8/8/00, Maastricht, Holland­—Well, I’ve always wanted to really see Europe, and for the next few months that’s just what I intend to do. I’ve always come over here on business before, and had unreasonable and overbearing bosses who insisted that I spend at least some of my time working.

This trip I am taking a low speed tour from Amsterdam to Morocco on a Beemer that has been specially modified for European driving. The modification consists of starting with an official BMW logo and attaching  a bicycle to it. This allows me to avoid the high cost of petrol here on the continent. I can now get 90 km per liter of espresso, this drops to 50 km with regular coffee and I develop a terrible ping with decaf.

The proper nomenclature for my custom driving machine is the BMW P2 A/M: this stands for BMW 2 pedal Amsterdam/Morocco.

So far my trip has gotten off to a slow start. I cycled for 20 km in Amsterdam following the signs to leave town, and ended up one block from where I started. I decided to have breakfast again and got off to a fresh start. Holland has excellent bicycle trails with excellent road signs written in perfect Dutch, but I still kept getting lost even though 99% of the Dutch people speak good English. The 1% that don’t speak English spend all of their time on benches by the side of the bicycle trails.

My first experience camping out and getting back to nature was probably about as comfortable as that of the GIs just after D-Day. Nobody warned me that the Dutch mosquitos are almost the size of Messerschmidts and as bloodthirsty as Count Dracula. I quickly got inside my tent and spent a somewhat comfortable night until the cows arrived. I think they came into the woods to escape the mosquitos, who were using their pasture for a runway.

On Friday evening I arrived, tired and saddle sore, in Maastricht, which is the prettiest European city I’ve seen so far. The city was founded in 50 B.C., and the waitress in the inn down the street was here to greet the first Roman legionnaires when they arrived to put up the city walls. I’ve also found one of the neatest hotels I’ve ever seen in my travels. The Hotelboot was an old river boat that is now moored at the edge of town and rents cabins.

Talk to ya later,

Bill

From The Rhyme of the Southern Rivers: With Notes Historical, Traditional, Geographical, Etymological, etc. by Martin V. Moore, published in 1897.

NOTES ON THE RIVERS OF VIRGINIA

2. SHENANDOAH. This is really the Shannon-Doah, or Shannon-Toah, the final term “Toah” a well-known Indian word for river. The word has three forms in different dialects: It is found as “Taquah,” as “Toah,” and more briefly as “Tau.” The writing as “Ta-ho” is precisely the same original word. It shows origin in the germ-words “Te” and “owa,” or “au,” water, its literal significance that of deep water. All the different forms are found in the names of deep waters in various parts of the world. As Ta-ho, it is the native name of a deep lake in California. In Spain there is a deep river having the prehistoric title Ta-ho, the word appearing in the modern Spanish idiom as Tagus. In China the writing in English letters is Tai. The oldest form of the word is in the Hebrew in the writing Toah, in the name of a water, Neph-Toah. A term for water simply is found in many languages in the English writings “Owa,” “Oah,” “Owee,” “Au-wa,” and “A-haw.” The old Teutonic form of the word is “A-wa,” or in the Roman idiom “A-qua.” This, in a composite with the root-word for the deep “Te,” gives the form of the term as “Taqua” seen in the native names of many of the deep waters of America. Other forms of this word will be referred to in Note 61. The term “Shannon” in the Virginia name appears to be of more modern origin. It corresponds to the old Irish word Shannon, the name of a river in Ireland.

In loving memory of Dr. Jean Allen Battle.

Yesterday morning I stopped at a small shop in North Berkeley to pick up some office supplies. When I went up to the counter to pay, a middle-aged Asian man (who I think is one of the store’s owners) and a young white woman were ringing up sales and a handful of customers was waiting to pay. The woman was handling the transaction of an older man who stood out from the pack because he was wearing a sportsman’s cap and camo fatigues. This is not the customary mode of dress in Berkeley, although it’s not unusual once you get a bit further afield from urban density.

