This is a good week to catch the kind of lectures you've always meant to go to but never did because the names didn't ring enough bells to draw you away from whatever else you were doing. Only ocean freaks and hardcore liberal politicos will be drawn by honchos in their fields this week, but there are plenty more obscure luminaries (contradiction in terms?) to keep things interesting.
THURSDAY
Princeton music professor Edward Cone will lecture at 4 p.m. Room 14E-109 of the Music Library, Hayden Memorial Building, MIT on "Three Ways to Read a Detective Story--Or a Brahms Intermezzo."
Back at Harvard, government professor Michael Walzer--a real gem of a lecturer--will come to grips with "Necessity and Choice in War" at 7 p.m. in the Moors Living Room, North House. Walzer recently returned from Israel and should have some interesting stories to tell.
If you're really serious about being informed on the world food shortage, head down to Science Center B at 4 this afternoon for the first of three lectures to be delivered by Professor John Hawkes of the University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England. This lecture will be on the "Patterns of Crop Plant Diversity". More on the topic will follow on Friday and Monday--same time, same place.
Next door, in Science Center A, the Radcliffe Union of Students and H-R Women's Center presents Wilmette Brown, a spokeswoman for the International Wages for Housework Campaign, who will speak at 8 p.m. on "Women, Children and Busing."
FRIDAY
Professor Robert Holt of New York University will give an 8 p.m. Science Center D audience a piece of his--and Sigmund Freud's--mind when he lectures on "Thematic Conflicts in the Structure of Freud's Ideas."
If you happen to skip out of that one 45 minutes into the lecture it's but a short walk to Phillips Brooks House where government professor Nadav Safran will discuss "America and Israel" at 8:45 p.m.
Up at Radcliffe, in the Hilles Library Cinema, poet Donald Justice will read his work at 4 p.m.
SUNDAY
A former premier of a small nation that was an early victim of U.S. CIA operations will speak at Morse Auditorium, 603 Commonwealth Ave., Boston at 11 a.m. Cheddi Jagan, expremier of Guyana, will talk on "The Way Forward for the Carribbean." Now you know where Guyana is.
MONDAY
Anyone who has ever even tasted salt water knows who Jacques Cousteau is, name is synonymous with oceanography. This is the man who brought the world Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus--better known as SCUBA--and helped popularize it with his dives into virtually all of the planet's deep waters. Costeau, who is getting on in years, is something of a legend in his own time. He will speak at 8 p.m. in the Pound Building of the Harvard Law School. There is a $2.00 admission charge.
At the same time, over in Gund Hall's Piper Auditorium, boyish Sen. Gary Hart (D.-Colo.) will provide some much needed feedback on President Carter's energy program when he lectures on "Energy and Congress." Hart engineered George McGovern's startling success in the 1972 Democratic presidential primaries and triumph at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. After the unsuccessful fall campaign, Hart got going on his own Senate race. He triumphed in 1974 on an environmentalist platform.
For those interested in an Arab perspective on oil, Abdul Latif al-Hanad, Director General of the Kuwait Fund for Economic Development, will speak on "Middle East Capital Flows" at 4:30 p.m. in Science Center C.
TUESDAY
Reginetta Haboucha, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, will lead a colloquium on "The Sephardic Folk Tradition: Story Telling Among Jews of Foreign Extraction," in the Colloquium Room, 3 James St. at 4 p.m.
WEDNESDAY
Matthew S. Meselson, Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences, will lecture on "Chemicals and Cancer" at 8 p.m. in the Science Center. Meselson is well known for his defense of recombinant DNA research.
Over at 3 Church St.--also at 8 p.m.--The Cambridge Forum gets under way with the topic "Should We Help Establish a Palestinian State?" Associate professor of Government Joel Migdal will take the affirmative. Migdal is presently completing a study of changes among West Bank Palestinian Arabs under the impact of military rule since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. He will debate Boston Israeli Consul Colette Avitel. (Tickler: Fear and Loathing comes to Cambridge a week from today.)