But in a few weeks there will be a shiny new concert hall and a tourist-friendly district around it where there used to be ugly, unloved Soviet-era blocks that were nevertheless people’s homes.

Eurovision will certainly go ahead. Iceland will probably take part. This year’s entry has already been selected so it’s presumably too late to back out. But it’ll be interesting to know what Paul Oscar makes of it and if he decides to hold his renowned annual Eurovision party.

As he said publicly when he voiced a call for the boycott; ‘Human rights first, Eurovision second.’ Taking a moral stance over his beloved Eurovision certainly won’t do his chances any harm if he does decide to hit the presidential trail.

Thai police arrested two terrorist suspects and were searching for a third man after three reported bombings in Bangkok on 14 February 2012. The Bangkok Post reported that bombings took place on Sukhumvit Road (Soi 71) in a crowded residential area of Bangkok. It appears a bomb went off in the alleged terrorists’ living quarters.

One terrorist was arrested at Suvarnbhumi Airport, Bangkok’s main airport, as he was about to board a flight to Kuala Lumpur. Another terrorist suspect, who had apparently sustained injuries during the bomb blast in the house, was further injured when a grenade he reportedly threw at police bounced back, blowing off both of his legs. The house occupied by the three men was searched by police, who discovered C-4 plastic explosives along with detonating devices. Based upon their travel documents, the three men are believed to be Iranians.

The target of their attack at this stage of the police investigation remains unclear, as does the possibility of whether a suicide mission was planned by the trio. From the initial reported evidence, it is difficult to conclude they were trained professionals.

For the last month or so, American authorities have issued travel advisories to their citizens, warning them of possible terrorist attacks in Bangkok. Thai authorities had sought to have the US (and a number of other countries that followed the American lead by issuing similar travel advisories of their own) withdraw their advisories as the warnings were thought to have a potentially negative impact on tourism.

The Bangkok bombing illustrates the tension between warning against terrorist attacks and the damage such warnings have on local economies covered by the warnings. Protecting one’s own citizens can and does conflict with the interests of other countries that rely on the tourism dollar. International crime prevention is difficult as the law enforcement is local and co-operation can be uneven. That means the best other countries can hope to achieve is to alert their citizens who travel abroad as to the possible risks of criminal activity, including terrorism. No country likes to be on the receiving end of such an official warning, as not only does it have adverse economic impact, but it also reflects on the competence, capability, and intelligence gathering and assessment of local law enforcement agencies in charges of security.

In the past, the target country and the country giving the warning can find themselves in a public relations war as to which set of officials has superior intelligence, information, and assessment of the risk. In the immediate future, the data divide between nations will be larger than the wealth divide. It is likely that the Americans and Chinese will lead on the cutting edge technology, which will exponentially accelerate the scope, nature and quantity of data collected and the data mining software to analysis, assessment and evaluation. The distinction will lie between the data-haves and the data-have-nots. An information arms race has already started. Suspicion and doubt will follow in the wake of data base monopolies that have the potential power to ruin local economic fortunes. Like control over sea lanes, control over data lanes will be crucial for development and political power. Information will be the predominate resource, the value of which will outstrip all other resources.

We are at the beginning of a phase transition in data collection and mining.  For a glimpse of the future, have a look at Recorded Future Inc., funded by Google and the CIA, which is in the business of web intelligence and predictive analytics in order to predict future events.  Astrologers and politicians and priests have traditionally been at the forefront of the business of predicting the future. Recorded Future Inc., a private company, is poised at the doorstep of the future. The future is a place where the most valuable of all resources will be privatized. And that raises a number of questions about the continuing role and importance of government in data collecting and mining, privacy, intellectual property law, and shifts of power arrangements in business, finance, medicine, universities, investing, and banking. There is a good argument that governments will not win this race. Corporations already have a headstart.

My big idea is that certain elements of the criminal justice will soon have the capacity to acquire and store an exponential amount of information, including psychological profiles, medical histories, iris scans, childhood illnesses and absences from school records, test scores, teacher evaluations, immunizations, family backgrounds, DNA, detailed neurological data and sequencing, work records, employer evaluations, emails, Facebook accounts, Twitter and social network media. These ‘wells’ of information will be linked into vast reservoirs that will be larger than their individual parts. Those who control that network of information will know the future before it happens.

