A universal individualism

As society at large became more secular the dream of universalism followed suit. Because individualism became more mainstream alongside this secular dream of a united humanity, I can see why New World Order conspiracies persist. Universalism and individualism are kind of paradoxical after all, but, if Kohn is to be believed, both are necessary for the establishment of modern nationalism. One world government conspiracy theories are just a product of the paradox, the result of staunch individualism bashing into a drive for universalism. Though the individualism involved in such theories is simultaneously on the personal and national level.

Anyway, along with the roots of such conspiracies, Kohn's coverage of the emergence of sovereign states deeply involves France. He notes how France of the seventeenth century had some great thinkers (Rousseau, Descartes, etc.). He mentions that during this time the French were the most wide ranging of the European peoples. And, he makes it clear that French was the language to learn if you wanted to appear truly civilized and sophisticated. Add that to the list of things that change very slowly.

What's interesting is that this romantic perception of French lasted to the present despite the long period of England's nigh global dominance. Though the French (and Spanish, and Portuguese, and Dutch, and Germans) were involved in colonizing the world, too. Maybe it's lasted so long because it was the English who dominated. But Kohn's not reached that point in history just yet.

Thoughts of a year-late Wii U adopter

Setting up the Wii U a year after its launch was way easier than I'd expected. I remember all of the horror stories about lengthy updates required to do anything, systems getting bricked because an update froze them, or because the system was powered off during the process for some reason or other. Even if it was a year later when I finally got the Wii U (Merry Christmas!), for whatever reason, these problems were expected.

But those expectations were foiled.

Though, the Wii U's hardly a plug and play system. You still need to set up a user account, run a few updates for most of the pre-installed channels/menus, and configure a few of the GamePad's features. These set up processes alone should be the criteria for a console to be considered "Next Gen," since I'm sure you need to go through the same things with the PS4 and XBox One. Specs and such aside, I will always consider the Nintendo console with a year-long head start part of the same video game heat as Sony and Microsoft's latest machines.

Yet, now that I have a Wii U I also have to admit that Nintendo really didn't make good use of its head start. The Nintendo Direct from 18 December left me feeling excited for 2014, but what, then, happened in 2013? It seems that Nintendo took the time to relax before (hopefully) turning their efforts up to 11. The Virtual Console is,as it was on the Wii, a prime example of Ninty's playing the hare.

The only two consoles represented on the VC as of this writing are the NES and SNES. Some of the games available for these are also available on the Wii (the VC of which is accessible via the Wii Menu). But, even then, when I turned off all of the eShop's search filters and went through all of the available titles I was dumbfounded to see there were only eight pages worth of software. Some of which wasn't even available on the Wii U, but only available for the 3DS. Since the two consoles now share the eShop, it seems that the eShop is doubling as a strange cross-platform advertising delivery system.

Yet, Nintendo has still captured my imagination with its GamePad. Off-TV play is, at its core, a simple concept. But it's so cool. Being able to take games or apps around with you is incredibly convenient. This convenience probably sounds familiar to owners of smartphones or tablets, but the GamePad's screen is bigger than most smartphones. Its being tethered to the Wii U console cuts down its mobility, but at the same time the GamePad is, essentially, a portable Wii U - which makes it super cool.

Hyrule Warriors raises my hopes for the future of the Wii U. Perhaps this spin-off in the Warriors series is a hint at some element in what will eventually be in Zelda Wii U. Or, perhaps the use of Link (and maybe Zelda?) in a spin-off game is just nodding towards a very late release date for Zelda Wii U.

A story rushing onward

River of Stars has a certain cinematic quality to it. Earlier in the book, the shifts from chapter to chapter covered greater geographical spaces and temporal gaps. Now, as the book's action rolls more and more quickly onward, the jumps in space and time between chapters are shrinking. In the case of the jump from Chapter XVI to Chapter XVII we actually see the two overlap.

Such jumps between scenes (the television/movie version of chapters) are common in audio/visual entertainments. Cutting between plot arcs creates the illusion of more things happening simultaneously, or at least within the bounds of a story.

Having more happen in a story makes it appear more interesting since it seems like there's a lot for the brain to process. By their nature, books can't replicate the pace at which television shows and movies switch between scenes, but because books are a slower medium they allow for more nuance, even in a flurry of scene and point of view changes.

Part of this nuance is the possibility of scenes overlapping each other. Or, because books take more time for the brain to process, you can see what might otherwise be frenetic scene hopping in slow motion and pick up on more of the detail of what's happening between scenes. Most importantly, though, this sort of scene hopping, either because of a flip book effect or because of what it's come to mean through the movies, indicates a story rushing onwards.

Exploiting a Link-sized loophole

Like the Helmasaur King's mask after the final hammer blow, A Link to the Past's linearity is now broken.

Armed with the Magic Hammer, I figured I'd see what new areas of the Dark World could be broken into. A vague memory pulled me to the Lost Woods, where, at one of the exits to Kakariko Village, I found a portal. After jumping through, I was primed to storm Theives' Town (so called), and quickly retrieved the Titan Mitts. With those great gloves on Link's hot hands, the entire structure of the game came crashing down.

The duck that was trapped in the village weather vane is now free. Link's sword was tempered by the dwarf smiths. The final bottle was retrieved. And, the cape that turns Link invisible was pulled from the Light World's graveyard.

This freedom of movement is what makes A Link to the Past great. If you know the game well, you're not just rewarded with cool stuff, but with the freedom to play its latter two thirds in just about any order you wish. That freedom is a true reward for skill because it puts so much power into a player's hands.

Though, this reward comes at the cost of story. A Link to the Past has one, of course. It's also an important part of the Zelda timeline, but so much of the game's story is in its atmosphere and NPCs, rather than in dialogues or exposition dumps. Or even cutscenes, for that matter. I think you can count the number of cutscenes in A Link to the Past on one hand.

The question is, though, has there ever been a story-heavy game that plays non-linearly if the player knows a trick or two?

Lleviathan vanquished

Lleviathan still put up a fight, but in the end those extra two levels earned through grinding made a real difference. Though, cutting right to the quick, this battle must've gone at least as many rounds as the previous one and Lleviathan used only a fraction of the group attacks that he had before. I only saw the tidal wave attack once as opposed to at least five times in the last battle, and the tail swipe thrice where it'd been busted out a few times more before. Ticks boss enemy AI aside, with stronger party members and more potent curatives I won the day.

What follows the battle is a rather touching reunion of father and daughter. Maybe it's the Welsh eye dialect used for the citizens of Porth Llaffan, but it had me misting up a bit, it did.

The game doesn't linger on this heartwarming scene for long, though. It fades to black, moves time forward a day, and has the party waking up in the mayor's house. There we're told that the ferry's back up and running. No doubt the NPCs comment on this return to service, as well, but this next gentle nudge forward is pretty clear.

Since things are moving along so smoothly so far, I expect that at either fig number three or fig number four we'll encounter a rival fygg collector to whom we'll lose our whole collection around fygg number six. Either that, or the fyggs, once gathered, will rouse some sort of vile demon that your party needs to face down. This is a JRPG, after all, and there's just got to be some sort of twist.

Heavy on the primary sources, please

The latter half of Kohn's chapter on the Renaissance and Reformation is all about the nation he believes is the biggest player in the spread of modern nationalism: England.

His focus on the island nation of northwestern Europe is quite useful for me. It gives me things to argue against with my case for Beowulf as a kind of national poem of Anglo-Saxon Britain.

His spending so much space on England and its progression through the various nationalisms he presents is also helpful because of the definitions of those nationalisms that he provides. Right now it looks like an Old Testament nationalism (seeing a people as set apart by a divine destiny) comes closest to what I think is expressed in Beowulf and other major Anglo-Saxon writings. There's definitely a note of a Germanic sense of superiority in there, too, though not enough to completely crush the Celtic culture the Anglo-Saxons found when they came to Britain's bright shores.

One thing that's becoming clearer the more I read of Kohn is that he uses a lot of quotations. I mean, to the point where there's easily a 70/30 split between quotations and original prose in some paragraphs. It's neat to see history in its makers' words, though.

When Link got Helmasaur'd

The Helmasaur King and I have never gotten along. Every time that I've faced him I've fallen at least once before vanquishing him, the first of the Dark World's fiends. Tonight's session was no exception. I admit it, I struck the reset button on my old Gamecube as soon as the "Game Over" screen appeared. As I pulled out the first satisfying syllable of a favourite four letter word.

On that first part of tonight's session with A Link to the Past, I spent 15 minutes gathering a heart container and the Bombos Medallion, as well as probing my limits in the Dark World. Before the Hookshot, it's a very small world. And it's even smaller before you get the Magic Hammer. Then, a good twenty minutes went into the first dungeon, The Palace of Darkness, before a five minute fight with old H.K. The fight that saw Link getting brained on the business end of that boss' flail of a tail. Well, that's how you've got to imagine a dramatic end to a dramatic fight, anyway.

On my second run through I gathered everything I'd gathered before in a about five minutes, navigated the labyrinthine dungeon in about 14 minutes, and then smashed and slashed Helmasaur King into an explosive end in about three. I also saved at every step of the way, unlike my impulsive first session.

The first dungeon of the Dark World is a big shift from the Light World's three. It's about as tightly designed as the Tower of Hera, but is more puzzling. From figuring out that Link can push statues onto switches, to needing the patience to navigate through mazes infested with fire-breathing Green Kodongos, The Palace of Darkness is definitely a steep step upwards in terms of difficulty. So much so, in fact, that the rest of the Dark World's dungeons are easy in comparison. Really, the only thing that most of the others have on the Palace of Darkness is length. That includes the Swamp Palace, though it too will be made short work of and its Hookshot will come in handy.

