Welcome to Bod Library’s new (2024):
~~~Self-Reference Overlook,
~~~~~Fun-House of Mirrors
~~~~~~~i. e., Bottomless Pit
~~~~~~~~~~~~Sub-Basement)
where we are now:
~~~~Home, home on the range…
0. SITE MANAGEMENT: How the site shows up (& may be navigated) depends on your screen. If big enough, you’ll see two unequal columns–one on the left with clickable menu to other pages & search functions; & larger one to the right for content like this. On smaller screens, only this side may appear, so you may need to find your screen’s MENU icon to access other rooms/ pages/ topics.
Note that the hyphen between “bod” & “library” in bod-library.info is a critical part of the website address, yet potentially confused by screens, platforms & word-processing programs that add hyphens to link one word across lines. Only the hyphens between bod & library (& between whole words in mirror-times-mirror sites) are part of the actual address, not any added by hyphen protocols– as mine has just done, showing .info in the address as “in-fo” across lines!
- WHAT’S A LIBRARY: According to the American Library Association (2010), “A library is a collection of resources in a variety of formats that is (1) organized by information professionals or other experts who (2) provide convenient physical, digital, bibliographic, or intellectual access and (3) offer targeted services and programs (4) with the mission of educating, informing, or entertaining a variety of audiences (5) and the goal of stimulating individual learning and advancing society as a whole.”
Such a definition might also apply to many non-libraries, e.g., seed-banks, museums, tourist bureaus, schools, plus fitness, yoga, martial arts & laugh therapy centers. Less clear might be the little free roadside libraries or even Ma’s 2¢/day lending library on Shirley Ave in old Revere, neither of which are associated with “information professionals or other experts.” Perhaps the definition has always been as porous as the broadly stated goals imply (“access…services and programs…educating, informing, or entertaining”).
The word library itself comes from the Latin for book, a concept not limited to printed pages between covers, so a library may include scrolls, librettos, cuneiform tablets & all other forms used for transmitting information, e.g., newspapers & magazines; journals & ephemera; visual & audible media; digital files (any of which may include any of the others).
Transmission technologies influence how content is experienced. Ordinarily taken for granted, this fact deserves mention here in relation to the various possible SELVES referenced in SELF-REFERENCE,to distinguish the vehicle of transmission from other aspects of identity, like content, intent, conceptual framework, vision, aspiration, staff, creator &/or other self-identifying features.
Like the architecture of a physical building, the framework of a virtual library can be a functionally important part of its identity, even central to what happens there. Though it may also be considered largely incidental to the primary inter-action between visitor & content, i.e., no more than a filing cabinet for material of interest within, the library’s conceptual framework may also affect (even determine) its contents.
A website framework has capacities & constraints of its own, affecting the expression of what’s found. Some constraints (e.g., layout, graphics, expression) may simply reflect staff’s lack-of-skill in such areas. It’s difficult to avoid the personal elements implied in self-reference, in other words, meaning in a library’s case, its personnel–actual, re-imagined by your guide here, &/or more or less entirely fictional.
There’s the rub. Just how fictional is any actual self imagined, particularly one’s own? Like a photographer who prefers to stay out of the framed focus of works made, your guide may dance around two dilemmas. The first is making the tour personally enjoyable without diverting attention from library to guide. The second is the equivocal distinction between what’s real (e.g., the virtual library) & what’s imagined (ditto), including what’s imagined as actual (however virtual) & what’s imagined as imaginary, fictional, metaphorical, conceptual….
In the present case, we can see & say that Bod Library is real in both the physical & virtual realms, each an almost entirely different entity in all regards. Not open to the public, the physical is largely irrelevant here, except as virtually represented, as is &/or re-imagined. The reality of the Library-On-Line speaks for itself–anyone can test that for themselves by visiting actual sites, including this, along with as many rooms, branches, wings, annexes…you can find &/or stomach.
