Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
What is does "Gazetteer" mean?
I chose to call this blog and the others a "Gazetteer". The term refers to a "geographical dictionary" though in my definition it's a little bit more like an encyclopedia.
The word is an English corruption of gazettier, forged in eighteenth century France by L. Echard when he wrote his geographical dictionary. It came from the Venetian gazeta, a coin to by a gazetta or newspaper.
The original word -gaza- was carried long time ago by the Greeks across the Hellespont and is Persian in origin, meaning "royal treasure" (Webster's New World Dictionary, Random House, NY, 1988). The Gazetteer is thus, a labyrinth full of hidden treasure. It's geographical in nature because it moves from topic to topic like a traveller crossing a border, a river, or even an ocean. Finally it's also like the Venetian gazeta or gazette, a kind of newspaper...a blog, wouldn't you say?
The word is an English corruption of gazettier, forged in eighteenth century France by L. Echard when he wrote his geographical dictionary. It came from the Venetian gazeta, a coin to by a gazetta or newspaper.
The original word -gaza- was carried long time ago by the Greeks across the Hellespont and is Persian in origin, meaning "royal treasure" (Webster's New World Dictionary, Random House, NY, 1988). The Gazetteer is thus, a labyrinth full of hidden treasure. It's geographical in nature because it moves from topic to topic like a traveller crossing a border, a river, or even an ocean. Finally it's also like the Venetian gazeta or gazette, a kind of newspaper...a blog, wouldn't you say?
The Origins of Tribia
This blog will be a home of a story that was born out of a very long daydream that began in my childhood and continued onto the rest of my life.
Long time ago, when I was in Cuba my grandmother used to take me regularly to see Tarzan on the big screen, My favorite episodes were were when the hero went to a lost city or had to traverse a fabulous mountain range or desert.
Later, fresh out of Cuba and in an American kindergarten, I was treated to the same mountainous landscapes in the Wizard of Oz plus other lost worlds and dinosaur jungles at the local matinee.
My family eventually moved to one of those urban developments that were mushrooming around the country at that time. Near our house, I played in construction sites that would turn into fabulous oceans, rivers, and continents after a rain. There were plenty of abandoned nails and small pieces of wood that could be fashioned into ships. There were many imaginary voyages taken back then.
On my tenth birthday, I got a telescope and soon discovered that the moon also had mountains and seas. I imagined a lost world up there that looked like the pretty images of the Austrian Alps that I saw in the Sound of Music which came out at around that time.
Inspired by Mary Poppins, another popular movie of the era, I wanted to write the story of a magical teacher named Cindy Copperfield who took her students on regular field trips to another world. by using a magic mirror as a portal. This was my very first book which was titled The End of the Rainbow for no other reason than that the name had a nice ring to it. I was in Fourth Grade at the time and living in a beautiful neighborhood called Lakota Beach on the shore of the Puget Sound. It was an idyllic existence with plenty of time to contemplate the sky and water and think of my fabulous story.
Three years later, as a Sixth Grader at St Frances Cabrini in Lakewood, a small suburb south of Tacoma, I continued to add more chapters to the End of the Rainbow, inspired by my Geography teacher who made us do little projects of world countries, with maps and pictures. All of a sudden, my fantasy world began to take a political shape, with countries, major rivers and capital cities. The Fun World, as I used to call it, started to have continents and oceans and it was mapped many times over,
The giant Random House Dictionary in our school library had a page that featured the Greek and Cyrillic alphabet, I thought these letters were so cool that I started to use these symbols as my secret code. By the time I reached Eighth Grade, the Greek letters had evolved into an alphabet of its own, with letters resembling a mix of Greek, Cyrillic and Runes. The Tolkien books were just beginning to hit the markets back then,
My freshman year at Bellarmine Preparatory School was graced by an enthusiastic teacher named Mr. Garrison, who loved languages. He taught a course in our freshman year that was almost revolutionary at the time. It was an introduction to language, a course on basic linguistics at a level high school children could understand. During the course of the year, we studied French first quarter, Spanish second quarter, Latin third quarter and German fourth quarter. We learned some of the basics of each language, but the major focus was on language itself.
As an extra-credit assignment, I "invented" some samples of an artificial language like Esperanto, I gave the language the name "Tribian". That was in the fall of the year 1970.