An easy coupling for Kay

Well, what I'd feared has come to pass. Much more quickly than I'd expected, too. Yes, Ren and Lin have hooked up. The image that Ren held to keep himself anchored to the world was one of Lin.

What bothers me about this pairing is that it's predictable. Ren and Lin are the book's central characters and as such are easy fodder for coupling.

That said, for Ren the draw is Lin's beauty and unconventional intelligence. For Lin the draw is Ren's rugged good looks and calm self assurance. But in becoming a pair, these two have fallen into a plot rut that is very well-worn: That of the star-crossed lovers.

It seems that getting with Lin has lowered Ren's guard, though Lin's getting with Ren has brought love back into her life. Yet there is danger in the relationship for her as well. More than likely Kitan society turns a blind eye to male infidelity, but severely punishes women for the same act.

Going forward, my hope now turns to Kay's ability to make the wheels if his plot (and main characters' arcs) jump out of this rut in a novel way.

Ideas spurred by nationalism

Kohn's numerical sub-headings are great milestones along the path of his arguments and examples, but naming them would've made them more helpful. As he gets further into the place of nationalism in the Renaissance and Reformation, each of these subsections focuses on a different nation. So far transitional conclusions and descriptive introductions have made each subject clear, but replacing the numbers with names would make for a smoother reading experience.

Not that Kohn's writing is anything but smooth. Although most of this chapter has been summaries of what happened in the regions of Europe that would later become its major nations, the book still reads like a reported story rather than an enumeration of events with causes and effects clearly outlined. It makes for some entertaining reading.

It's also the sort of stuff that further fuels my other projects.

For the Beowulf project Kohn keeps mentioning the conditions in which nationalism thrives and the elements that constitute it. Kohn also seems to have overlooked the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a piece of writing in a mundane language specifically designed to unify a disparate people. I know that this function of the Chronicle has been written on before, but being reminded of it in this capacity has given me another piece of evidence to argue that the early medieval Anglo-Saxons were actually trying to create a national unity. A unity that consumed what was left of the British Celts.

On the less academic side, reading about Castile being isolated within its mountains got me wondering about world building through storytelling. Specifically if it could be possible to achieve the effect of a gradually widening world found in the great RPGs in a series of books.

The big question I'm left with is which one of these matters will be the first to prove useful.

Further adventures in grinding

It seems that different vocations have quite the varied experience point milestones. Since I've had the same two extra party members for the whole of my playthrough thus far, I can't come up with any other explanation for each member having level thresholds about 1000 points either higher or lower than the others. This has made for some varied gains in levels.

It's also a little frustrating that characters don't always get skill points to allocate when they level up. Since these points unlock skills, spells, and special abilities with certain weapon types, they're the real meat of the reward of level building. Taking them away every now and then really cramps the whole process.

Nonetheless, at level 20 across the board, I think I'm ready to take on Lleviathan again. Though before I do, I'll be stocking up on alchemized curatives. Medicinal Herbs just aren't going to cut it.

Kay the mood-setter

Kay is a master of striking a mood. Chapter XV's Ren section is incredible as it sweeps from melancholic solitude to alarmed shock resisted by a stirred, yet calm, will. It's enough to make me forget about the use of another new perspective character.

Actually, as I get further into Part Two, I'm starting to find that Part One could be cut. Not that leaving it in is an editorial oversight, rather, it's nearly all set up, whereas Part Two has more to do with the novel's actual story. As a reader, it feels like Part One is just a warm up for what follows.

At the same time, without Part One, I'm not sure that Part Two would have the same impact. Perhaps it's just a necessary evil.

Getting back to Kay's many perspective characters, Ren and Lin remain my favourites. I can relate to Ren's strong feeling of purpose, and Lin, as an outsider who is nonetheless in the midst of her society's heart, is downright fascinating. I might be misreading some clues (hopefully I am), but it seems like they might wind up as a couple late in the book. However, from where I stand in both of their arcs, pairing them up would be a terrible mistake.

To nationalism via universalism

Moving from a sweeping narrative about a swathe of history to a dense discussion tracing the growth of nationalism, Kohn covers a lot of ground in the last half of his chapter on Rome and the Middle Ages. Dense as it is, were you to boil it down, though, you'd come out with a single word: Rome.

It seems that as things moved toward the Renaissance (or Early Modern period as the new trend in academia would have it), every group of people thought that they would be the ones to unite the world by means of restoring Rome. Some Italians thought it. Some French thought it. Some Germans. Some Eastern Europeans, too. Yet, Kohn holds back any ascription of nationalism to these ideals, since none of them were proposing a nation as a group of people that would be self-aware and autonomous. At the time, "nation" was applied to territories and not social groups. In fact, in this capacity the term was used to denote a division within the larger universal whole of humanity rather than individual groups in and of themselves.

Still, as Kohn points out, the idea of nationalism was there, and just wasn't ready to be expressed. Or, as Michel Foucault might put it, the episteme of the Middle Ages had not yet shifted into that of the early modern period - Western civilization could comprehend this new idea in snatches but not yet adequately express it. It especially was not expressed en masse.

Nonetheless, there seem to be some "national" qualities that could be found in the British Isles earlier than anywhere else in Europe.

Because of their isolation they would be self-aware on a group level fairly early into the Middle Ages. But that raises the question of whether or not that self-awareness was merely geographical or also social or political. Further, Kohn's point about social groups adopting patron saints as a pre-cursor for nationalism, raises the question of whether Beowulf could qualify as such a patron for the Anglo-Saxons.

Clearly, reading Kohn is opening windows onto the issue of medieval Anglo-Saxon nationalism (or whatever it might be called). But, what I'm left wondering is how many of those windows will open onto rich scenic views and how many will open onto brick walls.

After a trip to the woods

Another dungeon done. The Tower of Agahnim took a cool 15 minutes to get through, including the fight with the man himself. A fight in which the bug net featured prominently. This one took a little longer since so many of the rooms are dark. Not to mention, getting by mostly unscathed required more strategy than just barrelling through enemy ranks.

One of the best parts of A Link to the Past is the satisfaction you feel when you stride forth from the Lost Woods with the freshly retrieved Master Sword. Slicing through enemies and shooting an energy beam from your blade when at full hearts always makes you feel like a real bad ass. Doubling the damage you do with a single equipment upgrade never felt so good!

Unfortunately, though, the version of the game on the GBA has been doctored in a few ways. The witch Syrup's assistant is now another witch (who is supposed to be Maple from the Oracles games) instead of the generic enrobed apprentice. Link's uncle doesn't die saying "Zelda is your..." And, most devastatingly of all, the Death Mountain glitch seems to have been fixed. And here I was thinking I could break the game wide open, getting the Titan Mitt well ahead of schedule.

I suppose the first two dungeons will have to be done first after all.

Ren-ing smoothly

Maybe my tastes in fantasy are just more old school. A penchant for classic sword and sorcery stuff that can seem a little cheesy or dated when looked back on from today. As far as I can figure, that's one of the major reasons I've enjoyed all of Ren's chapters. There's never much sorcery (yet), but there are plenty of swords. And Kay really has a way with scenes involving characters being discovered in their hiding places.

Completely in line with his character, the voice of the narrator never gets frantic during this scene, though. Even the pieces of fight choreography are delivered in clean, measured prose. There's nothing in the writing itself to suggest a loud Hollywood-style action sequence as Ren escapes from the barn he'd planned to spend the night in, and instead we're shown someone who very efficiently assesses the situation and reacts accordingly.

Ultimately, the sense that this leaves is that Ren is a chosen person in so far as he believes that he is. This belief fuels his drive. This drive pushes him toward his goals, however lofty. Maybe, as with the matter of storytellers' practices, this chapter is a window onto the reality of Ren Daiyan, since at one point Ren notes that: "The world liked its stories" (294).

Could the storyteller be indulging that desire for stories? Is this story being told as it happens, or is it being reported after the fact by a storyteller who's spinning out a yarn about a young soldier who always strived towards the single goal of restoring his nation's old power?

Back to the old grind

So my last save in Dragon Quest IX was a little further back than I'd remembered. All of my equipment was upgraded with Porth Llaffan's finest, and all of the bookshelves had been raided, but none of the story events had been finished. So I ran through those again (this time, choosing "No" as my answer to Jona's question about whether or not the town was wrong to rely on Lleviathan), and then finally got to grinding.

During the cutscenes' second watch through I was once again mesmerized by the uncanny, glassy expression of Porth Llaffan's Mayor Bryce. When all of the other characters look somewhat lively and vivid, his is a pallid expression that looks like it's played the fool for far too long.

As per the grinding itself, it's a bit on the ambiguous side. What bothers me about it is the game's concentrating so much power in the churches.

Although my party's experience increases regardless of whether or not I've checked to see how much more remains until the next level, knowing about how many battles I'll need to fight makes grinding more quantifiable. Without convenient access to that ability, grinding loses its quantifiable property and becomes much more monotonous.

This extra monotonous climb to higher levels even evokes images of an actual meat grinder when I think about it. But be that as it may, I'll be turning the crank for another while yet.

