Isegoria

Of 300, Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, says, Sparta? No. This is madness:

We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan “freedom.” By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.
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300‘s Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb “to Spartanize” meant “to bugger.” In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

I didn’t realize that the kara in karaoke is the same as in karate, meaning empty — te means hand — and that the oke is short for ?kesutora, the Japanese form of orchestra.

(It’s not too different from Pokémon, which is a Romanized contraction of pocket monsters (poketto monsut?).

Shocking event for Captain America:

After close to 60 years in print, Marvel Comics has killed off Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, one of its most famous and beloved superheroes amid an already controversial story line, “Civil War,” which is pitting the heroes of Marvel’s universe against one another.

In the comic series, Rogers was to stand trial for defying a superhero registration law passed after a hero’s tragic mistake causes a 9/11-like event.

Steve Rogers eventually surrenders to police. He is later mortally wounded as he climbs the courthouse steps.

More at Marvel’s site.

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades:

Not only are teen book sales booming — up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis — but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

All of which leads Cart to declare, “We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”
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Take a look at the New York Times children’s bestseller list.

At No. 7, holding strong after 46 weeks, is “The Book Thief,” a Holocaust tale narrated by Death and written with stunning beauty by a young Aussie author, Markus Zusak. It was published in Australia as an adult title.

At No. 5 is Ellen Hopkins’ new novel, “Impulse,” the tale of three suicidal teens who meet at a psychiatric hospital. Like her meth-addiction novel, “Crank,” it’s written in a challenging format — free-verse poetry.

Then there’s “Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation,” the 2006 National Book Award winner for Young People’s Literature.

Set in Revolutionary War-era Boston, it’s a searing, audacious tale of racial experimentation that the author describes as part of “a 900-page, two-volume historical epic for teens, written in a kind of unintelligible 18th-century Johnsonian-Augustan prose.”

Obviously, teen lit is fast outgrowing its bobby socks.