light dawns on Marblehead.

I've been watching Agatha Christie's Poirot from the beginning, since Netflix only had series 9-13, and a while ago, and I flamed out trying to watch the final episode, which is very sad and bitter. It's amazing how thoroughly Arthur Conan Doyle defined the modern detective genre: at least in English, any venture into detective fiction is either avoiding or nodding to Sherlock Holmes. So it is with Hercule Poirot: finicky, unpredictable, brilliant, prideful. But Poirot was a policeman, and respects policemen, where Holmes more often than not can scarcely cloak his contempt in politeness. Poirot freely loves and cares about people, with some spiritual foundation, alluded to as Catholicism; Holmes cares, but is never able to articulate why, and his conduct in personal relationships rivals the most awkward teenage boy trying to talk to girls at a dance.

(No that wasn't me SHUT UP)

Series 3 begins with a flashback double episode, "The Mysterious Affair at Styles," which takes place during World War 1, and shows Poirot leading a group of fellow Belgian refugees around town.

...I didn't know there were Belgian refugees in World War 1. As I thought about it, I realized I had no idea what Belgium's experience of World War 1 was, why it should have been that way, or in fact much detail about World War 1 at all. (I mean, I read at least some of "In Flanders Fields" in school, so I knew there was at least one battle in Flanders, but we don't call it "World War 1" because it was highly localized.)

This odd-looking gap in my knowledge arises from having studied history in a thematic sort of way. I can tell you about the technological, economic, artistic, and geopolitical consequences of the war, and a decent amount of what went into it, but by definition, that airbrushes the details so you can see the broad strokes of color. I'm not great at memorizing pages and pages of raw information--ask me how much fun I had the final time I was an actor, or why I stopped after a single semester of Chinese--so I took advantage of a liberal arts education's offer to focus on concepts and patterns rather than memorizing.

The problem is that human events sometimes just don't quite make sense without some missing keystone fact. Part of the Middle East gestalt remained out of focus until I happened to hear author Stephen Kinzer on NPR, talking about how the CIA ousted the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953.

I didn't know Iran had a democracy! Suddenly it made sense why the Shah was hated enough that his overthrow could rebound so hard and consistently derive so much energy from anti-American sentiment. Not that they didn't have problems at the time, but they were working on solving them their way, and we broke their country because British Petroleum wanted us to.

Returning to Belgium, I went searching and found Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, which covers a manageable lead-up to and first 30 days of the war. Her writing is spectacular! And...wow. What a mess. I've barely started and already found a keystone fact I'd been missing: the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War--I didn't remember anything about it except that it had happened--was France:

• being baited into declaring war on the confederation steadily becoming Germany;
• losing; and
• forced to surrender under thoroughly humiliating terms,
• designed to cripple for generations their ability to make war,
• adjusting their borders so they could only be on defense,
• signed at...Versailles!

Oh, damn. Dear readers, Shit Has Gotten Real, because after the 1871 Armistice of Versailles, France paid off its indemnity early, and immediately re-set itself to only think of offense. All this time, I'd thought the 1919 Treaty of Versailles had been ordinary human vengeance, and it certainly was, but not (or not only) for the Great War.

What a fucking mess.

lots of surprises.

I'm not sure how many people pick up the violin because of Swedish folk music. Outside of Sweden, and possibly Minnesota, probably not many. I'm actually not sure there's many inside of Sweden, either: tons of people (possibly most) spending their time performing folk fiddling traditions have music degrees and/or started playing as children, and after mastering the classical tradition, either returned again to the music of their childhoods, or learned it for the first time and found it more satisfying.

Don't get me wrong: I like Irish and Scottish fiddling, and Cape Breton, and bluegrass, and old-time. And Quèbecois, although I think you have to be able to dance while playing, so it will probably remain beyond me: the percussion in this track is the fiddler chair-clogging.

I don't really care for Cajun or zydeco fiddling, except in moderation, but I won't claim there's any logic to that, because it all sounds repetitive and similar to me, which is equally well said of most fiddle music I do like, to say nothing of lots of other music I enjoy.

