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.

torrents raging down from the mountains

The tally is at 99 books so far, and work is shuttered until the end of the year, so I expect it'll be 101 or so by the end. I've found I've been reading a bit much, and have diverted into watching...not TV, exactly, though I am very slowly working through Luke Cage and The OA, and occasionally Justified. The latter has, for a wonder:

• a 15-year old playing a 15-year old, who...
• is transgendered, and...
• Asian.

American film and TV has been thoroughly appalling here, particularly about the latter two: transgendered roles are routinely given to cisgender actors, Asian characters are turned into white characters played by white actors ("whitewashing"), and, lest any permutations be left out, Asian characters are still nominally Asian characters, but are still played by white actors ("yellowface").

["Teenagers not playing teenagers" doesn't bug me much, since it doesn't erase an already-marginalized group. For an added twist, it also seems to date to early film days, as with 1944's The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, starring the then-18 Diana Lynn as the 14ish Emmy Kockenlocker. (You know I do not make these things up.)]

As if to scrub The Vorrh from my imagination, I've been binging through Julie Czerneda's Trade Pact Universe books.

I'm still reading J The Iliad at bedtime. It goes along for a while setting up the story, listing, as J put it, "everyone who ever thought about occasionally thinking about the Trojan War," and rather suddenly Shit Gets Real™:

Now Strife hurled down the leveler Hate amidst both sides,
wading into the onslaught, flooding men with pain.

At last the armies clashed at one strategic point,
they slammed their shields together, pike scraped pike
with the grappling strength of fighters armed in bronze
and their round shields pounded, boss on welded boss,
and the sound of struggle roared and rocked the earth.
Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath,
fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood.
Wildly as two winter torrents raging down from the mountains,
swirling into a valley, hurl their great waters together,
flash floods from the wellsprings plunging down in a gorge
and miles away in the hills a shepherd hears the thunder—
so from the grinding armies broke the cries and crash of war. 

Antilochus was the first to kill a Trojan captain,
tough on the front lines, Thalysias’ son Echepolus.
Antilochus thrust first, speared the horsehair helmet
right at the ridge, and the bronze spearpoint lodged
in the man’s forehead, smashing through his skull
and the dark came whirling down across his eyes—
he toppled down like a tower in the rough assault.
As he fell the enormous Elephenor grabbed his feet,
Chalcodon’s son, lord of the brave-hearted Abantes,
dragged him out from under the spears, rushing madly
to strip his gear but his rush was short-lived.
Just as he dragged that corpse the brave Agenor
spied his ribs, bared by his shield as he bent low—
Agenor stabbed with a bronze spear and loosed his limbs,
his life spirit left him and over his dead body now
the savage work went on, Achaeans and Trojans
mauling each other there like wolves, leaping,
hurtling into each other, man throttling man.

Soooo...that's horrifying, in a way that is totally appropriate to the poem, and less so for a high-anxiety kid to fall asleep to, even one who laughed at "Whichever contenders trample on this treaty first / spill their brains on the ground as this wine spills...!". Because, you know. Brains.

Anyway, Anna has always done on-the-fly editing when reading out loud, so now I skip over the (occasionally lengthy) verses of people dismembering each other. He does want to know who dies so he doesn't get confused later, though I'm pretty sure almost anyone who dies--Patroclus being the least escapable exception--is then forgotten for the rest of the story.

Iliad's gore obviously fits the setting, but above that, it's not the least bit casual. Homer bends his obsession with detail and mighty command of adjectives to paint a scene of human beings who suffer in ways we can recognize ("flooding men with pain," "Screams of men and cries of triumph breaking in one breath, / fighters killing, fighters killed, and the ground streamed blood," and the several lines describing each death), but are simultaneously dehumanized by the battle, at once contributing to and consumed by a bloody, impersonal, greater whole ("as two winter torrents raging," "like wolves, leaping, / hurtling into each other").

That's right, folks: my Computer Science degree came thickly wrapped in a liberal arts education. I'll be here all week.

If you read the above verses and think, "That is fucked up. Why aren't these soldiers traumatized?", then you'll be satisfied to learn that there is a persistent undercurrent of scholarship on just that topic. The marvelously-titled "The Rage of Achilles and PTSD in Antiquity" is a fine entry point.