Open Sesame

Welcome to BOD COLLEGE, Bod Library’s totally unaccredited, cloud-based, non-profit virtual facsimile sub-annex of higher-than-normal learning & lower than normal entrance requirements, tuition ($0), credits (0),  prestige (0) &/or standards (“limbo-bod”).

First off, note that BOD COLLEGE, like Bod Library (& as in bodlibrary.xyz), has nothing at all to do with any accredited institution, least of all the venerable Bodleian (sometimes irreverently called “the bod”). There are various other Bods we are not related to, even perhaps other libraries so abbreviated (e.g., the Bishop O’Dowd).

Being part of the Bod-Library.net network, we are of course related to its various sites, even one being prepared as a sister to Bod College, likely to sow confusion–being called B. Odd College, more on which you may hear as B-Odd develops (tuned to an accessible frequency). Until then, Bod College will even do its best to uphold the odd.  

Now located at www.bodlibrary.xyz, there’s more here than meets the eye, including invisible & password-protected ‘pages’ (rooms with more or less full-courses), potentially accessible on request. Most content having been paid for when first developed, Bod College currently charges nothing for access, but appreciates communication if/when put to use.  

For entry into a protected areas, email specific request (site, room & purpose) c/o bodlibrary2020@gmail.com. Include a little info about yourself, your interests & experience with the topic &/or area represented, if any. Your address will never be shared, sold, leased or rented; & you’ll never be asked for confidential information.   

Though most general subjects explored & skills developed are also taught elsewhere, specific Bod College courses, workshops, games, perspectives, experiences, approaches & various exercises may be available here only. Thanks to cloud, web, net, & digital pinhead technology, here is no longer point-localized, however, being wherever you & site are at the same time (e.g., right now). 

Particular approaches, games & exercises were initially developed for & with specific groups, sponsored by organizations & institutions. Particular presentations, performances & workshops were offered by the New Mexico Humanities Council, Land of Enchantment Poetry Theater, American Library Association, Western American Literature Association, various libraries, arts councils, cultural & environmental groups, international arts festivals, meditation centers, schools & colleges, even government land & conservation agencies.

Many were part of formal courses offered at New Mexico Highlands University, University of Nevada (Reno), the Sri Aurobindo Centre of Education (India), Selwyn School (north Texas), or during ‘residencies’ at Northfield Mount Hermon School, Moses Brown, & elsewhere. Others were adapted for &/or from annual professional conferences of college communication &/ or western American literature teachers.

A few grew from a workshop with Lawrence Kohlberg’s in the early 1970’s, at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, focused on the stage-progression found in reasoning & how individual development to higher stages can be ‘activated’ (my term for actively encouraged). A premise. throughout is that we learn active skills primarily by the actual practice, the doing, exercising what’s involved, though improvements also tend to benefit from informed “editorial” perspective, an overview that sheds light on & within the doing.]  

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All of us are students at heart, few more so than teachers. Whether the aim is teaching others or mainly wising up oneself, we learn mostly from practice. On the one hand, it all comes down to the individual–where learning, practice, insight & understanding take place (if at all). On the other hand, topics, thought & most sense of meaning (if any) come from (& reside in) the larger group, as functions of language.  

Reasoning itself may have developed as a group process by which possibilities, options & approaches could be processed by groups seeking optimal outcomes together, whether for themselves or for a larger group. Language certainly develops through group use, pairs on. We learn the basics from what goes on around us–not just words, but ways of thinking, acting, feeling, expressing, responding & being responded to; including the attitudes, associations & impressions encountered.

Language shapes how we look & listen, see & interpret the world; gives all named entities their identities; and transmits a seemingly unlimited range of  “potentially meaningful information,” including emotionally evocative levels of vibration, along with whatever else mind-fields offer, soup to nuts.

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On a personal note, ‘Yours Crudely’ didn’t set out to be a teacher. I intended–i.e., imagined myself–to be a writer, & did, as defined as by the doing. Not that I knew much, if anything, about the writing I did, let alone how, let alone how to teach others! In high school, my scribbling ranged from beat-jazz babbling to school newspaper articles on sporting events.

