Publisher's Synopsis
These poems in "Light, Float, Sit, Watsu Virtually: Bodymind Electricity Sings to Me at Harbin Hot Springs & Other Traveling Poems," many written at Harbin or on the road to or from it, travel the globe from the Harbin warm pool, with a focus on meditation, to Cuttyhunk Island ('I kissed your back' & 'The bell was sailing off Canapitsit'), to India, and back to Santa Cruz, California. Most were written in 2012 and 2013. I'd like to dedicate these poems to Sunheart, however, a friend and a main anthropological informant in my first book, "Naked Harbin Ethnography: Hippies, Warm Pools, Counterculture, Clothing-Optionality & Virtual Harbin" (2016) who passed away this autumn 2020. In the poem "She Dappled Sun" here, I seek to bring Sunheart a birthday torte, place one on his doorstep in the Harbin village, only to find out later that he's traveling far, far away. I'd like also to bring him alive again - with artificial intelligence and machine learning into avatar bot form - so that we might interact conversationally again, at first; see this December 18, 2020 UC Berkeley Anthropology Tourism Studies' talk in these regards - https: //scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2020/12/doubledays-hummingbird-cynanthus.html - for both video and slides. I'd like to articulate Sunheart's Harbin knowledge and memories in digital form, and interactively, so that you or I might again talk and interact with him, as a first example of what might be possible in these regards (http: //scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2020/12/gorse-sunheart-heartsong-at-harbin-hot.html?m=0).Inherent in this Harbin poetry project, as well as in my actual-virtual Harbin Hot Springs' ethnographic project, with its poetry, is creating a realistic virtual Harbin with realistic avatar bots. Scott MacLeodscottmacleod.com New Year's Day 2021
