A Game of Thrones trailer. Looks good and more importantly, gets the essence of the books right.
The Ruin of the Roman Empire – James J. O’Donnell
The Ruin of the Roman Empire
James J. O’Donnell
436 pages including index and notes
published in 2008
A few years ago I became interested in Roman history, especially with the later Roman Empire, what historians now call Late Antiquity, the period during which Rome supposedly fell. Supposedly fell, as the simple history we’ve been taught in school of barbarian invasions from the fringes of the Empire finally overrunning its heartlands, looting Rome and deposing the last true Roman Emperor in 476 CE, is of course wrong. That story is an invention, largely created by, as James J. O’Donnell put it, “a short, fat man”, Edward Gibbon, in his famous Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which codified this standard history of the fall of the Roman Empire. It was challenged in the early seventies, most famously by Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity, as new research and new generations of historians started to question this old story. They found a Roman Empire and world that was severely challenged in the fifth century CE, but much more continuity between the old classical world and the new dark ages than there had been room for in the standard model.
Fast forward a few decades and the revisionists themselves are being corrected by later generations of scholars, e.g. in the books of Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins I’ve reviewed before. James O’Donnell’s entry on the subject, The Ruin of the Roman Empire is the most idiosyncratic so far I’ve read, aptly summed up by its subtitle: “The emperor who brought it down. The Barbarians who could’ve saved it.” The emperor is Justinian I, who wanted to make the empire whole again, the barbarians the supposed invaders who had taken over its western provinces. O’Donnell argues that if Justinian I had not tried to reconquer Italy and North Africa, but had concentrated his energies on his Eastern provinces and the border with Persia, something like the Roman Empire could’ve survived for longer than it did, if not an united Roman Empire. The fall of Rome in 476 CE was not the end of the Roman Empire.
Now read on.
Everything of value is vulnerable
And in a time of economic crisis it’s always easy to cut funding of arts and culture. Nobody dies because musea budgets are cut, symphonic orchestras disband or theatres are closed. Yet people do not live on bread alone and the necessity for slashing budgets the way the current Dutch government wants to do is debatable. It’s not the arts that have put us in debt, so why should it have to pay for the bankers’ crisis? Sure, there probably is some wastage, some dubious funding decisions that can be looked at, some ways to do more with less money, but we’re ruled by a government that takes pleasure from its own philistinism and the cuts are done for ideological reasons. It’s payback for the “leftwing church” that has supposedly ruled the Netherlands for decades enforcing its cultural norms on “Henk and Ingrid”, Wilders’ average Dutch couple. Bullshit of course, but popular bullshit at the moment — there’s always room for resentment against elitist artists.
Which is why the protests against these cuts need to get the public on board, get their sympathy. A good start was made last week, with public stunts like the flashmob performance of Mambo by the Dutch Radio Orchestra and the Radio Choir at Den Haag Central Station done to protest the closure of the Netherlands Broadcasting Music Center, shown in the video above. If the art world wants the cuts minimised or stopped, it needs to do more stuff like this, to show people why culture is important, even if it’s grossly unfair these cuts are planned at all.
(Video found at 24 Oranges.)
Power failure
Shelf porn
Comics Reporter today linked to the latest installment of shelf porn over at Robot 6, in which collectors show off their hobby rooms. This time it featured Rod Hendrickson who, as seen in the picture above, has created his own secret hideyhole behind his bookshelves — the ideal way to hide those ungainly long boxes full of comics pamphlets. It’s a great idea and if I had the money and more importantly, the room, I would do the same. Get myself a little library room, make it cozy and hide away all the not so nice books. But I’m afraid I don’t even have a walkin closet to my name and hence the vast majority of my collection is stored at my parents’ house. All I have at home are three narrow Billy bookcases, which together still manage to fit some 600 trade paperbacks and albums in though.
Rooting through the shelf porn archives is illuminating, as it shows how small my collection is — and how much worse S. could’ve had it. But it also shows that collections and graphic novels have largely taken over American comics collections; fifteen or even ten years ago many of the collections featured would’ve lots more floppies on display. I stopped comics collecting in June or July 2000, just fed up with it and back then it was all about buying the monthly issues. When I got back into it seriously this year, it had migrated to the trade paperback or hardcover collection. And there is something to say for seeing a whole row of Marvel Essentials in your bookcase, even if I still have a visceral preference for the humble pamphlet.
Seeing so many collections one after another with all those oversized, overpriced Absolute Editions and DC Archives and Marvel Masterworks and such grouped together in picture after picture, just makes me realise all the more how awful they are. I just don’t like them, they look glitzy and cheap and I’d rather have a cheaper, black and white Essential or Showcase edition every time. Also, if I ever do get my own comics library room, it needs to be more than just cheap bookcases stuffed full with books and loaded up with tsotchkes. It needs to be nice, with good, comfortable chairs, quality bookcases and a room that’s actually finished…