This site (www.bodlibrary.org) was first used as a testing facility where the Bod’s l-o-l (library-on-line) staff (mainly Yours Crudely) could try different themes, layouts, widgets & plug-ins without risking anything of value. For a while, it served as the Bod’s experimental Derangement & Disorientation area (subsequently re-dislocated to the Deletion & Excerpt Depository in Void, far out on the Mishugunah Peninsula).

Meanwhile, back at the .org, HERE began developing a character of its own as our resident fellow vented, blogged, babbled, experimented with postings on the fly, wrestled with periods lived through, began grappling with the existential core nature of history. Adding artifacts, archival materials & personal reflections has since turned the site into the Bod Library’s History Annex, with Miscellaneous Posts.

As designated HISTORY ANNEX (HA), www.bodlibrary.org contains PAGES on Special Topics &/or Historical Periods along with a single POST (or Home) page most arrive at first with riffs, rants, reflections & reasonings on miscellaneous subjects.

The Post page contains all the Bod’s posts, in a  variety of categories–e.g., current events & public square issues; timeless principles & market dynamics; just play, serious jazz, crazy jazz; sports; etc.  Posts can be accessed all together or by category, scrolling down the page in reverse chronology (most recent first, at the top, oldest way down).

Topic pages, by contrast, follow their own organizing principles. History, time & mind,  a recent favorite, takes a fresh look at core aspects of history, time, and mind often overlooked, including scale, perspective, and dimension. The Sixties uses personal  history as a jumping off point to understand what was happening at the national & larger scale. It was a generation-shaping period, particularly for some in the class of ’60.

The Richardson Archive room [temporarily closed for re-organization] contains our window on the 1950’s, also a shaping period for many individuals & institutions. The archive features original materials focused on events at the University of Nevada/ Reno. The page should eventually contain a detailed summary of the events, from before the crisis entered the national consciousness to well after its incomplete (& somewhat illusory) resolution, along with a new analysis drawing parallels with events in the country at large.

[Although not a final resting place, Bod Library now holds Dr. Frank Richardson’s files relating to the case, including letters from key participants (e.g., Walter van Tilburg Clark), legal briefs, exchanges with attorneys, newspaper clippings, etc. Samples from these are going up slowly. faster If we hear of an active interest, c/o bodlibrary@gmail.com.]

Eventually, we want to add pages/rooms specifically for living history (interpreting the embodied place, artifact & presence) & the Chautauqua, that creative conversation in & across time, a unique hybrid of literary & historical, personal & cultural. On a personal front, Yours Crudely spent 25 years in the New Mexico Humanities Council’s Chautauqua catalog, traveling the state in the hats of historical figures (mainly Basho, Aldo Leopold & Ansel Adams), to bring their words & insights to life off the page. Near the end of my quarter century run, Yours Crudely tried summing-up programs exploring Humor & the Humanities, with ancient roots, & Chautauqua tonight! a personal journey, weaving personal experience with the various historical ‘Chautauqua forms’ (one with Elvis).

[In both Chautauqua & live humor traditions, no two presentations are ever quite the same.  Like any creative conversation, they take the shape of the room–with time, place & audience as co-conspirators. A sample transcript of either program might be found, as well as the original NMHC description, if anyone asks.] 

In addition to real topics that aren’t up yet there are some unreal ones that are. As one misquoted historical figure put it, “Some people see things that aren’t there & wonder why? Some don’t see things that are there & wonder why not?”  In this case, some otherwise completely non-historical remnants remain on-site (e.g., Empty Gallery 1, Mop Closet, etc.) simply because they are part of the site’s history, when it served temporarily as  the Bod Library-On-Line’s L-O-L Annex for Humor & Media, before being re-designated the Annex for History, Ideas, Tragedy, Incompetence & Time Travel….

THE REST OF THE COMPLEX: 

www.bodlibrary.com houses our ecological reflections (in Aldo’s Eco Zone & Seeds of Thought Archives), poetry/music collections (featured selections & Gifts from everywhere); and art-bird galleries, with links toeye-popping photography.

www.bodlibrary.info is entirely dedicated to Basho & his masterpiece, oku-no-hosomichi, newly rendered as Backcountry Ways–& Beyond, where the Beyond includes our Trail Companion Guide to passages; discussion of key terms, concepts & methods; chapters on language, the joys of translation, “inner aspects” of artist & work, & “further matters.”

www.bodlibrary.net holds our game & market modeling wing, with discussions on game theory, market dynamics, adventures in understanding, & a master class for students & teachers of writing, thinking, & relating skills.

www.mirror-times-mirror.net will become the new repository for streaming excerpts, bulletins, articles, stories, & selected deletions from members of the Dang Ling Inverse Peninsula Independent Press Association, including The M T Mirror Times Mirror Review, The Port Hole Sun, The Void Quarterly, Dick’s Postit Encyclopedia Dictionary Atlas on a Pinhead, Bao Lo Half Bakery’s time-life-weight-&-fortune-cookie monthly, The Buffalo Dip Chip Shot (formerly the Disconnectady Cheap Shot)….
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“The Dangling Inverse Peninsula Business & Organization Directory (DIPBOD) considers it a distinct privilege to feature the BOD LIBRARY in its contents, & vice versa–or even just to be included on one of its shelves.” — Inverse Peninsula Organization Depository