On the other hand, it’s also perfectly clear that Bod Library is entirely virtual, conceptual & representational, as well as at least to some degree fictional, metaphorical, & a creative translation of the imagined reality in various modes, overtly fictional media among them, along with discussions of game-theory (& actual games); philosophies of science & mind; histories in words & music; poetry & worse (verse) in various traditions; an embedded laugh therapy program & college course in CAT (Communication-Awareness-Thought); exploration of media & message, transmission & translation, form & genre (e.g., that of a novel novel-in-progress in the form of a Library-On-Line).
Now throw in a seemingly bottomless, ever-expanding self-reference section into which maker & reader may escape & disappear, such being a feature of attention, as well as in the nature of the self, presumably any self, animate, human; conceptual, virtual; even inanimate, e.g., a rock. Each exists at multiple scales or orders of magnitude, quarks to entities to contexts, with multiple facets &/or dimensions at each (e.g., intent, setting, function, form…), as well as feedback loops, translations & interactions.
In the case of the L-O-L’s intent, for example, we’ve already touched on a few: to make & leave a mirror of the times for later generations; to be a filing cabinet for writing the writer will likely come back to (& thus potentially improve); to have someplace to go, a work to do; to enjoy the pleasure of the exercise, the flow of thought & language (as writer, as reader); to have & share fun, provide laugh therapy on personal & perhaps transmissible scale; to wise up the interested, from individual self on; to pay the culture & civilization back, offering what flows here near the end; to pluck strawberries from the cliffside as the vine gives way.
Levels of abstraction & related constraints apply to all personal agencies & vehicles of transmission–virtual library, individual persons, even physical books. Although a particular volume may be held in one’s hands, for example, the actual “book” it represents transcends the copy, as well as the edition, mode of representation & delivery, even at times the language itself, changing with time, place & circumstance of translation. Its most defining characteristics may not reside in the tangible expression between covers or on the page at all, its essential identity being more analogous to music experienced as feelings evoked by vibrations, movements, & contagiously expressed emotions.
Sense & sentience, with breath & spirit in motion, may be as distinct from the written score as Beethoven’s 5th from Ludwig’s liquor cabinet, or any particular transcription of a score so titled, or even any particular orchestral rendition, all of which may be considered translations, a key aspect of Bod Library’s form, focus & function.
Though it might be said that the library sees itself primarily as facilitator in the transmission of its contents to “wonderful persons” like you, in self-referential terms, it also becomes its own content, an inherently multi-dimensional entity, with conceptual architecture, aims & intents (overt & implicit). On a fundamental level, for example, we might split our self-definition to the physically real library (books, archives, collections…), including three buildings, 200+ acres; & the virtually fictional, conceptually real, totally trans-local library-on-line (l-o-l).
Never mind so-called A.I. for the moment, a good deal of our everyday reality is based on fictions that are mutually turned into functionally effective fundamentally conceptual realities–e.g., from social constructs like money to culturally psychological constructs like language.
NOTHING BELOW THIS LINE IS READABLE yet…
scaling across orders of magnitude &/or levels of (non-) transparency…
NOTHING BELOW THIS LINE IS READABLE.
When it comes to the essentially self-referential identity of Bod-L-O-L (Library-On-Line),in other words, how many levels & dimensions would you like?
Bod-Library: essential conceptions (ALL genuine, certified B.S.)
1. –-the library’s public representation of itself: see
~~~ www.bod-library.net (welcome mat, map, audio, gallery, etc.)