We are some distance from that day.

But it is only a matter of time before the old barriers used to screen off that data will be dismantled or overrun. Over time, as more and more people voluntarily disclose their personal histories and private information on the social network, the space for privacy will shrink and the value of privacy will unlikely survive the quest to predict the future.

Law enforcement agencies will rely on data feeds and analysis programs to evaluate large amounts of information in order to deploy resources to monitor the most vulnerable neighborhoods. Schools, parks, public centers will all have profiles on those who use those facilities, and the information will be updated constantly. Future cops will start their shifts analyzing the latest day and time markers, such as holidays, sporting events, concerts, as well as unusual signs within networks of individuals, looking for data matches that correlate with past criminal activity, and use software that will efficiently assign security resources to prevent the crime through targeted, scaled up police presence. Surveillance, detection, and intervention will be digitally determined, coordinating events detached from ‘gut feelings.’ Crime is largely possible because criminals exploit the lack of information in the hands of authorities. Inefficiencies in deployment of policing resources are also a criminal’s friend.

But that is about to change.

Massive information is difficult to manage. We would likely, at the current state of development, run out of our capacity to manage as the storage of information outstrips our ability to process, analyze, and assess for patterns and correlations.  That is where data mining comes in. Mathematics will gradually tame and control the torrent of information. You will hear a lot more about Power Laws in the future; that is, a mathematical connection existing between the frequency and factors comprising an event. This is the networked world of correlations. For example, correlations between the sale of beer and pizza, the issuances of traffic citations, the number of drug arrests, divorce and abortion rates, deportation of illegal aliens and reruns of The Wire may indicate police resources are reallocated from homicide to domestic violence within a sector of the city.

In the future, the most important qualification for a politician may be his or her science background, as the job will require interpreting a complex world of new technologies for a general population. The risk is that, at some point, no human being will be able fully grasp such a system without the aid of artificial intelligence.

That day may be a long way off, as Professor Paulos recently wrote in an article titled “Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?” for The New York Times. In future, political leaders will need a new set of skills in order to understand the implications of probability distribution, the risks, benefits, costs and dangers inherent in applying probability distribution theory. We will live in a world of probabilities calculated by artificial intelligence systems. That world will include corporations, individuals and government agencies that will know far more about each of us that we can know about it or others around us.

Future Bangkok bombers will have more difficulty carrying out their operations. That is the theory. Governments such as Thailand will need to adjust to the reality where warnings are issued based on large pools of information pointing to the probability of a terrorist attack. Of course, probability is not certainty. But the political space to ignore probability distribution assessment will be vastly diminished in the future.

We are in the midst of a huge transition in how we acquire, store, access, analyze and use information. Technological breakthroughs will accelerate the creation of information filters that aren’t tainted by the usual fear and loathing that human intelligence brings. The hard, cold, objective assessment will drive authorities to take precautions because the cost of ignoring such an assessment will become too high.

There will be resistance to the kind of changes the new, technologically wired information system will bring to the customary ways of doing things in society and the way we think about ourselves.

There is a close correlation between conservative political associations and religion or sacred quasi-religious beliefs. A recent study titled “This Is Why American Keeps Getting More Conservative” illustrates why America has become vastly more conservative over time. The least educated, lowest income earners, and the most religious are also likely to be the most hostile to science. Perhaps this answers Professor Paulos’s question as to why scientists aren’t elected in America while those with fundamentalist religious beliefs at odds with science are routinely elected.

Over the next decade or two, as science advances, as those who embrace religious dogma, myth, fable and literal interpretations of ancient religious texts and those who have mastered the digital world of infinite information computing collide, a battle will be waged between faith and science. It will be a battle for hearts and minds as to which side is better able to predict the future of disturbances, riots, revolutions, or market crashes. The probability is that the neurological reason for religion will have been decoded and an abundantly more efficient way of coping with fear, uncertainty, survival, authority, threat and hostility will appear. Once the mystery of ancient amygdala’s role in overriding reason is revealed, religion will lose its traction.