Since the language had to have a people and a country, a map was created. The early Tribians looked like the Romans and Greeks, who we were studying then. Tribia was not alone, it also had neighbors. So other countries were born, To the countries were added continents and oceans. Mr Garrison also introduced me to the world of Tolkien, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and being the language enthusiast he was, introduced me to the Runes and Elvish. On television, the Star Trek series also were showing different planets with exotic languages such as Klingon and Vulcan. Tribia was fermented in all this atmosphere and began to take a life of its own.
The late sixties and early seventies were an intoxicating time in America. There was also that otherworldly drug-induced fantasy world that used to be on the album covers of the major rock bands of the era. I remember walking into a record shop and find many of my "Tribian landscapes" on the fantastic covers of Yes and Led Zeppelin. Album art was big in those days, compared with today's tiny CD covers!
After graduation from high school, I spent a year abroad in Paris, the biggest eye-opener I ever had in my life! Access to the great museums like the Louvre, visits to the cathedrals and palaces, and side trips to the beautiful cities of Italy started to shape the structure of this imaginary world. Impressions of these visits and experiences ended up in my Tribian notebook.
The character of this imaginary planet continued to evolve. My first trip to Morocco resulted in a new perspective. Western Civilization had become an objective entity of my world view. I would return to Morocco a decade later, as a Peace Corps volunteer.
Next year, at College of Notre Dame, a small tertiary institution in the San Francisco Bay area, the palaces of Tribia began to acquire an oriental flavor. Tribian architecture now had arabesques, onion domes, and minaret-like structures. Names of countries and cities started to acquire guttural sounds not found in Latin and Greek, Each semester I would add more notes and drawings to a box carelessly labeled "Tribia".
During my three years at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, most of my notes ended up in the Tribia Box, which kept on getting bigger and bigger as graduation approached. Every class I took gave me lots of little ideas to throw into my box. I wrote the Grammar of the Tribian Language when I was studying Linguistics, I perfected my alphabet during a Calligraphy course. The courses I took in International Affairs were more about the political intrigues of my fantasy world than they were about the real world I was supposed to be studying! A very special professor named Pietro Ferrua took a keen interest in my hobby and encouraged me to develop it even further, I even had some of my maps published with INI, an international group of artists that I still continue to collaborate with! More on us later...
From 1979 to 1984, as a graduate student in Paris with New York University, I learned about the importance of scientific and historical erudition in writing fiction, I started to study the historical novels of the French Orientalists written during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
I chose to focus my studies on Flaubert, who re-created ancient Carthage in his monumental work Salammbo. I learned how Flaubert wrote his novel from his research but also from his experiences in the Middle East. I followed the footsteps of Flaubert and went to Tunisia, the site of his great novel. There, I studied Arabic walked through the souk, and took trips into the Sahara.
Three years later, I was abroad again. This time with the Peace Corps in Morocco. With another Volunteer, I shared a beautiful little house with a courtyard and a banana tree in the middle of the ancient city of Marrakech. From the rooftop we could see the Koutoubia Mosque and the Atlas Mountains beyond,
Tribia was again reborn, inspired by the medieval nature of Djemma El Fna with its pink buildings, Gnawi dancers, snake charmers, cool porcelain tiles, and the raucous music of Morocco.
The next two years were spent as though I was living in the planet Mars: I was an English teacher in Saudi Arabia, There, I picnicked with my Bedouin students in the desert, walked in shopping malls with marble floorsm and saw women totally covered in black.
The absence of green in Arabia made my first trip to India quite a shock. Suddenly I found myself looking at trees and flowers as if I were an alien from another planet. From Saudi Arabia I took many trips to Thailand, another mind-opener with its Buddhist traditions and another step outside the culture of the West and Middle East - the Judeo-Christian-Islamic part of the world. After two years in Riyadh, I accepted a job in Jakarta.
I have been in Indonesia ever since. In 1995, I had to return to Tacoma to attend the funeral of my grandmother. The very same grandmother who used to take me to the Tarzan movies in Havana so long ago.
It was time to pick up the pieces of my life, I went into the closet and took out several "Tribia" boxes. I sat down at the dining room table and began the great archeological excavation into this lost world of mine.