A Kohn-ucopia of knowledge

I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I'm enjoying The Idea of Nationalism. The abstract art on its cover, and the general nature of its title make it seem like one of the theoretical classics of the twentieth century (up there with the likes of Herbert Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man, and Erich Auerbach's Mimesis). But Kohn spends so much time spinning out a focused, yet broad, narrative of history that it's easy to forget that nationalism is even his theme.

The first half of the chapter on Rome and the Middle Ages, for example, gives a fantastic overview of how the Roman Empire collapsed and split into East and West. Though Kohn doesn't stop there. He goes on to explain, with his concerns with nationalism always at the ready on his narrative's periphery, just what happened between the Church and the State in both the Western and Eastern parts of the divided Empire. All of these matters are treated quickly, and with only some depth, of course, but for someone who's never read much about Eastern European and Mediterranean history, it's downright fascinating.

Yet, at the same time, I'm well aware that Kohn's style of history writing isn't very popular any more (at least in academic circles). Dealing in nationalism on the grand scale that he has so far would be deemed too much of a stretch for modern historians. But there's definitely something to be gained by taking such a long view of things. The idea that one of the major tensions in the late Roman Empire was that of the Empire's own universalism (all peoples in the Empire were considered Romans) and the universalism of Christianity (all people were called to be children of god) is, well, epic.

Plus, Kohn's own nationalism is no doubt showing when he mentions Charlemagne's enemy, the Saxon Duke Widukind. I never even knew that Charlemagne had such an enemy.

Triumph in the Tower of Hera

I'm not sure why the final dungeon in the Light World is called the Tower of Hera.

Perhaps it's because in Greek mythology Hera is a scorned woman, the jealous wife of the very polyamorous Zeus. Just as there would be few true hearts in her eyes, there are very few hearts available in this tower, despite enemies taking generous bites out of Link relative to what we've seen so far.

Or, maybe it's because she was the queen of the gods and was simply the one to deal with to gain admittance into dark, occult secrets. Not that she was the goddess of the occult (that was Hecate's domain), but simply by virtue of being a powerful woman in mythology she has an air of mystery and intrigue about her.

Or, perhaps more mundanely, the Moon Pearl is essentially a piece of jewellery, and Hera is a woman. Though, the fact that the Moon Pearl helps people to keep their real shape in the Dark World does suggest that it has some sort of truth-holding power. Or at least reality maintaining power. Wouldn't it be neat if the Moon Pearl were actually a hold-over from A Link to the Past's original futuristic, sci-fi setting? An item that created some sort of field around Link that made him appear as he wanted/needed to appear to others?

And maybe the old man who gives you the Magic Mirror was originally some old servant robot. That would at least explain his line: "If you wander into a magical transporter, gaze into this mirror." It's a line that sounds just a little too much like a wrecking ball against the fourth wall, even for a 16-bit era adventure game.

Speculation about the Tower of Hera and its treasure aside, it's a tiny dungeon. It claims to be a tower but Link must take an elevator when the screen goes dark between floors because this thing takes minutes to breeze through. The final boss notwithstanding. Though, I was only knocked off of the platform that you're forced to share with the frantic Moldorm three times, and knocked out not once.

At a guess, ten minutes of my thirty minute session went into this dungeon. The other twenty being spent grabbing the mushroom, visiting the Master Sword, and collecting a few stray heart pieces. Along with just jogging from the desert to Death Mountain.

Everything will get so much faster once I free that duck.

The river's bounds

The varying perspectives that Kay offers in River of Stars definitely gives the book a very epic feel. As a storyteller, this varied cast lets Kay become a sort of film director, taking the entirety of his fictionalized Asia as his novel's setting rather than limiting it to where a handful of characters live. Parts of the strangeness encountered throughout Kitai and the Steppes even resemble the oddities on R. Scott Bakker's continent of Eärwa.

But, once again, and contrary to Bakker's The Second Apocalypse series, we're just not given much time with the novel's characters. Though it does seem that there is a boundary to the pool of characters from which Kay draws them.

Chapter XIII follows Lu Chao, the emissary from Kitai and the brother of the poet Lu Chen, as he meets with the Altai war-leader, Wan'yen, and it follows only Lu Chao. Since the last chapter concentrated on a short period of time and this concentrate on a single character, a pattern can be seen emerging.

Despite my earlier impressions, there is a limit of sorts set onto every chapter, but the definition of each chapter's limit changes. Perhaps it's this fluidity to the construction of the book's chapters that leaves me with the impression of flowing water.

On its own, such flowing water is just water. But if looked at from further away it becomes a river. In much the same way, each chapter has featured a nearly stand-alone arc told within the limitations of time or number of perspective characters. Yet, taken together, these chapters form a larger plot that the narrator surely knows but never seems to acknowledge. Just yet, anyway.

The broadening of nationalism

Kohn takes the early leg of both Jewish and Greek cultures as the subject of his first chapter. There's no hiding the ambition here, and his tight focus on how these two cultures moved from being exclusionary to more universal certainly helps. But, I'm intrigued by the holes.

I can't really speak to how other religions developed in their early days, so I've nothing to say against Kohn's placing Jewish nationalism as one of the cornerstones of his construction of the concept. There's very little to say against post-Alexander the Great Greek culture being another one of those cornerstones. But Kohn takes no other nation into account.

While it's definitely true that Greek culture became a major export in the late Hellenistic period and remained such (with some variation after passing through a Roman filter) during the Roman era, Kohn says nothing of other regions. The way he describes the spread of the Greek sense of nationalism as a thing based on intellectual achievement and training it seems as though this sense simply spread evenly everywhere. Records or accounts might not exist among the conquered or overcome, but surely some groups resisted this new culture.

Given the way things went, more than likely these pockets of resistance relented, but even then, their reception of the new culture would be different from that of a readily willing group. It would've been appreciated had Kohn mentioned this point, but I'm willing to bet that such a scenario simply wasn't considered.

Lleviathan wakes

It has been a long while since I played an RPG that lead me down an uncertain path that turned out to be the right one.

After some cutscenes in Porth Llaffan, you're pointed toward the private beach of the town's mayor. Heading in this beach's direction brings you back to the world map, though. My explorer's instincts being what they are, I wandered into what I thought was some extra area. After climbing through it and diligently getting all the treasure, I was pleased to find the game's story waiting for me.

The kicker, though, is that I just wasn't ready for the boss that was also waiting.

The extra "l" in Lleviathan definitely doesn't stand for "lame." What makes it a devastating opponent are its two group attacks. If the beast launches either in successive turns, then it'll simply overwhelm you. However, I was at least able to learn that "Sap" actually works on it, and "Crackle" seems to be its weak point.

Considering that the previous boss was handily defeated, there's been a definite jump in difficulty. Though fighting Lleviathan is really only made difficult by the amount of damage that it deals. That, and chances are "Medicinal Herbs" are no longer the best go-to healing item in the game. Instead, you're better off zooming back to Stornway so that you can create something stronger with the alchemy pot. Simply having the currently strongest curative in local shops would be fine, but this game just doesn't seem keen on hand-holding.

Organic anticipation

Tonight's time with A Link to the Past ran a couple over the usual 20 minutes. Not that a lot was done, rather just that the game doesn't offer a quick way to get from major place to major place until its final third. True, once you get the flippers you can use the "magic waterways of the sea folk," but those sea folk don't have any business on land, and that's just where Link is busiest.

So running over to get those flippers, finishing a heart container and briefly looking for a mushroom used up quite a bit of time. In fact, the run back to the Desert Palace and subsequent whooping handed out to the three sandworms that are the dungeon's boss took little time in comparison.

In no way does the game's lack of a quick way to get around so early in the game work against it, though. Because it's not easy to run from one side of the world map to the other, the game effectively railroads you.

You could go and explore between dungeons, yes, but if you get all of the Light World's goodies (and some of the Dark World's, too) first, then you'll run into fewer insurmountable obstacles. Running into fewer insurmountable obstacles means making fewer return trips to places, which means a more efficient experience. Though there's something to be said for wandering around an area, bumping into some gap or immoveable rock and realizing that there must be something that can help you out further into the game. It's actually an ingenious way to create organic anticipation.

Exploring vocations

Along with hearkening back to classic JRPGs with its plot-powering fetch quest, Dragon Quest IX can be pretty obtuse. After the abbot returns to Alltrades Abbey, I'm invited to change my vocation any time I like and can wander around to sign up for job-specific quests.

But where do I need to go next? The game offered no direct help, so I just set out to wander the continent. After all, a large swathe of this land mass had been unexplored up to this point.

So I set out into the heart of this unknown territory, first going east, and then to the south. Once I reached the continent's southern tip, I found a small fishing town. That seemed a good place to stop, since battling armies of slimes and combined slimes had started to wear down my party. Since it sounds like I'll be able to sail from this village once this Lleviathan business has been settled, I must be in the right place.

Setting aside giving the players the illusion of self-direction, this game's job system (or "vocations," as they say in-game) seems rather clunky to me. When you change vocations, your old one retains its level and spells and such, but all you carry over are the abilities and traits that you picked up from your old vocation. If my main character switched from minstrel to priest, he would drop from level 18 to level one. Where's the incentive in that?

On the one hand you could make some sort of super character, with abilities from all of the vocations. On the other, that sort of thing would take a lot of grinding. Plus, a job system that requires you to leave the main game to change jobs bothers me since the systems I'm most familiar with (such as the one in Final Fantasy V) allow you to change job at any time, and to gain abilities completely separately from your main level.