In college, after a stint as managing editor of a sporadically produced freshman rag, I landed a summer job with the San Francisco bureau of The Wall Street Journal, along with a Newspaper Fund scholarship. On weekends, I wandered Steinbeck country, starting to fill notebooks with his work, Sherwood Anderson’s, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti & Henry Miller among the models, a practice continued on the road in Europe & Morocco a year later. 

 The writing itself would have had little, if any, rhyme or reason–a log of experiences along the way, snatched images & phrases, reflections on anything & everything, even a game worked on for a few weeks at one point, incoherent musings on the dance of infinity & eternity. The writing itself had little, if any, sense of purpose, least of all publishing. I’d earned the little money it took from selling Great Books in L.A.

If I thought at all about eventually earning a living as a writer, I had a vague sense it could be something in journalism &/or cheap fiction, though it was mainly the off-beat, avant-garde & poetic fringe I followed–with a growing interest in music, spoken word, & Asian writing. Back in college for a junior year, I passed up extra-curricular journalism to play jazz at the school’s radio station instead. At the end of one “morning jazz” program, the news I read on air included the presidential plane landing in Dallas….

The next evening, I met the classmate who changed everything that happened in my life after–among other things, a natural teacher. We were married 4 months later, with our first job after graduation 24/7 immersion at a boarding school in Texas, followed by two years in India, starting with the Peace Corps in West Bengal & finishing at the Sri Aurboindo International Centre of Education in Pondicherry, a son born in between.  

That was more than a half century of learning ago, details of which we may be spared a recounting for now, except to note a highlight or two along the way & that teaching involved every level. The focus here is your learning, however. Meeting those we learned from & passing along what’s learned go hand in hand, as do awareness & thought, feeling & flow, the search for understanding & the topic (or process) of writing.

Bod College may be considered a soon-to-be-late writer’s attempt to pass along some of the know-how (&/or know-what) initially developed while teaching over decades, including about 7 years of university writing & communication courses, with various materials from which here, on the possibility of being helpful to others (decades to come?).

My own learning moved from university classroom to game design, poetry & performance, including a quarter century of Chautauqua & other programs for general & specialist audiences sponsored by the NM Humanities Council & related groups (schools, libraries, parks, colleges, arts & meditation centers, poetry & history festivals…).

In the 1990s, besides various long-running programs based on the writing of Basho & then Aldo Leopold, an album of original poetry & guitar music  led to a series of radio programs on the words & music of the Santa Fe Trail (in the 2000s). My speaking voice eventually gave out, after which the pleasures of writing (which had been driving the communication all along) became all the more fully indulged….

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The histories of science, social structures & technology all provide obvious  examples of the scale-crossing character of languages–on the one hand, particular to individuals in context; on the other, composed of elements totally shared, held in common with contemporaries & even across times.  As represented by library materials, all these are held in a kind of total mind-field potential state activated locally by specific ‘visitors’ with particular materials.

As a source of learning, a library can become its own college, then, without dictating “requirements,” course content, or credits. All seekers are free to progress in their chosen directions at their preferred rates.  A college founded on such a concept may offer library-designated “courses,” adventures along pathways of guided discovery, where insights, & realizations take place from within the experience that provokes them.

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More courses & topics of interest are mentioned (& briefly described below) than are up yet, or likely to get up. Priority in adding/ uploading may go to topics & skills in which visitors have expressed interest. (Drop a note if there are particular subjects &/or uploads you’d like to see jumped to the head of the otherwise hardly moving upload-line–c/o bodlibrary2020@gmail.com.)

Here are just a few of the topic areas with material up, currently in line, or available to go on-line. (Ask about any others.)