2. –the library’s 7-level self-definition:
~~~we am what we am (“it is what it is”);
~~~~~# branches & wings; # special collections; # exhibits…;
~~~~~# repositories of wisdom & folly, babbling & bubbling, arts & warts…;
~~~~~# working place where improvable prior drafts may be re-encountered…;
~~~~~# house of card catalogs; # gateway to everywhere…;
~~~~~# fun-house of the imagination; # DIY university…;
~~~~~# cure yourself asylum, sanitorium, yoga mat…;
~~~~~# escape hatch…; # novel novel…; # mirror of its time…;
3. —nitty gritties of entity-identities (hardly hidden, in plain sight):
~~~a) active mind-field(s) in motion;
~~~b) bases inquiring minds may leave & return to (tag & steal);
~~~c) cases(open & shut), sections for thought, documents, reflections…;
~~~d) depository of formal diversities(duh);
~~~e) exploratorium of evocative implicate & expletive orders,
~~~f) fun-&-wonder house of forms, genres, & functions…(where the flat lady laughs, a kid card-sharp shoots leaners, 3-way windows & mirrors sporadically reverse as floors, walls & ceilings open…;
~~~g) garden of delights (e.g. avian; imaginary);
~~~h) home office…;
~~~i) in disappearance we thrust…rust, rest in digital dust….
4. —temple of language;
~~~laugh therapy lab;
~~~home of the More-On-This-&-That Club Sandwich Club;
~~~More On (This & That) Club Murder Mystery Dinners;
~~~KNUMb, MPR/ Mime Public Radio station (in one era…);
~~~Avian cafeteria (seeds, suet, rice, eggs, magpie & raven treats…);
~~~Bed, book & bidet band, with setting for sleep-readers;
~~~s’Cat security, squirt & jerk surveillance headquarters…
~~~Doc’s lost-&-found-&-lost-again Dept. of Deep, where the mysteries keep….
5. –semi-private views & ideas of staff, founder, author, artist-in-residence; self-reference research fellow, analyst in absentia; card-holder; fictional reviewer, investigator, detective &/or sense-detector (actual, imagined, made up, caught on virtual Sasquatch cam or whatever).
6. – 7. – 8. gateways…
~~~Alice’s Inn….
~~~Bucking Bookmobile…
~~~Cider Sea’s Cruise Lines
9. Neiny No No
~~~Above all, don’t believe anything read here, let alone in the library’s Annexes for Humor & Media,
~~~But note the inconceivable degree historical media & public opinion have been effectively owned & operated by “national insecurity agency” aliases, agents, conduits, friends, shills & operatives.…
~~~See Ayay Oy Vey, classified report of the officially non-existent Peripheral Inteligence Agency (the only entity of its kind with mis-spelled name in its own signature, sign of its legitimacy), sub-titled, Director’s Eyeballs Only, which concludes:
~~~Down the Rabbit’s Pie & Bagel Hole.... (See “Collapse of the quantum wave function,” in Deck of Library Cards Shuffled Monthly) to Dick’shandy dandy random pocket digital pinhead D.E.A.D.: Dictionary-Encyclopedia-Atlas-Directory…
~~~Etc. (…ellipses…escape in progress…)
~~~Dept. of Deep Down
In the Dept. of Deep, mysteries keep…
getting deeper the deeper we go,
as the more we know, the more know
we don’t…know nada, know squat
(even know the farm we’ll soon have bought–)
So dust off the fiddle & oil up the bow,
for with that old time music here we go–
the more we seek, the more we know,
the more we know we don’t know squat–
at least that’s what the wise ones thought.
In the Dept. of Deep, the mysteries keep
us diving & mining, rising & shining,
higher than the mountain’s leap,
deeper than a dreamless sleep
beyond this verse for re-defining….
In the Dept. of Deep, the mysteries keep
us flying high & smelling cheap,
radio riffing bleep by bleep,
so even free, the cost seems steep–
as we follow the flock we’re part of–
for better & worse, it’s part of our curse,
frolic in the morgue with doc & nurse….
it’s all we know from birth to hearse–
slap on the bottom to so much worse,
that still won’t fit in a verse perverse.
In the Dept. of Deep, the mysteries keep…
thought Little Bo Beep, before going to sleep,
we’ll weep if we want, & weep if we must,
yet tears will not stop us returning to dust–
“Once one knows nothing, one knows that nothing can be something, too….”
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