Finally, beyond religion, there is another core concept largely accepted: free will. As sacred cows go, Free Will is the prize heifer. It, too, will come under close examination. It is likely that we will learn that our ideas about free will were shorthand expressions for insufficient, error-prone, or unreliable information in complex systems that, because these made outcomes uncertain, it meant we had choice, when, in fact, the inefficient information system only made it appear that we had a choice.

With infinite information, artificial intelligence, unlimited broadband, neurological enhancements, and nanotechnology, our sense of free will, like religion, will erode and vanish as a personal operating system.

Science, which gave us evolution, is undergoing a revolution. Political science, religion, our sense of self, individuality, crime, and criminals will all be overhauled and re-evaluated in the process. How we catch criminals and what we do with them once they’re caught may one day fall to scientists to determine rather than a cop, prosecutor and judge. But that is in the future. As for today, science works quietly in the background, while the usual voices tell us to be fearful and to seek protection under the big umbrella of agencies and officials who tell us when to worry, what to worry about, and remind us to honor our communal sense of sacredness is collectively our best defense against an uncertain and unsafe world.  This will change in the lifetime of our children and grandchildren, who will look back on the day of the three bombers in Bangkok and wonder how we ever lived inside such a primitive information networked system.

I just wrote an article for The Jerusalem Report about “What Israelis Fear Most.” Surprisingly, I found that Israelis didn’t fear being murdered by a psychopath or caught up in a case of mistaken identity which leads to them getting into car chases with the FBI on their tails.

Surprisingly, that is, if you read thrillers or crime fiction.

What DO people fear? Israelis fear internal divisions within their society. They fear the nuclear threat of Iran. They fear Palestinian terrorism. They fear war. Americans fear public speaking and clowns. (Check out the polls. It’s true.) Yet 8 of the current top 10 New York Times bestsellers are crime novels or thrillers.

Crime novels don’t hinge on the same fears as people confront in everyday life. Why do all these people read so many crime novels, then?

This question gives the lie to the typical argument about crime fiction: that our innate conservatism enjoys seeing order disturbed (by murder) and then restored (by fingering the bad guy.) If it were so simple, wouldn’t Israelis be reading novels in which Iran launches a nuke only for Tehran to get obliterated? Or surely Americans would be reading novels in which a guy is forced to address a conference of clowns, only to come through with a great rhetorical swell?

We need to reconsider what it is that makes people read crime fiction.Clearly it’s not fear. After all, how many crime novels end with the bad guy doing his worst and prospering? That happens in some post-modern books, sure. But for the most part there’s nothing to fear in crime fiction. Everything’s just fine.

(I plead an exemption for my Palestinian crime novels, in which almost everyone ends up guilty and the society is definitely headed for the rapids in a barrel. They’re certainly not Jo Nesbo, where everything ends up dourly dusted in true Scandinavian fashion.)

Maybe that’s the appeal of crime fiction. Not for a moment would a crime writer have you believe that murderers get away with it and go on to become Secretary of State (see Vince Foster/Whitewater internet conspiracy stuff – though just because I write “conspiracy” doesn’t mean I don’t believe Hillary had him whacked…). Or that the world’s most evil businessman ever can become vice president, survive a couple of heart attacks, shoot a business associate, and nothing bad happens to him – in fact, he even loses a lot of weight. (Which is pretty un-American really, losing weight. Why haven’t Democrats picked up on that?) Of course if it were fiction, no writer would call the bad guy “Dick.” It’s too obvious.

I have a theory. I should add that it’s statistically untested – when I was in grad school I had to study how to figure out statistically meaningful correlations, but it’s a long time since I even knew what Chi-squared looked like. I prefer, as Spalding Gray said, musing and speculating, rather than real research.

So here’s the theory: People know the difference between fiction and reality, and so they recognize the difference between fictional fear and real fear. Romance readers don’t want to be raped in chapter one and marry their rapist in the final chapter. “Literary fiction” readers aren’t all magazine editors who’re worried their wife will find out they’re boning a literary agent — and some of them aren’t even Jewish. Neither are crime fiction readers “fearful” of the events that take place in the books they read. They’re readers, not method actors. They know it’s a story, and that’s that.

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The wait for a successor to *Amadeus* is over.
*MOZART’S LAST ARIA *by Matt Rees
www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com/