Of course, all those fiddle traditions (and more!) are one family, carried from France and Ireland and Scotland over to Canada and Appalachia and Louisiana, mixing with everything they encountered, like Spaniards, enslaved Africans, and each other. Like any instrument unconstrained by the tyrannies of fixed pitch, the violin is tailor-made for musical syncretism. Want to play music with quarter-tones? If you can hear the difference, and remember where you put your fingers, the violin will play it for you.

Owing to Scandinavia's failure to thoroughly colonize the Americas, Scandinavian fiddle music is...something else. And then within Scandinavia, as far as I can tell, Swedish music is weird. The thing that grabbed me about Swedish music is the same thing that makes it hard: everything about it is just unexpected. I have all these decades of listening to classical and Irish music (and Cajun, until admitting I didn't like it), but I listen to Swedish music, and I constantly feel like I had NO IDEA that note was coming. To say nothing of the rhythms: a Swedish polka is the Polish polka we're used to, in 2/4 time, but the Swedes have a polska, which sounds like this:

Notwithstanding that the band is a supergroup of Swedish Folk Revival ninjas, this is a Christmas concert for normal people, and this is the kind of music the audience is expecting. The musician Lena Jonsson (not in that concert) described the polska as "in 3/4, but the second beat comes sooner," which is enough to make most of us ordinary (and non-jazz) musicians cry out to the heavens. "WHAT THE HELL DOES THAT EVEN MEAN, THAT IS NOT WHAT A BEAT IS."

It's more of a pulse, and it's part of why the email from the local Nordic music ensemble told me to use the sheet music as a starting point, but not to invest too much time in it, since the band plays whatever it plays and mostly uses the music to remember how songs start.

I highly recommend watching the whole concert. It's so different, but so damn catchy.

a long morning.

Another court hearing yesterday! Good times, good times.

After June's Crabby Judge Adventure, I was expecting Crabby Judge 2.0, and my own hope was to direct her crabbiness where it belongs, at Angry Biodad (ABD), who keeps pulling fun stunts that dodge her orders. Crabbiness levels were surprisingly low, though, and I think were helped by a couple of attorney appearances: one new associate, who came charging hard at the judge out of the gate, and immediately wished he hadn't, turning red with embarrassment as his aggressive claims fell apart like wet tissue paper. This was followed by a guy who:

• looks like he's in his mid-70s,
• talks like an immigrant from some long-ago part of the Northeast,
• seems like maybe he focuses on jury trials, because he was standing up and gesticulating and emphasizing a lot, and
• wore a bright emerald green blazer, and the biggest cuff links I have ever seen: disks over an inch across.

Hard not for him to be the highlight of everyone's day.

From the sanity-preserving low expectations of this just being a continuous holding action until J turns 18, the outcome of yesterday was A+: the previous interim order continues (J chooses where he lives and who he talks to) and ABD's primary shenanigans for dodging previous orders are kneecapped. He can now see the harbingers of doom on the horizon, which he's worked so hard to avoid:

• The many medical and psychological professionals who have gotten to know J, and, to their misfortune, ABD, will be interviewed and their opinions collated for the judge.
• He has to keep payments current with the court-appointed medical arbitrator who isn't allowed to work unless both parents are paid up (thus letting him continue to veto medical care simply by declining to write a check).

While it's not always a comfort, I am always grateful that he's not intelligent, focused, or wealthy; he's sort of the Ford Pinto of narcissists. His contribution to the world has been purely genetic, and whatever his own original potential, he now lives in that far realm of fantasy where he reads things on the Internet and uses that lofty education to assess the medical expertise of people who teach in multiple departments at Stanford Medical School while running world-class clinics.

The closest he comes to personal growth is learning from an occasional support group that in repairing his relationship with J, spending months telling J he should feel bad for how much he's been hurting ABD's feelings may have been counter-productive. I'm quite sure he doesn't understand why that should be the case. He's a simulacrum, the most shallow imitation of an adult human; a little like Pinocchio, if Pinocchio told the Blue Fairy to fuck off because he was already a real boy, thank you very much, and God, if it isn't just like a fucking fairy to try and tell you who you are.

(You may think I'm exaggerating, but one of the final straws for J was ABD going on a bender of anti-feminist ranting; a standard feature of Men's Rights Activism, which I promise is far worse than you're imagining, and probably gave him the referral to his scumbag lawyer who specializes in representing domestic abusers.)

Onward to the next seven weeks, then. It goes how it goes.