So Dragon Quest IX's vocation system smells like game elongation to me. Just the sort of thing that someone blogging about their playthroughs doesn't have time for.

When the lazy Susan of characters settles

It's become clear at this point that Kay isn't giving up his lazy Susan of characters any time soon. However, if the rest of the book is anything like chapter twelve, then the array of point of view characters won't be an issue.

In chapter twelve we once again get a set of different perspectives, ranging from Ren's to Lin's father's. But all of these characters are in one place. And, more importantly, they all seem to be shown at or around one set time: the night after Ren, Ziji and Fuyin's scheme to stage an attempt on Lin's life so that Ren looks like he saves her. Unity in setting goes a long way to highlight the importance of this event. Plus, since the whole chapter takes place in such narrow geographical and temporal scopes we're actually given time to empathize with characters.

However, it doesn't seem likely that this tight structure will become the norm for the book. "Part Three" looms on the next page, and that's likely to herald a shift into a completely different direction.

Power Gloves get!

Well, A Link to the Past just got easier. At the end of my last 20 minute session I grabbed the Ice Rod, bought the second bottle, and got the Power Gloves. The Ice Rod is kind of incidental (like the two pieces of heart I picked up), but the bottle will be incredibly useful for my "no death" goal. Then there're the Power Gloves.

Ah, the Power Gloves. They aren't as devastating to the order of the game as the Titan Mitts are in the Dark World, but these bad boys let me get the Flippers and general potions. And, with the flippers, I can visit the fairy behind the waterfall to get some item upgrades and the fairy in Lake Hylia to boost my item capacities. Plus, I'll be able to swim out to the hobo living under the bridge at Lake Hylia, the very one who gives me bottle number three.

Actually, when I go there, I'll be addressed by name and everything. This has already come up quite a bit in Kakariko Village - but it doesn't happen anywhere else really. The thief-type characters you meet in caves don't use your name, neither does the sage-looking guy in the cave near the Desert Palace. Which leads me to believe that Link is some sort of regular around Kakariko Village.

Of course, Kakariko being the only real town on the world map, this makes sense from a realistic sort of perspective. Link and his uncle don't look like they farm around their house on the hill, so they must deal with the villagers for food and clothing. Perhaps that sort of familiarity is all it is. Link is just another face that the villagers frequently see. Yet, as cool as it would be for Link to have already distinguished himself in some way, that's probably just what it is. Such familiarity would explain why you get people saying that they still trust you in spite of rumours and that you look like a decent enough guy.

Still. It leaves me wondering just what life was like for Link and his uncle before the game begins.

Nationalism: a primer

Although Kohn is writing in a wildly different time than our own, I continue to find his definitions of nationalism, its elements, and examples of it to be quite enlightening. So far (having just wrapped up chapter one) these have been simplistic. As an example, he constantly highlights the idea that shared experience is necessary for nationalism to develop. Nonetheless, this makes the first chapter an excellent primer and raises my expectations for the rest of the book.

Getting a little meta, actually, being fresh off of H.I. Marrou's masterpiece and considering that he was writing in the same decade as Kohn, there's some national character shining through Kohn's writing. Granted, education isn't nearly as racially charged as nationalism can be, but Kohn's not afraid of reporting generalizations, unlike Marrou. Though that's the problem with nationalism. Just as no land, even when defined by people, will be uniform over the expanse of national borders, so too will no people, even when defined by the land, be uniform.

But, Kohn is quick to define nationalism as an identity that a group agrees on and then gives themselves up to. In his thinking, nationalism succeeded religion as the driving force of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He also notes that in the future this mindset may well be replaced with something else. Though he leaves the sense that nationalism will still be around in individual psyches when that happens, just as religion is still kicking around in most people's.

Where the river of time speeds its flow

River of Stars, going into part three, is a very action packed read. That Ren's and Lin's stories finally intertwine definitely contributes to this sense of great momentum.

However, I have to take issue with the passage of time that brings these two stories together. There are some spoilers in what follows, so read on with care.

Ren and Lin are brought together as part of Ren's plan to rapidly ascend through the army. His reason for wanting to become a high ranking officer being simply that it will give him some power over the outcome of Kitai's upcoming war the barbarians to the north. This is a fine ambition and is a concrete goal that helps to make Ren's character all the stronger.

But it's an ambition that would take time to follow. A lot of time. Even with the help of a chief magistrate, climbing up the ranks would take years. In the book, however, chapters 11 and 12 show Ren's initiating his plan and, subsequently, its coming to fruition in his being the imperial guard who saves Lin's life. Such an act is sure to rocket him even further up the ranks. Though, getting into the imperial guard in the first place would take time, even with the favour of a magistrate.Yet, in the book it seems that no less than a year could have passed between chapters.

Eastern Palaces and currency declines

One dungeon down, 10 to go. There's really nothing else to say.

I've played through the first dungeon of A Link to the Past (the Eastern Palace) so often that it's become rote. The image that kept popping up in my mind while playing through it: a straight line.

That's not to say that the Eastern Palace is a direct sort of dungeon. But it's definitely designed to get you to collect all three of the major dungeon items: the map, the compass, and the item. Though, part of that is just statistics, since more people are likely to turn right when given the choice (if I'm properly remembering my signs from the Dungeon Man dungeon in Earthbound). Not that getting everything in this dungeon really tacks on that much extra time. From start to finish, it must've taken just a little over 10 minutes to get through.

What I don't understand, though, is why you're given so many rupees. There's a cache in a room behind Sahasrala, there's a room full of blue rupees in the dungeon, and chests give you fifties and hundreds like the rupee's as valuable as all the sand in Hyrule. Actually, considering the fact that an empty bottle is going for 100 rupees in the Kakariko Village marketplace, maybe that's not far from the truth.

Beginning to think nationally

Next up on the non-fiction block is Hans Kohn's The Idea of Nationalism. From what little I've read of it so far, it looks like it's exactly the book I needed to get my head into an old, academic, Beowulf-as-pre-national-epic project (Tongues in Jars, where you can find my translations of the poem, is something of a starting point for this project). The end point of this project is likely a book (or perhaps just a long piece) about how Beowulf is the result of the Anglo-Saxons taking Celtic tales and mixing them with their own epic/heroic leanings. Or, if not the result, that the epic poem is at least the expression of an attempt to do so. Nationalism comes into the project via the Anglo-Saxon's obsession with finding their place in the world as a people.

Though, Hans Kohn would have some choice words for anyone who posited that nationalism (at least as we know it) existed before the 18th century.

Yes, having been published in 1943, Mr. Kohn has some very starchy ideas that just don't hold water any more. That is, if they ever did at all.

Among these ideas is that "alien [food and customs]...appear to [a person] unintelligible and indigestible" (5). As someone with Irish and Polish roots who would eat sushi on a daily basis if he could, I'd say Kohn has some explaining to do. Explaining that he never gets around to, because such statements are just taken as fact.

Interestingly, though, in the next paragraph Kohn writes: "The more primitive men are, the stronger will be their distrust of strangers[.]"

Given that idea, two things are apparent: First, we've certainly become much more civilized over the past 70 years; and second, reading through this book could get a little bumpy.

Facing the pushover in the Tower of Trades

The main quest in Dragon Quest IX seems too easy so far.

After making my way through the Tower of Trades my party was nearly exhausted. There were healing items enough in the bag and my characters' inventories, but everyone's MP ranged from low to nil. Since this was going to be the first battle for a fygg, I thought I'd get destroyed given the state of my party.

But, smacking the boss around with physical attacks, squeezing healing items in regularly, and getting my mage to cast "Crack" several times was all it took to defeat the Master of Nu'un. No one was knocked out, nor was anyone poisoned, paralyzed, or put to sleep. As far as I can tell, the challenge of this boss is just hanging on long enough to take him out.

Since he looks quite a bit like Cell from Dragon Ball Z, I was expecting the battle with him to be a desperate struggle.

The Master of Nu'un, the boss of the Tower of Trades.

Hopefully the game's difficulty will ramp up again, bringing my party face to face with a battle that's truly fierce and puzzling.

Things up-river are looking better

River of Stars gets much better as the second part winds to a close. Ren's plot gets under way. Lin's plot gets under way. The major plot of the entire book gets under way. Everything's moving at this point in the story, and although there are so many pieces in the machine you can finally see most of them spinning together in what looks like it will be an interesting harmony.

But. It shouldn't have taken over 240 pages to get to this point.

A valid question, of course, is: "Why did you keep reading if the first 240 pages were a chore or a bore?"

My answer: "It's been 240 pages already?"

Kay's writing really is that good. It's got this flowing quality to it that lets it melt in your mind rather than on its way off the page. This flow and the handful of interesting characters that he presents help those first 240 pages to really zoom by.

Though, at the same time, those first 240 pages are like sweeping the viewer's eye across a wall-spanning tapestry at a slow and steady rate. Those pages are filled with lovely passages that set the book's tone gorgeously. Yet, those 240 pages could have been put to better, plot-serving or character-building use.

The end of Classical education (as H.I. Marrou knows it)

If there's one thing that bothers me more than anything about works of history it's when historians call the period after  the fall of Rome the "Dark Ages."

This bothers me because it's terribly biased towards Classical culture.

Sure, the invading peoples had no organized system of education or writing, but they weren't entirely ignorant. Theirs was just a different kind of knowledge and teaching. Besides, it's not like their leaders were such that they couldn't appreciate cultures other than their own. Marrou makes this clear, thankfully, when he writes of Theodoric of the Visigoths. Though he also repeatedly bemoans the threat that the invaders posed to Classical culture.