Feeling:
~~~~~ASP: All senses perceiving….
~~~~~~Non-verbal expressions
~~~~~~Non-verbal representations…

Awareness:  
~~~~~Fine Tuning the Senses–Outer & Inner 
~~~~~ Mind, Life & Meaning–The Nature of Nature
~~~~~Almost All & Everything You’ve Wanted to Know

Communication: Writing 
~~~~~Easy Expo: evolving skill levels, essay engineering
~~~~~haikai arts –hokku, haiku, renga, haibun, Basho!
~~~~~Backcountry trails (Basho’s oku no hosomichi) 

Communication: Presenting
~~~~~Easy Expo: evolving skill levels, essay engineering
~~~~~Translation: arts & languages, domains & dimensions
~~~~~Chautauqua tonight!–a personal exploration of the form(s)

Thinking Strategically 
~~~~~game analysis, simulation & design
~~~~~the autocratic challenge: recognition & response
~~~~~Nevada’s McCarthyite Crisis: the ‘Buttinsky Affair’ 

While most of these may be considered serious stuff, some offerings also qualify as being more or less completely ridiculous, e.g.,
~~~~~Humor & the Humanities–Literature & Laugh Therapy 
~~~~~The Mirror-Times-Mirror Trans Media Mis-Translation Method
~~~~~Mime Public Radio:-smellably audible, florally aural…

There are also occasional philosophical-metaphysical-disassociative asides like this, with notes like: When donating his library to found Ardvark College, Juan Ardvark claimed,  “A library may make a college & be its chief resource, shaping its curriculum & character.” So, too, a college may make a library all the more useful, housing it in Ardvark Yard.

Whether considered an annex of Bod Library or an entity of its own, B’odd College is wholly open, with neither walls nor gates, neither dorms nor dining hall, neither tuition nor fees, neither credits nor debits, neither graduation requirements nor conventional degrees.

(Fraternity shenanigans & sorority sponsored panty raids, if any, are entirely unsanctioned by the administration, which reserves the right to turn a blind eye to what consenting near-adults not ostentatiously breaking laws in public do in their spare time. Besides, B’odd College has neither fraternities nor sororities, neither elite eating clubs nor secret societies we know of. –Dean O. Beans)

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Courses offered, on or over the 360 degree horizon:

ACT 101: AWARENESS-COMMUNICATION-&-THINKING, 3 skill sets to success
~~~~~STEWPA 101: Strategic Thinking, Easy Writing, & Productive Awareness
~~~~~~~~~~WAT: Writing, Awareness, Thinking/ 