That would have been the end of it, except that I happened to catch the tail end of his casual, cheerful chatter with the saleswoman:

“… if he got attacked by three black guys over six feet tall, the only thing that would bother him would be if one of them got away.”

With that, he completed paying for his purchase and walked out of the store. There was a beat, during which “Well, I guess some people aren’t worried about political correctness” ran through my head, then the saleswoman said something like “Can you believe that?” and everybody started talking at once. The customers were a typically diverse Berkeley group (although no one there was black). I hadn’t caught the first part of the conversation, so I didn’t know who or what the man was referring to (I would have noticed if he’d had a dog with him). But it didn’t really matter. It was such an unusual thing to hear spoken within the city limits that everyone was busy making sure we’d all heard the same thing.

A woman who looked like a fellow Baby Boomer pointed out that the man was of sufficiently elder status that he probably just didn’t realize how his words came across. My reaction was that it said something positive about Berkeley in this day and age that someone could feel free to speak his mind in such an uninhibited fashion while seeming blithely unaware of the cultural context. The city prides itself on being the home of the Free Speech Movement, but an increasing amount of intolerance for differing points of view has crept in over the years, some of it quite ugly in tone. The various witnesses to the incident seemed to agree that the man had been speaking metaphorically rather than pejoratively and didn’t intend any offense. Even though I had been startled by his language, I found it rather refreshing that a random group of diverse individuals was quickly able to reach a mature, rational conclusion about its intended meaning.

“Stories we tell will cast their spell
Now and for always”

NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF STORYTELLING, THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES OF MUSIC AND VISUAL IMAGERY, OR THE MAGICAL ABILITY OF THEATRE TO SWEEP PEOPLE AWAY. AT A GATHERING IN LONDON FOUR AND A HALF YEARS AGO, DIRECTOR MATTHEW WARCHUS DESCRIBED HIS VISION OF HOW The Lord of the Rings COULD SUCCESSFULLY BE BROUGHT TO THE STAGE.

The answer lay not in a conventional formula, but rather in letting the story itself suggest, organically, how it might be done. The atmosphere in the books of an ancient world steeped in history and lore, with a vast breadth and depth of cultural traditions, suggested mystery and magic to be explored. J.R.R. Tolkien’s implication that the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings depict events from an era of European history lost in the mists of time, surviving only in an ancient manuscript handed down through the ages, offered a context for the creative freedom needed to translate the tale into a different form. The Mystery Plays of the medieval craft guilds—Biblical stories in a wide range of dramatic styles that were performed across Europe during the Middle Ages—provided a model for morally substantive narrative combined with theatrical pageantry that actively involved the audience in the imaginative experience. This would be a new version of the old stories of Middle-earth.

The basic idea would be to draw the audience into a fantastic sensory environment and emotionally engage them in the central tale of a dangerous quest undertaken by two ordinary little folk who set out to defeat an evil power that threatens their entire world. The story needed to be told without irony, befitting its epic scale and mode. The challenge would be to remain true to the spirit and essence of the books while crafting an accessible narrative that would succeed on its own terms as a piece of contemporary theatre.

For Composer and Musical Supervisor Christopher Nightingale, music was central to the tale, both literally and metaphorically. In The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s introduction to his imaginary universe, Middle-earth is called into being in song, and each new act of creation—of Elves, Men, Dwarves—is a new theme in a divine symphony. Evil is introduced into the world as a discordant theme that disrupts the harmony. Nightingale realized one couldn’t theatrically tell the story without music. The songs and musical styles would need to convey the unique spirit and flavor of Middle-earth’s various cultures—familiar and yet alien, not pegged to any real-world counterparts. What kinds of songs would Hobbits sing? They would naturally have an earthy folk feel to them, but melodic motifs, rhythm, instrumentation, etc., might take the ear in unexpected directions. How to reflect the timeless magic of the Elves, who live and breathe exquisite artistic expression? What kind of music would Dwarves make? What would Evil sound like? How would that differ from the sound of Evil that believed it was acting for Good? Read more…