Matters of ridiculous bias aside, Marrou wraps things up nicely in his last two chapters. After a brief bit about the emergence of monastic schools, he then concludes with the idea that Classical culture lives on in the contemporary trivium/quadrivium (Arts and Sciences/Maths) educational structure. This sort of continuity is what I search for in history. But I can't help but wonder what would be different had Rome's invaders come into writing and the like on their own.

Overall, Marrou's style lends itself well to a work as long as A History of Education in Antiquity. He is, for the most part, straightforward and direct, but doesn't shy away from the odd exclamation point. Thus, his book is informative and perspective-broadening to some extent, while also possessing the personality of a serious, yet kindly, professor.

Link eludes capture

One of the reasons why video games entries have been spotty lately is because I was waiting.

Waiting for a good time to test out my video capture set up.

Unfortunately, it looks like there are a few bugs that need working out, particularly my program's telling me that there is no capture device attached in the middle of displaying what's being fed through my capture device. That device by the way is the Diamond VC500. The software I'm running is Ulead VideoStudio 10. And yes, I'm running it all on an old version of Windows (XP).

Another of the reasons for the scarcity of entries about video games is that I was waiting for an opportune time to marathon A Link to the Past, my favourite entry in the Zelda series. Since I don't currently own a 3DS (or a 2DS, for that matter), I can't play A Link Between Worlds just yet and so I figured that its predecessor is the next best thing. That time's not come up, but more important than marathoning it, I want to get through the game without dying a single time.

Unfortunately, all I have with me (aside from an emulated copy, either on the Virtual Console (VC) or through less legitimate means) is the GBA port. Since I've already played through it on the GBA, I figured why not put the old Gamecube Game Boy Player to use and play it on the TV (or computer monitor, as the case may be). The trouble with the game's GBA port, though, is that Nintendo either forgot or neglected to port over Link's grunts from the original game. Instead Link's cries and struggles call up the Nintendo 64 entries in the series thanks to the use of child Link's sound effects.

Not only does this ruin the charm of the original game, but it assumes that this game's Link is the same age as child Link. But what in the game itself even suggests that?

Is it that he's living with his uncle? That he isn't in the middle of military training?

Everyone in Kakariko seems to know Link - unless he's some sort of Dennis the Menace-type character before the game begins, it seems like he'd need to have been active around town before people would be able to know him. To do that, he'd have to be at least a little older than the Link of Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask. I'd like to peg his age as that of the main character of a fun Zelda-esque Genesis game called Crusader of Centy: 14.

So, why am I playing this version when there's a perfectly good port on the VC? Because controlling it with the Gamecube controller's analog stick almost simulates walking on ice. It's just a little bit too sensitive. Considering I know the game well from playing through it several times, I welcome the extra challenge.

"Storytellers do that sort of thing."

I'm not sure how I missed it before, but maybe the reason that I find the narrator in River of Stars so interesting is because it's unreliable.

On page 208, a single line suggests that the narrator is definitely shiftier than you might expect, especially if you're still reeling from the propriety and socially constrained court intrigue of the book's first part. This line comes at the end of a list of people who also heard a sound that the recently killed (and just a short while earlier introduced) O-Yan heard before his death:

"It was also possible that someone, later, spinning a tale out of the old sorrow of a young man's dying, might have added that sound to twist the hearts of listeners a little more. Storytellers do that sort of thing."

Taking this new perspective on the book's narrator has made me pay closer attention to the narrative. However, my ongoing issue with the book isn't its narration or narrator, but the constant cycling through of characters. We're told that O-Yan is a young man of promise, a typical chosen one - but we aren't ever given a chance or a reason to care about what this destiny may or may not be. To some extent, that seems to be the point that Kay is getting at here, since one of the book's emerging themes is the fickleness of fortune, even among those who are "chosen."

With such a theme emerging, Ren's plan to climb the army's ranks through his connection to Wang Fuyin, now a chief magistrate of the city of Jingxian, is cast against a very dull backdrop indeed. In fact, Ren's effort has been quite conveniently set up to fail in the worst way possible. Though not just because of some unknowable fate.

Fuyin is portrayed as a crafty character who has honed his calculating side as he's risen through the magisterial ranks himself. I expect some form of trouble to come out of Ren's dealings with him.

Christians and Pagans learning together

I'm right with Marrou when he writes that many will be shocked to learn that early Christians didn't have their own school system.

As someone who went to both a Catholic elementary and high school, this revelation is particularly interesting simply because the biggest difference between separate schools and their public equivalents then was the inclusion of a specifically Catholic bent to assemblies, health classes, and other such sessions that were more about discussions (as it were) than the delivery of facts. I imagine that here and now in 2013 classes about religion (even if just a section of social studies or history curricula) can be found in public and separate schools alike.

In the late Roman Empire (which I'll just consider the Empire post-Christ, for convenience's sake), though, this lack of a separate school system is interesting because it puts Christians and non-Christians together in a very fundamental institution. Of course, religious and moralistic training were, even in the minds of the fathers of the early Church, the duty of the family rather than some teacher. But even that says something that seems quite alien from the modern world.

For, placing the onus of religious education onto parents suggests that religion wasn't as public a matter then as it is now. Sure, there were festivals and holidays that would have hosted parades and plays and public events, but in the day to day lives of people the fact that Christians and non-Christians were educated together with no real alarm being raised (though maybe this is just because the late Roman Empire had no FOX News equivalent) suggests that when it came to individual, public displays of religion they were more subtle than ornate cross necklaces or bible-quoting t-shirts. People, at least perhaps, tried to show the morality that they learned from their beliefs not through symbols and billboard-esque displays but simply through their mundane, daily actions and reactions to the world around them.

Perhaps the practice of leaving alternative religious education (which Christian education would have been then) to the family was regarded in some quiet way as the proper thing. And that's just what those in power in the late Roman Empire sought. After all, the ever-cherished practice of rhetoric had begun to falter, and when people cannot speak properly it was firmly believed that they could neither think nor act properly. So as long as those Christian pupils learned their rhetoric well, perhaps they were a sign of some sort of resurgence.

Or, maybe the reason for separate Christian schools being a rarity in the late Roman Empire is simply that Christians and the rest of those in said Empire got along fine, as Candida Moss argues in The Myth of Persecution.

Brawling in the tower

Dragon Quest IX's next part, the collecting of the fyggs seems like a good piece of classic JRPG gameplay. The tower where the abbot of Alltrades of Abbey allegedly went is like something out of Breath of Fire or, well, an earlier Dragon Quest game. As much as it's a dungeon, there aren't many puzzles to speak of aside from the navigational puzzle inherent in each floor's layout. Instead of such brain teasers, the dungeon's battle frequency also takes some hints from old school JRPGs since there are a ton of enemies spawning all over the screen.

So far this retread is fine with me. However, I do wish that there were more spells that hit all enemies rather than one or two. Those that strike a single group of enemies are oddly prevalent, particularly because most battles are with a couple of different enemies. Thus, spells that target a "group" of monsters may help with two monsters out of three, but they only wound them rather than doing enough damage to bring them down.

On the other hand, having characters at level 18 probably isn't indicative of the game's being more than 1/6 finished. Looking at the map just for Alltrades Abbey's island, with its cave and tower, and mysterious formations really makes me wonder at the sheer size of this game. So, maybe I just haven't come across a powerful, offensive, group-targeting spell yet.

Legitimizing teaching

The ways in which Rome ran its state schools is indeed fascinating.

Though, more than anything, what had me widening my eyes as I read was how state funds were what legitimated the teaching profession.

As I've noted before, in Greece teaching was a last ditch career move (as it was throughout most of Rome's pre-fall existence). It was a poorly paid job and grouped with prostitution because teachers were being paid for a service. Land and goods were fine things to earn a living from, but services? Never!

Yet, it sounds as though Rome's designating things like academic chairs and having spots on the government payroll for a very small number of teachers made teaching enviable. Of course, these spots were truly far and few between - even Rome had a very limited number of such positions.

The whole situation reminds me of the current state of teaching in (at least) Ontario. There are just a few well-paying spots and thousands of people vying for them. Meanwhile, there are those teaching and tutoring on their own, just as there were in Rome, thus buttressing the comparison. Hopefully a barbarian invasion isn't what it takes to fix our current bout with employment issues in the teaching profession, though.

Throwaway characters

As I get further into River of Stars, I'm reminded of Infinite Jest. The plots of the two books are wildly different, their settings strike up a stark contrast, and the authors' writing styles are definitely at odds with one another (though also similar, at least in their using a distinct "oral storyteller" voice).

What really reminds me of Infinite Jest, though, is how Kay keeps introducing new characters (some of whom are only around for a chapter or less).

However, using these varied perspectives isn't working for me. As I read onward I'm interested in learning more about the world that Kay has created through the varied viewpoints in which he presents it, but aside from Ren and Lin I feel very little attachment to his characters. Conversely, I found myself getting invested in nearly all of Infinite Jest's characters.

The reason for this investment being that Wallace really shows you his characters' inner workings through the ticks and habits that each had. Unsurprisingly, Kay does that quite well with Lin and Ren, but the other characters that are introduced just aren't clicking with me. They are, however, building the book's world quite nicely. Though I can't say that it's a grand new world with interesting people in it.

A missing rite?

