Archives for 2012

The Empress Theodora — James Allan Evans

books and books review, history
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Cover of The Empress Theodora


The Empress Theodora
James Allan Evans
146 pages including index
published in 2002

Ken MacLeod once said that “history is the trade secret of science fiction”, but sometimes it’s abused and nowhere more so than in the cribbing from early Byzantine history that has been ongoing ever since Isaac Asimov first put in thinly disguised expys of emperor Justinian and general Belisarius in his Foundationtrilogy. Largely overlooked in these sort of appropriations is the empress Theodora, who as James Allan Evans shows in The Empress Theodora – Partner of Justinian was just as important as her husband in determining the course of the Byzantine empire.

There were quite a few strong woman emperors in Byzantine history, but most of them either ruled through their weak husbands, or as regents ruling in place of their still minor children. Theodora on the other hand ruled together with Justinian, a strong emperor himself. Their rule was a true partnership and it’s this relationship and Theodora’s role in it that Evans wants to examine here. At the same time The Empress Theodora is also a concise biography/history accessible to lay people like me.

Read more.

“published on a slow day to a gentle chorus of mooing”

Tories
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As Alex called Gove’s latest brainwave, to bring back o-levels for thickos, as discussed at Jamie’s. Also from there, The Financial Times (!) comes down hard on it, arguing it would reduce social mobility and condemn the poorest and the northern to inferior qualifications:

The most significant issues around this idea are related to social mobility: the CSE will tend to be an exam for poorer children. Consider who would take the CSE if schools could select the quarter of pupils with the lowest average grades with perfect foresight.

[…]

There will be a geographical effect, too, with some areas switching heavily to it. I have marked this map showing what proportion of children in each neighbourhood will finish in the bottom quarter on the same measure. The CSE will be a northern qualification, too.

Go look: there’s graphs and everything.

It all does once again beg the question why a certain breed of tory, both in the UK as in the States, is so obsessed with bringing back obsolete forms of teaching to the point of fetishism. The phonics fights in the US, the eleven plus in the UK, the alleged degradation of a-levels, undsoweiter, all operating on prejudice rather than fact. Granted, that’s the conservative m.o. in a nutshell, but education does tend to bring the kooks out even more so than other subjects.

Go look at what Tom Spurgeon read in the eighties

Comix
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Love and Rockets #1 cover

The Comics Reporter is the one comix newsblog I read daily, both for roughly keeping up with what’s happening in American comics as because Tom Spurgeon is one of the people whose tastes I trust and have ever since we were both on the old Comix-L e-mail list. This month he has been looking back three decades to what he was reading in the eighties, as a teenager.

I myself only came to comics slightly later, from about 1987 or so and much of what he talked about I only know from reading about it in Amazing Heroes, comics Scene or Comics Interview, scouring the back issue bins in local comics shops and at local cons all during the nineties and of course from ads in other comics. Love & Rockets especially, the quintessential eighties comic, but I only know it from ads in other comics.

Hard to imagine these days, when we’ve long become accustomed to the idea that anything even halfway decent will be collected eventually, while it’s easier to just list the classic comics anf newspaper strips that haven’t been reprinted yet. But who would’ve thought even ten years ago, let alone thirty, that Fantagraphics would one day be better known as a publisher of high quality archival comics reprint projects than of avant garde alternative comix?

In the eighties and long through the nineties, trade collections were the exception, not the rule and if something was collected, it rarely stayed in print long; except for Watchmen of course. Which mean that the back issue bins were the only way to get any issues or series you missed and it was easier to read about a series like Reid Fleming than actually find it. You had to take what you could get and bugger proper reading order.

Tom’s series of reminiscences are interesting not just as excercises in nostalgia, or as a quick rundown of the better comics of the eighties, but as a contrast to the current state of the medium, in how we talked about them, bought them and looked at them. The traditional weekly comic shop ritual of getting the latest floppies is dying, comics have become more like books, something you buy online or in a general bookstore rather than in a specialised shop. There are good and bad sides to this, but it’s good to see it put into context every now and again.

Tom Spurgeon’s list so far: