Publisher's Synopsis
This little book of poetry, "To the Dance or the Pools? Virtually! How different it is to soak at Harbin Hot Springs, than to realize it in virtual Reality," explores Harbin Hot Springs in a radically new way, - both actually and virtually, and physically and digitally. I wrote many of these poems while I was doing anthropological fieldwork in 2010 & 2011 for my Harbin Hot Springs' ethnographic project, both while at Harbin, and while on the road there, and this book's poems are, in a sense, an expression of this anthropological thinking as well. My large, first book "Naked Harbin Ethnography: Hippies, Warm Pools, Counterculture, Clothing-Optionality & Virtual Harbin" was published in 2016 (in the Academic Press at World University and School), and while it also has some poetry in it, it's an unique ethnographic exploration of both actual and virtual Harbin Hot Springs, coming into conversation with Tom Boellstorff's "Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human," (Princeton University Press, 2008). The Academic Press at WUaS seeks also to reinvent the book anew, and to publish eventually from within the Google Street View with time slider environment, text in the sidebar, and planned, with machine translation, to translate all 7,111 known living languages and with virtual Reality (e.g. images and videos) too, to which we can all add, and which will become interactive and with avatar bots. WUaS Press seeks to make this printable to paper too.The last poem in this book, also entitled "To the Dance or the Pools? Virtually! ...," is what I'm calling an "idea poem" or "philosophy poem," and possibly as a new kind of genre in poetry, and explicitly explores western philosophy ideas of consciousness.I hope you, the reader, might be able to 'travel there' or virtually 'visit Harbin' - and via each of the poems in Virtual Reality or VR in something like Google Street View with Time Slider with Maps and Earth and in Google Cardboard, eventually in VR Glasses, thus making it possible to conceive of the book in a new way too, and for any of us to curl up with a good book, and expand our consciousness, in very new ways.In these virtual actual-virtual Harbin poems, the following are places on the Harbin Hot Springs' property in northern California: Mainside, the Pool Area, and Stonefront Lodge (which burned down in 2015). And Watsu refers to water shiatsu, a kind of water dance, and therapeutic modality, significantly developed at Harbin.In the last poem "To the Dance or the Pools? Virtually! How different it is to soak at Harbin Hot Springs, than to realize it in virtual Reality," and with regards to science and studying consciousness -George Church - "DNA: George Church at TEDxCERN" 2013 - https: //youtu.be/KWSYtgTLQFw; "George Church on reversing aging - ApplySci @ Harvard" (12/10/2019) - https: //youtu.be/yefzqDpJ5Oc;Ed Boyden - "Ed Boyden: A light switch for neurons" (2011) - https: //youtu.be/hupHAPF1fHY; Karl Deisseroth - "Karl Deisseroth (Stanford / HHMI): Development of Optogenetics" (2016) - https: //youtu.be/MUGky_QaaV0;David Chalmers - "David Chalmers on the virtual and the real" (2017) - https: //youtu.be/QMLojOcOJFI; "The Virtual and the Real" (2017 paper) - http: //consc.net/papers/virtual.pdf - are innovative Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and NYU professors respectively, and here are some examples of their thinking in video, and in one paper, with regards to this poem. In "To the Dance or the Pools? Virtually! ... " I've added a blog link with every poem, where in these blog posts, you will also find photographs. Names of poems with natural images in beginning of title are sometimes related to the poem, and sometimes arbitrary. The cover photo's avatar is of an UC Berkeley Asian American undergraduate student who came into the 3D virtual reality world of Second Life. See: "Aphilo Scott MacLeod The Making of Virtual Harbin Introduction" - https: //youtu.be/3nhvcHw54GE.