No doubt Marrou's guess that the divide between youth and adulthood goes back to Indo-European societies is close to the truth. It's not really all that curious as to why human life is divided into these two parts. Humans love stories, and stories always have turning points. Plus, the oldest stories that survive are predominantly heroic stories. Stories that fit Joseph Campbell's model of the Hero's Journey (a plot outline that fits very snugly over modern classics like Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter series, and so on).

Campbell's model is also a map of the coming of age story, as the hero moves from his/her hometown towards the unknown, eventually returning to that hometown a changed person. Having left a child and returned an adult. The division of life into youth and adulthood is definitely deeply entrenched.

This brings to mind all of the rituals that cultures and civilizations practice to mark the entrance of a child into adulthood, and that the West really doesn't have any such thing. You might consider moving out of your parents' house the North American rite. It takes a person out of their comfort zone and faces them with a whole set of unknowns.

In fact, moving out could well be the ritual. Why else would there be such a reaction to the struggles of the millenials and their returning to live with their parents again? I mean, setting aside the concrete reasons people might give, moving back in with your parents could all too easily be seen as a refusal of the adulthood initiation ritual.

The calming of the river

Two chapters into River of Stars' second part, I'm feeling quite calmed. It could be that I simply didn't follow enough of the political goings on of the first part, or that the time jump that happened in the middle of it threw me for a loop, but the second part's big picture is clearer to me. That is, the second part's larger plot arc (which Kay is building up with several shorter ones, as he did in part one), is clearer to me than the first part's. In short, I'm pretty sure that Ren is planning to strike a blow for the peasants of the area.

Being able to see what's going on here has helped me to get over the shock of having the book's two main characters separated in this way. From what I'd read about the book before picking it up, I'd thought that Ren's and Lin's stories are tightly intertwined. This might be the case in the book's last section, or maybe this interconnection feeds into some larger reveal closer to the book's conclusion, but right now it still bothers me. Mostly because it forces one story to stop while the other catches up.

Actually, if Kay was trying to make the two characters' arcs seem like they were running temporally parallel, it seems like the goal is just too lofty. Both characters are from wildly different socio-economic classes, and, shy of some reference to the assassin that was sent to kill Lin, I can't come up with a tidy way for Kay to let the reader know that these two parts events are happening simultaneously. Currently the two feel worlds apart - and not in the same way Aomame and Tengo were in 1Q84.

I will say that leaving the time between Ren's joining the bandits and his becoming a respected member of their ranks unexplained is a good move. Whatever he experienced on the road to his present, seeing it come out in the way that Ren acts, reacts, and thinks is much more rewarding than being regaled with the tale of a swashbuckling young man fighting to gain the respect of his fellow bandits and the area's citizens.

A romantic notion

Influence is a curious thing. On the personal level, it's plain unpredictable where a person will gather it from. When it comes to larger trends and fields of study or art, it's still wild, but at least hemmed in by sheer size.

For example, just how much influence did Roman legal education have on medieval romance? From what he writes in the History of Education in Antiquity, you'd think the answer is "quite a lot." At first brush, this is a tempting idea, too. Practice cases in Roman legal training were paradoxical hypothetical situations that sound like arcs from modern soap operas (which probably grew out of medieval romances in some way).

The connection between the roots of genre fiction and Roman legal training also make me wonder if that is why so many law students/lawyers get into genre fiction (Guy Gavriel Kay and Terry Brooks among them). Fantasy and science fiction are the modern day equivalents of medieval romance (knights, court intrigue, quests, magic, et c.) after all.

However. Given that many of Menander's plays have plots that are as closely knit as Rome's practice legal cases, Marrou is probably overstating the influence of Rome's legal training on medieval romance. Plus, ancient Greek and Roman novels are known to have existed, the plots of which could probably be revived in Greek soap operas without anyone noticing.

The reappearance of Ren

So Ren Daiyan finally reappears in the second chapter of River of Stars' second part. And Kay drops us right into the middle of his story.

Ren's a full-fledged bandit at this point, but retains his education and is still in touch with his father. Ren's also looking to right the world's wrongs, but in the more immediate present he and fellow bandit Ziji have gone to Chunyu to gather information. Kay doesn't explain Ren's trip beyond that. But such simple motivation is fine, since Kay continues to sketch wonderful characters as he guides his readers through this part of Kitai. Not to mention the chase scene that seems imminent.

From what I've read of him, one thing has become clear to me about Kay (and maybe fantasy writers more generally). Plenty of dialogue means plenty of motion. The reason why I feel that a chase is imminent as Ren and Ziji get help from two children is because this part of the chapter is almost entirely dialogue, whereas the rest of it is description. Alternating between these two does a lot for a book's pacing, it seems.

It might seem like I'm just stating the obvious here, but what the patterns of dialogue and description mean and how they affect pacing are small, but important things to learn. As a writer, pacing is essential for keeping your readers interested, and as a reader, more can be taken from a book if you learn how to read its signals. If you're reading a first rate author, most of the time those signals will prove true and your anticipations will be rewarded, and a few rare times, they'll not be and your sense of wonder will be fully engaged. I have yet to see if Kay can be considered first rate on this count, but it seems likely.

Nonetheless, Kay's holding Ren's story back until part two makes it seem that River of Stars' parts should instead be separate books. However welcome it is, the shift between characters is still jarring.

Words well used

As Marrou makes clear in his writing about Roman education, rhetoric continued to be based on hard and fast rules and formulae. A good speech had specific parts and those parts could be filled out with particular elements appropriate to the occasion, audience, desired tone, and so forth.

Such attention to detail casts a pall of the magical over rhetoric, at least in my mind. Curiously enough, the same sort of attention was paid to Roman ritualistic magic. Just as an effective speech was described as having various sections, so too did the prescribed ritual for convening with some spirit or deity so as to request some favour or other. What this leaves me wondering is which came first?

Was Roman ritual magic (and the Greek version before it), basically a way to hold a conversation with some supernatural force, borne out of the political use of words? Or did those who were born with gilded tongues take what they had originally used for religious or occult purposes and turn it to the political at some point in ancient history?

Given the sacred power of rulers, I also wonder if somehow the magical and the political weren't more closely related at some distant point in human history. Perhaps at one time having a way with spoken words was viewed as a gift that entitled its wielders to hold power over others, on both a natural (if someone's persuasive, they're simply persuasive), and religious (their quick wits being viewed as a sign of a close and open connection to the divine) level.

Maybe, at some point in history, ritualistic magic and rhetoric were the same thing, understood as simply the use of words to affect the world around you. This could be closer to the truth than you might expect. After all, studies have shown that swearing when you hurt yourself eases the pain, so maybe whatever magic there was around words themselves in that distant past has persisted in some small way into our own world.

Still waiting on a promise's fulfilment

I understand that Guy Gavriel Kay is working with some heavy Chinese influences in River of Stars. But, so far, one idea that he has made extensive use of has been to the book's detriment: using a multitude of point of view characters, no matter how socially small they are at the time.

This bothers me because since the first few chapters of part one, I've come across nothing else about Ren Daiyan, the son of small town official who runs away and becomes a bandit. Since then Kay has introduced (as perspective/major characters) a poet, another official, that official's daughter, her husband, the Emperor of Kitai, the Deputy Prime Minister, his wife, an assassin, and a servant girl who effectively copies what the Deputy Prime Minister's recently deceased wife did when interacting with him to seduce him. Those last two have been featured in an average of 8 pages apiece.

I, along with millions of others, am eagerly awaiting the Winds of Winter (the next book in A Song of Ice and Fire). As such, I've had some experience reading books with multiple viewpoint characters.

And, to be honest, there's nothing wrong with any of Kay's characters.

But if the books' different parts can be compared to the acts of a play, I feel like part one, looking back from where I am enmeshed in part two, did very little work setting up any sort of premise. In fact, the first section of part two, where we see the Xioalu emperor thinking his way through the various trades and political allegiances of the lands of Kitai, Xioalu, and Kislik, establishes the world much more effectively in two pages than the whole of the book's first part.

What frustrates me about this lack of events in part one is that it makes the book feel like it has no momentum whatsoever. For 150 pages, very little actually happens in River of Stars' part one. In it, we're introduced to major characters, we see them live on and struggle as time jumps ahead from when Ren and Lin are children to when they're young adults, and we witness some political manoeuvrings along with their ripples.

But if you were to ask me what the book's plot is I would have to say that it's about an empire that is changing and how these changes effect people and politics. Anything that goes deeper will no doubt be dredged up later in the book, but aside from the characters and Kay's descriptive passages, I'm not sure that I would feel interested in reading on.

So far, if this book were a ring, it would be a lovely ring with a finely handcrafted setting complete with scrolls and tiny flowers, but the stone on it would be pyrite.

While things change, things stay the same

Literary scholars of Rome were the ancient analogues of modern day mega fans. The way Marrou notes these scholars' knowledge (including knowing the life of a character who appears in two lines of the Aeneid (Marrou 377)), they sound like they would have been trivia buffs extraordinaire.

But Marrou doesn't explicitly state that these scholars love their minutiae. Instead he frames their extensive knowledge as something that's the result of their love of learning for its own sake. This quality is admirable, but the sense that I get from Marrou's notes is that the majority of Romans frowned upon such practice. Why? Because it did nothing for the State.

I know that this is a relatively small point, but it sounds like this is another inheritance of the West care of Rome. Today, as then, it's easy to dismiss English Lit as just learning for learning's sake (and not so easy to defend your choice to get two degrees in it). But studying literature now, as then, imbues people with a greater sense of humanity. But my fellow arts majors and I don't need to sound this cry alone, Science is finally standing up for her older sister as more and more studies show the psychological and social benefits of reading fiction.