I found a planet with mountains that were extremely high and jagged, like the backdrop of the old Tarzan movies, The planet was very much like Earth, but with seven moons and two suns in the sky. There were a race of people called the Tribians, and they had many neighbors: the Copicians, the Irganians and the Nguns, to name but a few.
I returned to Jakarta with all these boxesm and began the loing process of sorting out each piece of information, esch little map and note that I had written on a train between Paris and Strasbourg, or in a desert tent while my students were praying.I discovered that there were huge gaps in this world, and many things that were unexplained.
The first thing I did was begin to write several chapters. The plot was of little importance, I just wanted to describe my world. I soon realized that the world was far from being finished and there was still a lot left to invent. Time is also a big problem when one is a full-time teacher, So Tribia had to be furtively doodled on notebooks in between classes, in the back seat of a taxi, and at home on weekends.
It was taking a very long time to fit all these pieces together, But everything changed the day I bought myself a computer. A lot of the sorting was done with a click of a mouse. The graphic tools of the word processors made it easuy to draw straight lines and perfect circles, excellent for drawing maps. I could move my continents as naturally as the tectonic plates move on Earth. The first book I published privately was the Grammar of the Tribian Language, created from a mass of notes. I plan to post this grammar, plus the dictionary one day on this blog,
The result of this work was a giant monster two-volume privately-published book called The Tribian Gazetteer which is also the title of this particular blog. I sent a full copy of this monster to the Library of Congress in order to get it copyrighted. It is probably sitting in some basement under a pile of a thousand other books.
For a while, I had put up mostly all of my work on a website called www.tribianet.com. It used to be a very pretty and interesting place to visit on the web. Unfortunately, one day I was trying to upload a new link and totally messed up my website. I called my providers to see if they could help - but all the king's horses and all the king's men,,,,well nobody was able to put back Tribia together. There are pieces of this old website still floating out there in cyberspace like the wreckage of a planet gone asteroid.
About five years ago, I began to work on the idea of making it a novel, and got a good start during my summer vacation. Well, upon my return to Jakarta, life got very busy and I shelved the project. The file sits opposite my desk and mocks me every day.
The new social network phenomenon has given me new hope for this unfinished world of mine. Now I can create blogs online for free and Tribia has now found a new home in the shape of a blog.. Unlike a website that requires special design and skills I do not have, the blog is amazingly simple to operate. Perhaps I will be able to recuperate the pieces of my world that are now floating aimlessly in cyberspace. Perhaps, the blog will become a new medium altogether and the ideal home for my brainchild Tribia. Hopefully, I will learn new skills to make this blog more interesting. I am dying to learn how to make links like the Wikipedia. Maybe my world will become an interconnected entity.
I know one thing for sure, Tribia has a life of its own!
So please. join me on my journey in the next couple of months. I'll take you to a fantasy world that you might decide to make your own!
Vilhiamas
Long time ago, when I was in Cuba my grandmother used to take me regularly to see Tarzan on the big screen, My favorite episodes were were when the hero went to a lost city or had to traverse a fabulous mountain range or desert.
Later, fresh out of Cuba and in an American kindergarten, I was treated to the same mountainous landscapes in the Wizard of Oz plus other lost worlds and dinosaur jungles at the local matinee.
My family eventually moved to one of those urban developments that were mushrooming around the country at that time. Near our house, I played in construction sites that would turn into fabulous oceans, rivers, and continents after a rain. There were plenty of abandoned nails and small pieces of wood that could be fashioned into ships. There were many imaginary voyages taken back then.
On my tenth birthday, I got a telescope and soon discovered that the moon also had mountains and seas. I imagined a lost world up there that looked like the pretty images of the Austrian Alps that I saw in the Sound of Music which came out at around that time.
Inspired by Mary Poppins, another popular movie of the era, I wanted to write the story of a magical teacher named Cindy Copperfield who took her students on regular field trips to another world. by using a magic mirror as a portal. This was my very first book which was titled The End of the Rainbow for no other reason than that the name had a nice ring to it. I was in Fourth Grade at the time and living in a beautiful neighborhood called Lakota Beach on the shore of the Puget Sound. It was an idyllic existence with plenty of time to contemplate the sky and water and think of my fabulous story.
Three years later, as a Sixth Grader at St Frances Cabrini in Lakewood, a small suburb south of Tacoma, I continued to add more chapters to the End of the Rainbow, inspired by my Geography teacher who made us do little projects of world countries, with maps and pictures. All of a sudden, my fantasy world began to take a political shape, with countries, major rivers and capital cities. The Fun World, as I used to call it, started to have continents and oceans and it was mapped many times over,
The giant Random House Dictionary in our school library had a page that featured the Greek and Cyrillic alphabet, I thought these letters were so cool that I started to use these symbols as my secret code. By the time I reached Eighth Grade, the Greek letters had evolved into an alphabet of its own, with letters resembling a mix of Greek, Cyrillic and Runes. The Tolkien books were just beginning to hit the markets back then,
My freshman year at Bellarmine Preparatory School was graced by an enthusiastic teacher named Mr. Garrison, who loved languages. He taught a course in our freshman year that was almost revolutionary at the time. It was an introduction to language, a course on basic linguistics at a level high school children could understand. During the course of the year, we studied French first quarter, Spanish second quarter, Latin third quarter and German fourth quarter. We learned some of the basics of each language, but the major focus was on language itself.
As an extra-credit assignment, I "invented" some samples of an artificial language like Esperanto, I gave the language the name "Tribian". That was in the fall of the year 1970.
Since the language had to have a people and a country, a map was created. The early Tribians looked like the Romans and Greeks, who we were studying then. Tribia was not alone, it also had neighbors. So other countries were born, To the countries were added continents and oceans. Mr Garrison also introduced me to the world of Tolkien, the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings and being the language enthusiast he was, introduced me to the Runes and Elvish. On television, the Star Trek series also were showing different planets with exotic languages such as Klingon and Vulcan. Tribia was fermented in all this atmosphere and began to take a life of its own.
The late sixties and early seventies were an intoxicating time in America. There was also that otherworldly drug-induced fantasy world that used to be on the album covers of the major rock bands of the era. I remember walking into a record shop and find many of my "Tribian landscapes" on the fantastic covers of Yes and Led Zeppelin. Album art was big in those days, compared with today's tiny CD covers!
After graduation from high school, I spent a year abroad in Paris, the biggest eye-opener I ever had in my life! Access to the great museums like the Louvre, visits to the cathedrals and palaces, and side trips to the beautiful cities of Italy started to shape the structure of this imaginary world. Impressions of these visits and experiences ended up in my Tribian notebook.
The character of this imaginary planet continued to evolve. My first trip to Morocco resulted in a new perspective. Western Civilization had become an objective entity of my world view. I would return to Morocco a decade later, as a Peace Corps volunteer.
Next year, at College of Notre Dame, a small tertiary institution in the San Francisco Bay area, the palaces of Tribia began to acquire an oriental flavor. Tribian architecture now had arabesques, onion domes, and minaret-like structures. Names of countries and cities started to acquire guttural sounds not found in Latin and Greek, Each semester I would add more notes and drawings to a box carelessly labeled "Tribia".
During my three years at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, most of my notes ended up in the Tribia Box, which kept on getting bigger and bigger as graduation approached. Every class I took gave me lots of little ideas to throw into my box. I wrote the Grammar of the Tribian Language when I was studying Linguistics, I perfected my alphabet during a Calligraphy course. The courses I took in International Affairs were more about the political intrigues of my fantasy world than they were about the real world I was supposed to be studying! A very special professor named Pietro Ferrua took a keen interest in my hobby and encouraged me to develop it even further, I even had some of my maps published with INI, an international group of artists that I still continue to collaborate with! More on us later...
From 1979 to 1984, as a graduate student in Paris with New York University, I learned about the importance of scientific and historical erudition in writing fiction, I started to study the historical novels of the French Orientalists written during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries.
I chose to focus my studies on Flaubert, who re-created ancient Carthage in his monumental work Salammbo. I learned how Flaubert wrote his novel from his research but also from his experiences in the Middle East. I followed the footsteps of Flaubert and went to Tunisia, the site of his great novel. There, I studied Arabic walked through the souk, and took trips into the Sahara.
Three years later, I was abroad again. This time with the Peace Corps in Morocco. With another Volunteer, I shared a beautiful little house with a courtyard and a banana tree in the middle of the ancient city of Marrakech. From the rooftop we could see the Koutoubia Mosque and the Atlas Mountains beyond,
Tribia was again reborn, inspired by the medieval nature of Djemma El Fna with its pink buildings, Gnawi dancers, snake charmers, cool porcelain tiles, and the raucous music of Morocco.
