Seabrook hits a nerve writing of opening notes

Without having to worry about analyzing an album, Seabrook's writing about Bowie has markedly improved. Bowie in Berlin's third part is instead full of interesting facts and observations. It's the sort of narrative construction of a person's life that I genuinely enjoy reading.

And within that narrative, there's a welcome twist.

Bowie's bringing the violinist Simon House on for the "'Heroes'" tour is quite interesting to me. Not because I'm familiar with House's work, but because I've dabbled in playing the violin.

Throughout my self-tutelage I was always trying to figure out the opening riff to "Ziggy Stardust" by ear since I couldn't then (and still can't now) reliably read violin sheet music (or translate guitar tablatures). And what did House most remarkably do while on tour with Bowie? He played the opening riff to "Ziggy Stardust" on electric violin.

So now I just need to dig up a copy of Stage and try to work through it with an actual example. Any book that broadens your listening (or reading) like this is definitely a success.

But, not everyone is an amateur, self-taught violinist.

Obviously this is a very specific example of Seabrook's retelling of Bowie's life and music affecting me, but it still goes a long way to confirming my suspicion that without albums to focus on Seabrook's general attention to detail would increase. Sure, most biographers would likely include Bowie's bringing a violinist in for his tour, but only a handful would mention House's playing the opening of Ziggy Stardust with Seabrook's enthusiasm.

"Master and Man" and "The Death of Ivan Ilych"

"Master and Man" says less about those statuses than I'd expected. Instead, its message echoes that of "The Death of Ivan Ilych": don't live for materialism or monetary gain, but for other people.

The difference in this later story is that the apparent master of the story, Andreev, gives his life to save the peasant Nikita whom he finally acknowledges as a fellow human being. With that in mind the English title of the story suggests that "master" and "man" are exclusive categories. Someone can be either one or the other but not both.

This retread of a the theme of "The Death of Ivan Ilych," but in a much bleaker setting fits perfectly as the final story in this collection. Not just because it's chronologically the last written among this collection's four, but because it works as denouement after the emotional action-thriller that is "The Kreutzer Sonata."

But taken on its own, I don't think "Master and Man" is Tolstoy's best work. Trading in the tight third person perspective of "The Death of Ivan Ilych" for split attention between Andreev and Nikita and a more or less omniscient narrator brings both of these characters close to being caricatures of their particular social stations.

Yet, the situation of the story, two men and a horse getting lost in a snowstorm who are given several chances to rest in town until morning but refuse and wind up stuck in the middle of nowhere, seems all to realistic considering the coincidences involved. It's a structure that mirrors the strange happenings of life too closely to be written off as mere contrivance.

And that's what sets "Master and Man" apart from the other three stories in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. It is the only one in which characters take a back seat to plot and setting.

Moving from Russian literature to something lighter, the next book on the list is Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.

From boss to boss, from grind to grind

After having gone through a grind session with metal slimes in the Bowhole, it's time to start another one up. That session was enough to help my party take down Hootingham-Gore, but Goresby-Purrvis has proven to be a different beast all together. Literally and figuratively.

The fight is against only him, but he attacks twice per turn and has a one-hit KO move that he uses regularly. The difficulty here is that for all of its difficulty Dragon Quest IX is stingy with the full-party healing spells. Maybe I need to upgrade Peridot (my priest) to a sage to gain these skills, but gaining them would no doubt require some levelling up as well. Which brings me back around to my bafflement with the game's job system.

You get six points (after passing level 30 or so) every few level ups (it seems almost arbitrary, but happens regularly enough) and most of the skills or stat boosts cost 10 or more points.

So even if, for example, I put all of Peridot's skill points towards her "Faith" attribute, it would take three level ups to get a major boost to her magical mending (so long as each level yields six points to put towards it). On average Peridot requires about 17,000 experience points to go from level to level at this point in the game.

Now, in Gittingham Palace there is a place with a restorative tile, so it's possible to grind indefinitely there. Plus, you'll get around 900-1300 experience/fight doing so.

But at that rate of experience you'd need to fight (at most) 18 battles to level Peridot up.

The average battle takes about a minute to play out, so that's around 20 minutes per level.

Assuming that the experience Peridot gains from these fights doesn't drop too drastically from level to level, I could, in theory, grind in Gittingham Palace for an hour and gain three levels (and enough skill points to actually get something out of my character's "job").

An hour of grinding isn't necessarily terrible. Especially not in a JRPG. But having to do so to reap the benefits of your character's job - one of Dragon Quest IX's major mechanics - is ridiculous.

The job system in the Final Fantasy series, with its separate "Job Points," isn't necessarily any better. But at least in that system you're building up your characters' jobs with nearly every fight and not every 20.

At any rate, skill points aren't entirely relevant to facing Goresby-Purrvis. One level more should be enough to be well-matched with the sword-wielding cheetah. And that, if my calculations hold, will just take about another half an hour (after his last level up my main character needed some 32000 experience points to do so again).

Hopefully whatever is beyond the door that Goresby-Purrvis blocks doesn't involve an even stronger boss.

Seabrook gives his all for "Heroes"

Seabrook's build up to his song-by-song analysis of "Heroes" and said analysis are exactly what I was looking for.

There's trivia, there's Seabrook's standard in-depth look at all of the production that went into each song, and there's a reflection on how each of them contributes to the whole of the album. Everything is there. 