Dick’s Random Encyclopedia Dictionary defines the Bod Library COMPLEX as:
“a psychological state or creative disorder lived in &/or suffered by those who imagine themselves a library containing various wings, rooms, annexes, mountains & rivers.”
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*Note: Hole that was here has been moved, lest more readers disappear into it.
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GOING DEEPER…
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meta-menu (coming through the rye)

The TMI/ Too Much Info Zone: 

The Post-Page (Home Room) has a post-menu listing Individual Posts & also Post Categories (as an aid to selective browsing). This gives the reader a loco-navigational choice–whether to click or scroll to particular Posts, to a Category of interest, to particular topic-focused rooms, or even to other websites in the Bod’s Library On-Line Network.

Navigation to particular pages & opening embedded files are done by clicking–like Dorothy with her magic slippers. (We are still learning about Alice’s hyperlinks.) Meanwhile, Time progression in the Post Chronology is rarely, if ever, exactly what it seems, since we sometimes edit dates, if only to keep a Menu Post near the top for new arrivals.

While a conventional calendar tends to be organized in a sequence of days, numbers, weeks, moons, months, seasons, & years, reality is not always artificially reducible to a single narrowly conceptual time-line. In experience as lived, various dimensions of past & future are  intricately woven together within any dynamic present.

“The present does not just emerge from the past, but also hosts & edits it, even while focused on the future, whatever comes next in the eternal unfolding.” —Ricardo Bods

This past-&-future integrating aspect of the present isn’t just an aesthetic metaphor, but, like the mathematical discovery of the fractal, something apparently deeply embedded in the nature of existence, emerging in our geological, ecological, psychological, & even half-baked illogical descriptions–with countless foldings kneaded into each loaf. [This idea is explored further examining the nature of history, time & mind.]

Despite being a mouthful, the linguistic concept of “progressive-regressive juxtapositional assimilation” may clarify. Derived from the fact that in language, specifics of sound & sense often depend on what precedes and what comes after, this dual integrating principle is more fundamental to language (& the processing behind it) than is generally recognized. It is obvious when looked at closely, yet may seem counter-intuitive in the abstract. How can something be changed by what hasn’t happened yet, that only comes after? Just take a look, & a listen.

Notice how the h sound depends on what letter comes before, as in SHLEP or PHARMACY, as well as on what comes after, as in THIN or THAT. It gets even trickier when it’s the combination of before & after that determines the sounds in THAT & THIS are different from those in PITCHER. Or note how the C-sound changes according to what follows in CAT, CHURCH & CITY, or in the combinations PACK & PATCH.

Unconsciously for the most part, we do the same thing with sense, where the end of a sentence can determine what the whole thing is about, and what the beginning means. Sometimes it’s information beyond the end we need, as in context, to understand what a sentence means–e.g., what actually happened when the photographer “shot his hat.”

Sounds & sense are both changed, in other words, by what comes before & what comes after, as well as what’s around. Examples are all around us, yet the process remains largely hidden to most. At first glance, the idea that the future influences the present seems counter-intuitive, like effects influencing causes, counter to the so-called arrow of time, in which the cascade from the falls cannot flow backward, nor the shattered glass turn itself from shards to a whole capable of holding water again, except in funny videos. Yet in language, we do this all the time, and also in life, where thoughts of the morrow, or even just what comes next, help shape, guide & inform our now.     

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In our library are many rooms, wings, shelves, cabinets, cartons, volumes, books, scrolls, encyclopedias, maps, reference materials, biographies, novels, stories, poems, histories, documentaries, periodicals, journals, letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, footnotes, appendices, indexes, tables of content, decks, cards, card-catalogs, catalog catalogs, cuttings, postings, flyers, & signs (e.g., “NO EXIT”).

In our library, there are also many birds, but that’s another story, for another time & maybe place. The point here is that, even if we normally function with an all-day hour-glass whose sands flow more or less consistently in one direction, here we’re free to skip around in the niches of virtually multi-dimensional space-time with as much abandon as in any virtual library to which we have carte blanche, 24/7 private entry access & sufficiently low expectations. Why that?

Too high a standard might not only eliminate most library materials, but leave too little room for improvement, new additions, & later second-hand sales. Besides, where would we find either the time or talent to write better material, let alone read it, judge it, & re-write or discard it? As in any other library, you get to pick & choose without expecting to digest the whole thing at once. You supply the dynamic attention, making the  experience more active. In the theater with six screens & multiple speakers, by contrast, all we do is sit there while the sensory overload of light, sound & imaginary story comes at us full blast. We do nothing but receive &/or register. In the Bod Library Virtual Multiplex, the reader participates in choosing, making & shaping the particular experience, if only in the throwing the dice to decide where & what to browse.

