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The University of Alabama's ALLELE series of lectures on topics related to evolution (http://evolution.ua.edu/) announces  the first lecture of the spring 2018 semester: February 8, 2018: Bernard Crespi, “Where Darwin Meets Freud:  The Evolutionary and Psychological Genetics of Human Cognitive Architecture.”​ the lecture is at 7:30 PM, in 1011 North Lawn Hall, UA campus, Tuscaloosa. The talk is free and open to the public.

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What is wrong?

a hard-working personable young man
also a flasher and a thief
I imagine he tries so hard
life is harder than it looks
so often we are our own
worst enemies

True Story

Counting by 10s always made her sing that song about the bloody Red Baron, 50+ years after first hearing it.

Deep-ish thoughts

I recently had to choose a bunch of my poems for a reading at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. The theme of the meeting was the monstrous in literature. I realized a few things about my monstrous poetry in the process of making choices for the reading. In most of the poems, if there were two intelligent beings, one was male and the other female. The viewpoint character was almost always male. The viewpoint character almost never dismembered/devoured/made wallpaper out of any female characters. The reverse, however, was true in many of the poems. In a few of the poems, none of the major characters victimized anybody. I don't think analyzing one's own deep psychological motives is fruitful, but I did write this poem as a result of my observation.


The Poet Debates an Imagined Reader


What is it with you
and these poems about women?
Your protagonists, all of them male,
and all of them you,
are eaten, killed, turned into furniture,
by females of one kind or another.
The best they can hope for
is to lose their women to
alien monsters,
natural disasters,
ecological catastrophes,
mysterious viruses;
is this something from your childhood?

They are viewpoint characters,
not protagonists,
and never me.
Don't mistake the character for the author;
that's the mark of a noob.

Weak, very weak.
Why should we read any more of your crap?


end

Next ALLELE lecture

Brad J. Sagarin of Northern Illinois University will be speaking on “Evolutionary Psychology: Exploring Darwin’s Psychological Legacy” at 7:30 p.m. on October 13 in
127 Biology Building on the University of Alabama campus in Tuscaloosa. The lecture is free and open to the public.

His presentation is the first in the 2011-2012 Alabama Lectures on Life’s Evolution, known as ALLELE. The lecture series, in its sixth year, is supported by UA’s College of Arts and Sciences and the departments of anthropology, biological sciences, geological sciences, philosophy, and psychology.

For further information, visit: http://bama.ua.edu/~evolution/alleleindex.html

evolution lecture

Thursday of next week (Apr. 28), 7:30 PM, University of Alabama biology auditorium. Dr. Brad Sagarin talks about sex differences in jealousy.

http://bama.ua.edu/~evolution/schedule10-11.html

Recent lectures are free from iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/alabama-lectures-on-lifes/id404003891?ls=1