The next two years were spent as though I was living in the planet Mars: I was an English teacher in Saudi Arabia, There, I picnicked with my Bedouin students in the desert, walked in shopping malls with marble floorsm and saw women totally covered in black.
The absence of green in Arabia made my first trip to India quite a shock. Suddenly I found myself looking at trees and flowers as if I were an alien from another planet. From Saudi Arabia I took many trips to Thailand, another mind-opener with its Buddhist traditions and another step outside the culture of the West and Middle East - the Judeo-Christian-Islamic part of the world. After two years in Riyadh, I accepted a job in Jakarta.
I have been in Indonesia ever since. In 1995, I had to return to Tacoma to attend the funeral of my grandmother. The very same grandmother who used to take me to the Tarzan movies in Havana so long ago.
It was time to pick up the pieces of my life, I went into the closet and took out several "Tribia" boxes. I sat down at the dining room table and began the great archeological excavation into this lost world of mine.
I found a planet with mountains that were extremely high and jagged, like the backdrop of the old Tarzan movies, The planet was very much like Earth, but with seven moons and two suns in the sky. There were a race of people called the Tribians, and they had many neighbors: the Copicians, the Irganians and the Nguns, to name but a few.
I returned to Jakarta with all these boxesm and began the loing process of sorting out each piece of information, esch little map and note that I had written on a train between Paris and Strasbourg, or in a desert tent while my students were praying.I discovered that there were huge gaps in this world, and many things that were unexplained.
The first thing I did was begin to write several chapters. The plot was of little importance, I just wanted to describe my world. I soon realized that the world was far from being finished and there was still a lot left to invent. Time is also a big problem when one is a full-time teacher, So Tribia had to be furtively doodled on notebooks in between classes, in the back seat of a taxi, and at home on weekends.
It was taking a very long time to fit all these pieces together, But everything changed the day I bought myself a computer. A lot of the sorting was done with a click of a mouse. The graphic tools of the word processors made it easuy to draw straight lines and perfect circles, excellent for drawing maps. I could move my continents as naturally as the tectonic plates move on Earth. The first book I published privately was the Grammar of the Tribian Language, created from a mass of notes. I plan to post this grammar, plus the dictionary one day on this blog,
The result of this work was a giant monster two-volume privately-published book called The Tribian Gazetteer which is also the title of this particular blog. I sent a full copy of this monster to the Library of Congress in order to get it copyrighted. It is probably sitting in some basement under a pile of a thousand other books.
For a while, I had put up mostly all of my work on a website called www.tribianet.com. It used to be a very pretty and interesting place to visit on the web. Unfortunately, one day I was trying to upload a new link and totally messed up my website. I called my providers to see if they could help - but all the king's horses and all the king's men,,,,well nobody was able to put back Tribia together. There are pieces of this old website still floating out there in cyberspace like the wreckage of a planet gone asteroid.
About five years ago, I began to work on the idea of making it a novel, and got a good start during my summer vacation. Well, upon my return to Jakarta, life got very busy and I shelved the project. The file sits opposite my desk and mocks me every day.
The new social network phenomenon has given me new hope for this unfinished world of mine. Now I can create blogs online for free and Tribia has now found a new home in the shape of a blog.. Unlike a website that requires special design and skills I do not have, the blog is amazingly simple to operate. Perhaps I will be able to recuperate the pieces of my world that are now floating aimlessly in cyberspace. Perhaps, the blog will become a new medium altogether and the ideal home for my brainchild Tribia. Hopefully, I will learn new skills to make this blog more interesting. I am dying to learn how to make links like the Wikipedia. Maybe my world will become an interconnected entity.
I know one thing for sure, Tribia has a life of its own!
So please. join me on my journey in the next couple of months. I'll take you to a fantasy world that you might decide to make your own!
Vilhiamas
The Tribian Gazetteer
This blog is dedicated to my imaginary planet.
The URL for this blog is thetribiangazetteer.blogspot.com
The URL for my opera blog is theoperahousegazetteer.blogspot.com
The URL for this blog is thetribiangazetteer.blogspot.com
The URL for my opera blog is theoperahousegazetteer.blogspot.com
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
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