A broken promise?

I'm still not sure if River of Stars has a single narrator that simply speaks in a different voice for different characters, but I realized something while reading today. The way that Kay slips between perspective characters reminds me of R. Scott Bakker's work. Maybe this shuffling POV is just a trait of contemporary Canadian fantasy. Whether it is or isn't, though, it's greatly appreciated.

The mark of a great storyteller is his or her ability to bring a story's characters, setting, and plot to life. The narrative style that Kay uses does this excellently. Though I worry that by the end of the book it will have become too exhausting or overreaching, leaving the story's delivery overwrought. So far there aren't any concrete signs of this sort of overloading of perspectives. However, the way that the book starts makes it seem that it follows a boy and a girl's life. At this point though, the girl has received far more attention.

My problem with this isn't that there isn't a gender balance (there isn't) or that the girl's plotline isn't very interesting (it is). My problem with the current pacing of the two intertwined stories is that at this point in the story Kay's promise of two main characters (a promise I found implied in the book's first two chapters) does not look like it's going to get fulfilled. Of course, 400+ pages do leave a lot of room for it to be.

Origins of the Western canon

The root of the Western canon is discovered! Like so many other aspects of modern curricula and modern modes, it goes back to Rome. Specifically, first century Rome when the fashion in literary circles swung from studying living poets to looking much further back to the early Latin poets (your Virgils and your Terences).

As I noted before, there's a certain arrogance inhering in studying works of your own time. As I type that, the fact that modern education actually teaches a lot of contemporary writing comes to mind. But under current circumstances and in our current system, it's not arrogant to use modern writing in teaching. Why? Because there's just so much of it.

Antiquity was a great stranger to the printing press. Scrolls and codexes took time to make, along with various resources of great value. People had to be sure that they wanted to write down what they were writing down because it might well cost them an otherwise valuable sheep or scroll of papyrus (not to mention the ink and time needed).

In a way, then, authors had to have a high opinion of themselves (or others had to, at least) to go ahead and write. It could be argued that the "traditional" publishing model is a continuation of this sort of valuation before writing, only the value isn't necessarily of the materials it takes to make a book, but rather the returns that a third party can expect on the content (and context) of a book.

Because we have so much writing in print and publicly available today, I think there's an unspoken understanding that no single perspective can be privileged over another (the foundation of any literary canon).

All writers (and all perspectives) worth studying have insightful things to say, and so the onus of arrogance is really taken off of the society at large and put onto the individual instructor when modern works are taught. Of course, at this point in the conversation "arrogance" becomes the wrong word. "Confidence" or "interest" are better - "passion," even.

After all, the massive variety of great works across genres and forms works as a silent rust that's settled onto the Western canon. And rust never sleeps.

Who's telling this tale anyway?

Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars is difficult for me to judge. It's a fantastic book, as of page 150, but I'm not sure about the book's narrator. That is, I'm not familiar enough with Kay's books to say whether or not this narrator is especially tailored to his attempt at Chinese history-inspired fantasy, or if it's just how his narrator always is.

Based on what I recall of the first few chapters of Kay's Tigana, this narrator's quite different. If memory serves, Tigana was written in the same way that most epic fantasy is written now. It has various point of view characters and the different characters each have their own voice come through in their respective chapters' narration.

To some extent, the same thing is happening in River of Stars, with one twist: the book reads like it's narrated by a single person who imitates the point of view characters' voices. The difference may be subtle, but the impression that I'm left with is that of a well-versed story teller putting on voices for each member of its cast of characters instead of one who gets lost in those characters and their points of view.

To concretize this a bit, what makes River of Stars different from, say, one of the books in A Song of Ice and Fire is that its narrator seems to have some sort of motive. Whomever Kay's narrator is, it relates everything as if he or she was there and watching, observing, as if it were some omnipresent entity who will later use its observations to judge those it observes.

Slaves, students, and you

Although he doesn't come out and say anything about it plainly, I'm starting to wonder where Marrou stands on the matter of slavery. When he writes of Roman slavery practices he seems to romanticize them. As he describes it, the Romans treated their slaves fairly well, though covering them extensively isn't part of Marrou's work in the History of Education in Antiquity.

Nonetheless, that slaves and their masters would share common interests and hold conversations on these topics, that they would take on the role of teachers (again, a profession despised and of low esteem, as in ancient Greece), and get to be close enough to their charges to be their moral instructors makes Roman slavery sound not half bad. Of course, slaves would have had no rights, owned no property or land, and been largely disregarded in public forums. I'm sure a fair few members of Generation Y feel that they can relate.

This romantic image of the slave and master getting along swimmingly is bolstered by the romantic passage from an ancient Roman text book that chronicles a day in the life of a Roman student. The account has some large silences and the student it chronicles is almost as upbeat about things as announcers in 1940s PSAs.

What's a little worrying, though, is that Marrou doesn't analyze this account as much he should. Though, writing in those same 1940s no doubt meant taking historical evidence at a much cleaner face value than historians are expected to today. This slips in analysis is still troubling, though, since everything else that I've come across in the book is quite firmly grounded.

Notes on alchemy

Strangely, the work of finding alchemy recipes in Dragon Quest IX is quite streamlined. The first batch of them are found in Coffinwell, a town that you access after you can first get the alchemy pot (the "Krak Pot"). I was completely expecting that you'd find all sorts of recipes in all of the game's towns. Though I was also expecting the recipes to be found individually. Instead, when you find a book of alchemy you get anywhere between three to six recipes. This really speeds up their acquisition.

It's also interesting that the majority of recipes that I've found so far are for items that can be bought. Maybe this is just because I was a bit slow in getting the Krak Pot, just picking it up after arriving in Alltrades Abbey. That is, the part of the game's world where the first fygg is found.

Instead of offering a way to get ahead with your equipment, from the recipes I've seen so far, alchemized equippables seem primarily to be another way to customize your outfits. Though it's also how you get the best equipment in the game - some way down the road, of course.

Item

Aside from the three weapons you find in the towers, I'm not sure why Pandora's Tower has treasure chests. Their contents are rare items, sure, but I can't see why those items couldn't just be dropped by enemies on very rare occasions.

Actually, when I was last in the Ironclad Turret I fought enemies that dropped nothing at all.

I'm  not sure if this happened because their carcasses vanished while they were off screen, or if they were just item-drop duds. Not getting anything for my troubles (this was in the room with those wall-crawling, salamander-like creatures and an armoured servant beast) was mildly annoying, though. Especially since one of the deadbeat dead beasts was the servant beast - so I may have lost out on some quality beast flesh.

At least it turned out that the chest I had missed in the Crimson Keep was a Shard of Divinity. I'm down to my last one, and have almost nothing in the way of curatives. As a result of this state of my inventory (and my reluctance to back track for more curatives) quick escapes are going to be a major part of my strategy as I make my way through the rest of the Ironclad Turret.

The size of the world

Now that the game's opened up to some extent, Dragon Quest IX feels almost overwhelming. 

When I was given Xenoblade Chronicles as a gift and played a few hours into it, I was floored. There's just so much stuff in that game. There's an unbelievably huge world to travel, a whole network of relationships to tend to, and an item system that's simply extensive. At least, that's the impression I was left with after those first few hours of play. 

Dragon Quest IX now feels similar, but mostly in terms of the size of its world. I am definitely glad that the teleportation spell "Zoom" costs 0 MP. 

But Dragon Quest IX also has an alchemy system. So, as seems to be the case with Xenoblade Chronicles, and is the case with Pandora's Tower, inventory management is likely to make up a considerable chunk of the game. So far, alchemizing things simply gets you stronger items, and helps you to solve some quests. But I wouldn't put it past the game's developers to get you to combine items to move the plot forward at a point or two down the road.

Aside from that vague sense of fetch quest-foreboding, the game really feels vast. The cause of this sense of enormity is the way that the overworld is broken into several separate maps. This, along with the Starflight Express' basically being a warp point rather than a proper vehicle, works to make the world feel huge. It's not just something that can be contained in one map screen, or trudged across, oh no. 

It's likely that this overworld sprawl was necessary to keep within the DS' limitations. But, those limitations paradoxically give rise to a game world that feels much larger than it would were it just another of the continuous, rolling overworlds featured in most 16-bit era J-RPGs.

One good playwright brings forth another

After reading through Norma Miller's collection of Menander's plays I feel like I need to brush up my Shakespeare.

Both of these authors' plays are still relevant, in spite of time. But both also have elements that seem odd or even uncomfortable to us.

Shakespeare has his tween-age weddings and near cast-wide die offs. Menander has a whole other culture's references (are cooks still stereotyped as thieves?), and quite a bit of casual rape.

That is, rapes are central to quite a few of his plots, and more often than not the raped woman ends up  marrying her rapist. But she does so silently - neither she nor the society within the plays comment. If anything, this scenario is practicallly presented as the norm. It's as if it were an ordinary way for people to wind up married. That makes it especially disconcerting.

That's what makes me curious about Shakespeare's plays. They were written hundreds rather than thousands of years ago, but Elizabethan culture is quite different from our own. Surely, Shakespeare's plays have something of their own that makes us truly uncomfortable.

As per this specific collection of Menander's works, it was definitely made with specialists in mind. Miller constantly references scholarly works, and subjects the odd part or two of a play to a general cultural/histotical analysis. She clearly put this collection together for those who already know Menander, but if you just want to read his plays then using this book is a fine way to do so.