The only problem I have with this part of Bowie in Berlin, in fact, is that the rest of the book doesn't measure up. "Heroes" (the song and the album) being what they are, it's to be expected that the most attention be paid to it. But why deliver only what readers expect?

Seabrook's constant winking references to incidents given more page time in other works or that are already well known to fans of Bowie in earlier sections of the book are fine for those fans. But what about people for whom Bowie In Berlin is their initiation into the secret life of the man and his music? 

Surely things like Bowie's seeing Visconti and Antonia Maass smooching in the shadow of the Berlin wall and then integrating it into "'Heroes'" happened on Low and Station to Station.

Oddly enough the only comparably deep cut of information that Seabrook gives about another of the albums that he covers can be found in his analysis of Iggy Pop's "China Girl." Maybe "real" fans already knew about Iggy's affair with Jacques Higelin's then girlfriend Kuelan Nguyen and how it inspired that song.

But again, why isn't there more there and in his writing about the other albums?

The worst part of this inconsistency in coverage is that it looks like it will continue to the end of the book.

Heroes is the last album that Seabrook gives the song-by-song treatment to. Perhaps, though, with his attention turned from musical analysis, more of it will be paid to illuminating just what in the world was going on with David Bowie as he moved on to Lodger and beyond.

Breaking chain no. 2 and breaking fast

Truegold Tower's second chain is as straightforward as the first. There are some more servant beasts in the way and a platforming puzzle to solve, but otherwise it's a very quick thing to take out the second chain. Probably because it's meant to be the first one you go for. After all, you reach it by going through the otherwise unused half of the first real room. Ah well.

But it looks like that's the end of Truegold's handouts. Especially since the monsters that show up aren't just random but also appear to be time-sensitive.

My first venture into the tower took place at night. So the monsters were predominantly sword-wielding servant beasts. During my second visit, a day-time visit, one of the armoured and spear-handed servant beasts showed up. Though the military scythe made short work of it.

And that was it for the tower in tonight's session. The other fifteen minutes of thirty were spent exploring Elena's life at the Observatory. Though, only incidentally, since I really just wanted to see if Aeron gets any more dreams at this point in the game. Maybe four hour blocks of sleep aren't enough to trigger his REM sleep, but they are enough to observe Elena's various activities.

At 7pm she's found sowing. At 11pm she's standing by her bed. At 3am she's willing to chat. At 7am she's whipping up breakfast. Apparently a breakfast of...well...maybe thoroughly mixed bibimbap?

It's a big bowl of something that looks like a cross between spaghetti sauce and shredded wheat, at any rate. What's stranger is that her cooking is apparently improving as the game progresses. There's no benefit to you as a player because of this, it just is.

Now that might sound like a pointless element to include in a game. But it's neat to see that the people at Ganbarion put such detail (going so far as to give Elena a whole routine!) into the Observatory side of the game. Though that is a side that, except for when the towers are quickly worked through, is likely to be overlooked.

"Master and Man" begins

"Master and Man" is unlike any of the other stories in The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. For the first time in this collection Tolstoy writes about a peasant.

Every other story features the lives and problems of members of the middle class. Peasants and other labourers are mentioned, but never at any length. They're just the ones keeping the basis of society running. "Master and Man," no doubt to make a point in the end, instead puts Nikita, one of these labourers, front and center.

The style of Tolstoy's writing has also changed over the six years between The Kreutzer Sonata and "Master and Man." No longer does Tolstoy explicitly dwell on the interior lives of his characters. Instead, things are more active (the main action of "Master and Man" being a sledge trip to a nearby village in a light snowstorm), and characters are drawn less through description than through action.

Nonetheless, after over twenty pages I have the same sense of disorientation as the main characters (likely in part due to my utter lack of knowledge of Russian geography).

Noting this lost feeling might sound backhanded, but it's very clear that being so lost is part of the story's point.

Putting his characters, Andreev (the master) Nikita (the man), into a snowstorm is putting them into a liminal space. A space in which not even the snow-laden landscape is stable, try as people might to make it so with markers and signs.

In such a space it's hard to say how Tolstoy will make his point (whatever it is), and that spurs me on.

Grinding for metal slimes

Level grinding in RPGs is a curious thing.

Across the board, in just about every J-RPG, there's a location (or a handful of them) where tough or special monsters reside. Monsters that give you several times the experience points other monsters do.

Games that do this well, like Breath of Fire II and Chrono Trigger, have these monsters dominate or stand out in these areas.

Dragon Quest IX doesn't quite do the same, though.

The best way to level grind in this DS RPG is to seek out metal slimes. However, the tricky thing here is that metal slimes of all variations have a considerable tendency to flee. Not to knock your block off with some ultimate attack. Not to instant-kill one of your party members. But to run away. When this happens there is no way to save the fight as in the other two scenarios, you are simply forced to restart your hunt.

And sometimes it can be quite a hunt. Metal slimes will sometimes show up with other monsters, but most reliably you need to find them on their own. Even then, they're just as likely to run.

The slimes' tendency to run away can be very frustrating.

But, in The Bowhole at least, the non-slime monsters can offer around 1000 experience points per fight. Considering most of my party members need about 20,000 points to level up, that means I'll need to go through about 20 fights. That's not terrible, but it still makes for some pretty intense grinding.

I'm still hoping that I'll run into a heroic slime or two.