A library can hold films, photographs & audio files, as well as rooms, shelves, collections, scrolls, books, adventures in thought & imagination, posts, post-holes, worm-holes, dimensional portals, catacombs, attics & towers, verandas, balconies & (in our case) the Avant Gardens Aviary, home of the En Garde Martial Arts Academy.

The single biggest difference between our physical library & the Bod’s LOL (Library-on-Line) is in the ratio of original material to total number of works or authors represented. Our physical library contains x thousand volumes by y-number of authors, within which our special collections (mainly by writers personally known &/or studied in depth) make up less than 10%, with our own original writings, publications & Bod Library productions presumably less than 10% of that, making our own original material about 1% of the total. In the virtual LOL, by contrast, the ratios are more or less reversed. Most of what goes up (90-99%) is original, most of that fresh, often drafted as it goes up.

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A New Perspective on Scrolling

Scrolls have been with us from long before digital tablets, tabloids, magazines & books. Only stone & clay tablets, rock writing, sand sketching, plastered muralists, knots, beads, clay pots & scrap collections may be older. No one knows how long it took to get from rock to roll & from roll to double-ply, or the dual-roll of the two-spool scroll. It is no accident, however, that most advanced cultures with “holy scribbles” (books meticulously copied by scribes, often in a hurry to meet quotas & deadlines) transferred their holiest to scroll form as soon as they could, being so much lighter & more portable, thanks to which holy scrolls still exist for the Hebrews & Shebrews, Tora Tora & Bora Bora, Chinese,  Japanese & Tibetan, the Sanskrit & the Sanskirt.

Contrary to popular belief, scrolls come in various forms. Some are hung vertically, letting gravity do the unrolling. Others are rolled on spools or just around themselves & stuffed in urns, then closed up in caves requiring library map & key-cards for entry. For societies advanced enough to have round sticks &/or large enough spools, the rolled scroll can be unrolled by hand either right to left or left to right to reveal text & illustrations. Where rolled before ink or blood has dried, the first two-sided impressions may be found.

Now today, our website POSTS & PAGES give scrolling new life–yet each in a  different way, different from each other as well as from scrolls of yore. Each has its own distinctive wrinkles, in other words. WordPress, our software host, offers us the  “Home Page” choice as either a “Static Page” (in which case there’s no place for  “Posts”) or “Posts,” in which case “Home” becomes a theoretically endless SCROLL, with newest posts on top (at least in theory, as dates can be ‘edited’).

The terms seem iffy. A “Static Page” is only as static as the web-worker’s relation to it. Besides, a “Page” isn’t really a “page” at all, at least not one with a set bottom. [The “hole” removed above came out to 6 pages & 3000 words on the Word file where dumped, for example.] What the website calls a Page is more like a Room organized as a potentially bottomless & endless scroll, where content may be displayed, stored, opened, etc. Each room is a SCROLL of any number of ordinary pages long, with posts, paragraphs, hyperlinks, inserts, illuminated photos, slideshows, videos, & audio files, sometimes even other rooms tucked inside (with their own mop closets) for content. So what’s the functional difference between a “post page” & a “static page“?

As used here, “Home” is a “post page“ while “About bodlibrary.org” is a “Static Page.” They differ as follows. The “Static Page” scrolls FORWARD in time &/or other progressions while rolling DOWN the screen. The first paragraph to be read is found at the top & the last at the bottom, whether following a thought process or a chronological story, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter. First this, then that. Scroll down….

The Post-filled Home-page, by contrast, scrolls BACK in time from dated post-to-post, newest (not first) on top (unless tweaked). To confuse matters, later paragraphs follow earlier ones within an individual post, but later posts appear above the earlier, dropping lower with each new addition. It may be that the order is reversible, to put oldest on top, so the last paragraph of any post would just precede in time the first paragraph of the next, more or less how a story is told.

As readers & writers of newspapers, magazines, & comedy are all well aware, however, there are advantages in leading with what’s freshest & most recent. Yesterday’s news & views are trumped by today’s. Earlier events & views fade in immediacy as today’s thoughts & happenings matter first. Yet there are also some situations in which this approach becomes perverse. If successive stanzas in a developing poem were added as posts composed over days or weeks, for example, a new reader ends up reading backward by stanzas, from last to first moving down the page of dated posts.

A reader who follows the stanzas as they appear (always on top) through time, however, would read from first to last over time, which a later reader could only by reading stanzas from the bottom of the page up. What works best depends not just on what’s written, in other words, but also on how it’s read.

Since “Posts” automatically seem to go up on what also serves as the site’s “Home” page (arrived at first by visitors), where a Preface,  Introduction & Orientation are called for, we edit listed “posting dates” to keep such “menu” posts on top. Nor are we above diddling with the listed dates on other posts, where there’s a reason to do so.