A literature of one's own

Rome's pride can't be underestimated. But, the concept of living writers of classics - at least in the ancient world, where the term carries real weight - is downright arrogant. That there were such writers really underscores how Rome raced to catch up to the Greek culture it so secretly admired and sought to imitate. Marrou doesn't mention anything about the Romans seeking to outstrip Greek literature, but they clearly really wanted their own.

Part, if not all, of this desire stemmed from the Romans' project of developing a uniquely Roman literature. It simply would not do to have Rome's heroes quoting the Greek classics when they did momentous things, after all.

In some ways a national literature is definitely appealing. All the more is a worldwide literature. But the latter is far less possible than the first when literacy isn't a close guarded trait of society's upper echelons. Though any literature coming from just one part of society isn't likely to be that resonant with the whole.

In so far as his focus is education, and the working classes of people didn't usually get much of that, Marrou's book is free from having to react to any calls for social history. Nonetheless, I can't help but wonder what the common Romans thought of the importance of Roman literature. Did they even care?

New tower, new arms

When I first played A Link to the Past, I was terrified of fighting the Grey Ball and Chain Trooper that guards Zelda. An enemy with a ranged attack that I can't block or effectively dodge? That's madness! Then I discovered that a few hurled jars put the fiend to rest. Unfortunately, in the Iron Turret there are no jars.

The Iron Turret is the next tower in Pandora's Tower. So far, it seems like a bit of a retread of the first tower, at least in its look. Though there are the added mechanisms and gears. It's not quite a Steampunk tower, but it comes close. Along with the new look, comes a new breed of beast.

By this point in the game you've already encountered armoured servant beasts. However, up to this point they've just come in groups of one and have a harmless, melee-range, lance hand.

In the Ironclad Turret these armoured servant beasts get a bit of an upgrade.

Now, they're packing morning-star-like weapons - weapons with serious range. Plus, they seem to come almost exclusively in pairs. Needless to say, there was some trash talk when I faced off against the first couple.

However, along with trapping you in a narrow area with this ball-on-chain-swinging duo the developers over at Ganbarion give you one bit of slack. In the far corner of the room is a chest. In that chest you'll find the "Military Scythe." Its range doesn't quite match the beasts', but it's a welcome cross between the Athosian Sword's power and the Twinblades' speed with a bit of reach thrown in for good measure. Plus, because it's a scythe, Aeron swings it in arcs - meaning that you can hit both beasts in one go.

So that scythe is a very welcome scythe indeed. Maybe it'll even figure into this tower's master. Though that might make it too easy to compare this game to those in the Zelda series.

'Gotta heed the call/of magic Dragon Balls shiny Fyggs'

I'm sure that Dragon Quest IX has more in it than what now seems like its prologue showed, but the story's taken a turn for the predictable. It's become the plot to Dragon Ball - I need to go around the world (or, as the game's angels call it, "The Protectorate") to collect the seven lost fyggs of Yggdrasil, the world tree.

Nested within this plot downturn, is promise of something twisty and cosmic down the way though. For your main character has a dream while sleeping under the world tree. In this dream you see two forces battling for the fate of the mortal world - and it seems that one of them has implored you to collect the seven fyggs. So, at some point, you might wind up fighting god, or whatever the game's "Almighty" really is.

At any rate, the game does a nice job of keeping the enormous feeling of the mortal world once you return to it. You're given a spell that teleports you to previously visited towns. And you're more or less given a vehicle - except that where it can land is extremely limited. Once again, promises are being made. Hopefully the game makes good on them.

Taking it to the streets

I know that ancient Greece regarded the home as private space and the marketplace, the street, as public space. I know that these divides were fairly strict. I also know that along with the house being regarded as their realm, popular thinking dictated that children and women were best neither seen nor heard.

Despite all of this, it still seems weird to me that the settings for all of Menander's plays seem to be streets. Specifically, they're mostly streets just out front of two central characters' houses. Ancient Greek theatre was minimalist (as far as I know), but even so it's downright distracting that simply a street in front of peoples' houses could be the setting for so many plays.

Yet, considering the content of these plays, I find myself less and less surprised. Public spaces are spaces in which news trades hands and people from different houses interact and conflict. Those are the essential elements of all of Menander's plays. Thus, Menander's setting his plays on streets makes sense. Not to mention the importance of misunderstanding to most of the comedy of his works and how much of that can be had when news and gossip trade hands.

Nonetheless, I'm left amazed that someone who reused an aspect of successful plays was able to remain popular. Nowadays, if we find a lack of imagination in an author's works we call him/her out on it, myself included.

Theories rising from the ashes of the Crimson Keep

Aeron's footsteps as he races up the path to the observatory entrance sound like the ticks of a clock. Since the last few times I've run that way, the curse's gauge has been under 1/4 and the time in the towers beforehand was harrowing so his footsteps had my heart racing. I was also playing in the dark which may have drawn me into the game's atmosphere a bit more than usual.

Not that the fight with the Crimson Keep's master could do anything but.

When you come across the note about it and find out that it's invincible when it has its flames you know you're going to be hard pressed throughout.You know that you'll be sweating it - for sure. I definitely did.

But, aside from the appropriately frantic nature of the fight, it was much more straightforward than previous masters have been. You toss the chain into either of the master's arms or head, pull until it snaps back (somehow extinguishing the flames) and repeat until the beast's been put out. At that point you rush in, hook into its exposed flesh and pull for dear life. The master's ability to re-ignite in the middle of this process nicely complicates things and nearly brings the battle to where it would require you to execute your tactics nearly perfectly, but the battle's pace never gets to that point. The fact that you can stop the mid-bout reignition processes has to be thanked for that.

What comes next is the usual stuff. Elena has her dream, wonders what it means, and then you get the chance to gear up before heading to the next tower. My theory about the family that Elena sees in her dream is that the parents have sold their son to be made into the final master. Horrible, yes, but not outside the realm of this game, I think.

There is an additional scene wedged into that series of events, though. Late at night we see Elena waking from a nightmare, counting herself lucky that she didn't hurt Aeron. The camera then shifts over to him and we see him wince and grit his teeth before the scene ends and the game jumps to morning.

Sadly, there's been no other mention of the "Other World" below the towers. Currently, my theory is that it has something to do with the old homeland of, or possibly was/is the land promised to, the wandering Vestra. Apparently these people were exiled from their homeland centuries previous to the game's action and Elyria made a contract with them, promising a new homeland.

Only time - or the ticking of Aeron's footsteps - will tell whether my crazy theories are right or wrong.

A Roman extrapolation

If what Marrou writes of in regards to the Roman tradition's single-mindedness and practicality still holds water then it says a lot about modern culture. Particularly, it says a lot about the sort of Christianity that took root in most of Europe and later spread through the rest of the world and why it's so slow to accept social change and progress.

Apparently, much of the education in early Rome concentrated on practical things. There was no high-falutin ideal that students were chasing, nor were students being raised into men rather than nurtured as children as was the case with the ancient Greek systems. Instead, Roman pupils were taught about things like husbandry, medicine, and law. They were instructed in subjects that pertained to the everyday and to the sorts of problems that those who were formally educated ("squires, gentlemen farmers," as Marrou calls them on page 323) were likely to face: How to make money from the land you owned, how to treat slaves and underlings to maximize the work they could do, and how to deal with other members of society.

These subjects were apparently steeped in tradition, ways that worked in the past were handed down as, well, law.

Marrou doesn't get much into the "why" of Roman moral education beyond simply noting that it rose out of the practical. But whatever its origins, the early Romans seem like they were much less concerned with moral abstraction than the ancient Greeks were. Now, since this moral practicality is to be found at the outset of Roman civilization, and Rome (if Marrou still holds true) held tradition in the highest esteem it makes sense that Christianity as adapted by Rome would hold to the same sort of morality.

I can't help but wonder then, if after existing in this traditional society for centuries what would later become Western Europe's Christianity was just too single-minded to change and instead had to splinter to cater to changes in society.

Forced into a new tack

Round two with the Ragin' Contagion saw me put it to rest. With the sickness sealed, Dragon Quest IX continued onwards. Now I'm back up in the Observatory - the game's sub-heaven. That is, the game's cosmology is laid out in a way similar to Norse mythology where there's the earth below (Midgard), the realm of the gods (Asgard) and then a realm between them (Alfheim). There are six other worlds in Norse mythology, but just between the three in Dragon Quest IX (the world below, the Observatory, and realm of the Almighty) the game gives me a feeling of enormity all the same.

Backtracking a bit, though, the second fight with the Ragin' Contagion got me thinking. I can't tell if my level grinding helped since the battle seemed as long as it did before. However, that time spent away from the boss fight got me to change my strategy. Rather than going all out offensively, I distracted the two-turn-in-one having monster by upping my own stats, forcing him to use one of his turns to bring them back down.

Disappointingly, the whole tension and "Coup de Grace" things remain mysteries to me. I guess it's a number that goes up as characters are attacked, but my main character definitely took enough damage to merit such an attack, yet it never opened up.

Nonetheless, I count a game successful if it forces me to shift my battle strategy - especially since Dragon Quest IX has been a mostly classic J-RPG experience thus far. Plus, given that the game pretty much spells out the need to distract the Ragin' Contagion from his set strategy when it teaches you to provoke enemies with a book written in a Cajun accent, it's great that an alternative strategy works just as well.