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poetry
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Not Haiku
Sergio Vucci. Untitled, 15.
2003.
Polaroid Spectra Print.
courtney druz
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When I look up and see
branches
framed in the three-pane
strip above the blinds,
black and tenuous like
brush strokes
against the paper-white
sky of late winter, late afternoon,
my eyes are opened
and I think of other
filaments
thrusting their fractal
tips into some blank —
the blood’s inverted
branches gasping into the lungs’ air,
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The Graduation of Prometheus
brian wilkins
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We, the
firebringers and conmen,
who studied in those
bestial nests
and were baptized in the nonsense of brooks
scattered like blown dandelions
impelled by wishes and novel space.
Some got religion and faithfully
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Amputation
Sophie Andrews.
White Dust and Roses. 2007.
d.a. feinfeld
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After that surgery, my name seemed to me to
be no more than a
loose rubric under which at intervals, aspects of myself
occasionally reassembled and functioned. -Larry McMurtry
After drugging and cutting,
split sinews, veins lopped to tree-stumps,
he finds one unplanned side effect:
amputation of his given name.
He dreams in the colors of pain: red bands
over his eyes battle black sunspots.
Half-awake, nerve-cords loosed
from their mooring, he collects
arms or legs for shocked instants,
and, blinking in blood-mist, gropes
along a strange
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stories
A Natural Selection
Frans Floris. Judgment of Paris. 1548.
anya bellow
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It
was
April and balmy. Russell
opened the window to his home office and could barely remember what it
was like to feel cold, though it had just snowed a week earlier. He
looked at a picture of Lilah on the desk and thought about putting it in
a drawer. But he had a strange superstition about putting framed
pictures flat down — as if, by dint of some voodoo magic, the person in
the picture would suffer somehow. So he kept it there...and then went
back to rereading emails from Clare
— like the one sent in haste after she read his novel
Face Blind (about
a young boy with prosopagnosia
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Tornadoes Along a Möbius Strip
james warner
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In the year following Greg's divorce, he and his seven-year-old
daughter Helen had a computer game they played together before
bedtime. In the game you were a sphere that could move forwards,
backwards, to the right, or to the left, by pressing W, S, A, or D
on the keyboard. The space bar let you jump. While trying to collect
as many jewels as possible on a series of platforms, you had to
avoid trap-doors, moving walls, bumpers, exploding devices etc. One
mistake, and you soared downwards to expire in a lagoon far below.
Irritating music played all the time. As a representation of life
under capitalism, it was actually not
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Not Just-So Stories
REFLECTIONS ON AN EP CONFERENCE THROUGH AN EP
LENS
photo: jay landolfi
First Inaugural NorthEastern Evolutionary
Psychology Society Conference (NEEPS) State University of New York at New Paltz; April 2007
chester dimsdull,
maryanne fisher, glenn geher,
daniel kruger, rosemarie sokol, sarah strout
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Genuinely altruistic hominids spotted in New York’s Hudson Valley!
GLENN GEHER
When it comes to altruism, the party line in evolutionary psychology
goes something like this: True altruism doesn’t really exist – it’s
not an evolvable quality of organisms given how natural selection
works her magic (which is by selecting features of organisms that
have the effects of replicating their own particular genes). The two
predominant kinds of altruism discussed by evolutionists both
Penis Envy
SARAH STROUT
It was interesting to
note, given the plenary address of Gordon Gallup and his slide show
of giant penises (as they were projected to monumental proportions
on a 6-foot screen), that after the plenary, a number of men in the
audience were to be overheard blatantly proclaiming their
heterosexuality and indicators of fitness ("I run every day"!) to
the women around them, as if they were actually competing with a
potential competitor in the form of
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discourse
The Biology of the Imagination
Deborah
Marsden.
Intelligent Evolution.
2007.
simon
baron-cohen
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In what sense might something as intrinsically human as the imagination
be biological? How could the products of the imagination — a novel, a
painting, a sonata, a theory
— be thought of as the result of biological
matter? After all, such artifacts are what culture is made of. So
why invoke biology? In this essay, I will argue that the content
of the imagination is of course determined more by culture than
biology. But the capacity to imagine owes more to biology than
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Modernized Mutating Vinegar Tasters
AN ADAPTATION OF THE ANCIENT CHINESE
'VINEGAR TASTERS' STORY
rosemarie sokol
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"The Vinegar Tasters" is
an ancient Chinese tale about three wise men in a city in China, who, in
fact, represent the three major teachings there: Confucianism, Buddhism,
and Taoism. Let's assume, however, for the sake of psychology, that
we’ve instead walked down a very busy street in present-day Scholarville;
where people of all kinds partake in various interactions. Each strikes
up a different conversation about an aspect of psychology,
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Celebrity Aesthetics as Mortality
Terror Management
Ira
Joel Haber. Nude.
daniel j. kruger
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Did you know that your academic productivity can
be attributed to your subconscious desire to avoid thinking about your
own possibly imminent death? Publications and other cultural artifacts
are products of a compensatory psychological mechanism for ameliorating
the psychological terror resulting from the awareness of one’s own
mortality. Like cognitive dissonance and other paradigms before it,
Terror Management Theory
is on the verge of becoming the latest mainstream psychological
meta-theory for explaining a wide array of psychological and cultural
phenomena.
Although some evolutionists have claimed that the phenomena cited by TMT
are artifacts of coalitional psychology (e.g., Navarrete, Kurzban,
Fessler, & Kirkpatrick 2004), TMT remains a powerful tool for dissecting
cultural products and events. For example, witness the recent
existential crisis of American celebrity singer Cher. Faced with the
recognition of her impending senescence
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The Last Appletree
david appelbaum
david/derrida kate hamilton
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The appletree was a riddle to me. It was a
gnarled silhouette in an early dusk, a sport that had escaped from
the domestic orchard downwind. Far from farmland or pasturage, it
stood alone, a single tree in a glen halfway up the mountain slope.
As I looked from below, a bright winter star shone at the top —
Albadaron. In the wind, it was eclipsed momentarily by a withered
apple clinging
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The
Lie of Memory
Deborah
Marsden.
Electromagnetism. 2007.
eric
d. lehman
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Memory works in strange ways. Scientists are
still unsure how it is stored, and even more baffled by the fact
that it seems to change over time. How do events we perceive as
objective reality become muddled fantasy? Why do people forget
something for years, and then suddenly it pops into their minds?
What makes certain neurons fire and not others? Where? When?
Scientists don’t like chaos.
It is
unfortunate for them, then, that our minds warp and fluctuate
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