AHA! breakthroughs: Game-based adventures in new understanding, e.g.,
~~~~~The ULTIMATE ADVANTAGE GAME: 30+ years of experiments;
~~~~~Douglas Harding’s enlightenment exercises;
~~~~~How-to Solution Frameworks 

Walter van Tilburg Clark, The Inner Ox-Bow & the Mid-50’s Nevada Affair–-A fresh look at the upheaval in higher education precipitated at the University of Nevada Reno, based on new documents & insights from personal interviews & primary materials in the Bod Library’s Frank Richardson Archives.

Chautauqua tonight!: A Personal Exploration of the Forms; Identifies 8 bearers of the term Chautauqua, from “Big Fish Story Place” to institute, daughter assemblies, circuits, Elvis, motorcycle meditation, humanities revival & creative conversation crossing time-zones (e.g., with historical character, present gathering & future contemplation). 

Humor & the Humanities/ Literature & Laugh Therapy; Whether taken on their own terms or in contrast to historical struggle, study of the humanities often takes a step back far enough to reveal humor in the absurd & ridiculous.     

…over horizons beyond:

Adventure CAPITAL: The Gopher Brokerage Guide to Value & Investment Markets; Bod Library Card Poker; Probability Insurance, Chance & Certainty… 

Better Late: ghostwriting 101–unauthorized posthumous autobiographies
PS: The Art of Post Scripts, Post Crypts, Posts, Postits, & Post Holes

Slam Poetry for Mimes, Nude Photography for the Blind; 
Re-Education for the Pre-Saturated, Over Educated & Under-Undestanding

The Bod College philosophy:

“What? We’ve got a philosophy?”

“If it ain’t fun, it ain’t functional.”

[Formerly, If it ain’t grammatical, all the better.]

Fun isn’t always what it seems, of course. Some people think running is fun, &/or other things that take effort, produce sweat, grunting & groaning. Fun depends on context, spirit & attitude. Too much fun isn’t fun anymore–it’s too much. (Just ask anyone queasy from too many sweets or over-drinking.)

We learn by doing. Even more when doing means teaching. 

[This is a twice taut ‘taughtology,’ since teacher & learner are ultimately one, whether only one involved (you or I, teaching oneself) or ultimate one (you & I,  beneficiary). Corollaries = Do we or don’t we learn by not doing, not teaching?]

We learn by playing, & more so from insight-informed play.

That applies to poker, fiddle, strategic planning, baseball, etc., you name it. 

Whether the play is on stage, in a field, at a table, it takes place as imagined in the mind, with direct perception of the present & immediate past merging with what’s imagined in anticipation (sometimes prior to mental consciousness). Nothing exists in a vacuum, so the play takes place within a given framework learned from others.

Experience is the great teacher, most effective when one’s own is informed & guided by the enlightened experience of others with more. Experience alone does not guarantee insight, but insight can help improve how you influence experience, improving the productivity of the process as well as the quality of any product (or by-product).

Nature is the great teacher. Nature & experience & experience of nature make up 3/4 of the faculty, and help determine 1/4 of the curriculum. The last 4th = what is, all given by human nature–language, economics, media, government….

Practice may not make perfect, but better. (There are many worse things than better.) Where learning means developing, practice is what does it. The more you exercise a muscle, the greater the capacity it tends to develop. This also applies to brain muscles, including those used to think, imagine, organize, interpret, reason, problem-solve, hold a conversation, speak to a group, write a paper, poem, story, news account, topic report, blog, postcard, post, tweet or memo…(some of which benefit more from “productive awareness” than others, according to payoff).

Payoff should benefit on multiple levels–from pleasure in the immediate experience & appreciation of new insights to the longer-term capacities developed; the enhanced quality of understanding & output; subsequent achievements (for self & others), etc. In a course on market dynamics, for example, you should enjoy the play, have insights, develop understanding, and be able to engage more effectively in real world markets. (Your mistakes, stupid or otherwise, just like your gains, remain your own.)

Effective courses ought to include expanded cognitive understanding of the territory traversed; increased fluency with terms, concepts, & mechanisms; & some “hands-on feel” for the actions & choices called for. Where the territory involves thinking & communication skills, the sky’s no limit.

“Absence of mind is a poor substitute for lack of attendance, so showing up should be half the fun.” —The Unauthorized Posthumous Autobiography Formula, from Ghostwriters in the Cloud.

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BOD seems to be a proto-Indo-European root that shows up in the Bodhi tree, Bodhidarma, & Bodhisattva, as well as in the northern European message carrier, as well as the bottle the message came in, & in the Hungarian barrel-maker (bod-nar), Spanish boda & bodega, English body, & American bodacious….

[By a unanimous super-majority of the College’s Policy Board (a 1-0 vote with abstentions in absentia), our non-institutional name may be rendered Bod, Baud, Bawd,…B-Odd &/or Be-Awed College, however inconsistently &/or randomly.  If & when B-Odd-College has its own site, it may claim “Odd’s our middle name.” At least until then, oddness will rear its head here from time to time, & place to place, being too delicious to resist entirely.

It may be said that 1 is the ultimate in oddness, a singular being characteristically unique, with all subsequent odd numbers actually a combination of even & odd, (e.g., 3 being 1+2; 5, 3 + 2; 7, 5+2 or 3+4 or 1 + any kind of 6…). 1 has no evens, unless as either two halves or half a pair….  Two odds always make an even, as do two evens…. Another way to put that is that any even turns out to have at least two odds at its root…

If there is anything odder than existence, natural & human alike, the world as we know it, the mind that does the knowing (& un-knowing alike), who knows what that would be? One candidate: language, which combines features of all these–mind, world as we know it, natural & human, even its own existence, arguably as ephemeral & even disembodied as both seem. 

“With all due respect for the law of averages, attempts to get even usually lead to losing more. Better to obey the law of odds instead, & quit while ahead.” –Full Steam Ahead, Slick Willie]