Stop censoring yourself

I had the pleasure of seeing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tayari Jones at the Tenement Museum last week. (You don’t mind if I borrow this picture, do you, Tayari?) The Q&A yielded a lot of interesting thoughts on the craft of writing, including Chimamanda’s insistence on the importance of maintaining the distance from your subject that’s required to make it possible to write truthfully.

Tayari mentioned (but did not name) a famous woman author who signs her books with the message “Stop censoring yourself.” Readers tend to take it as a piece of stunning insight into their personal situation: How did she know?

A little googling didn’t help me figure out who the author is, but I did find John Cassavetes offering the same advice.

Things that make you go hmmm

I like Don DeLillo’s writing, but he’s better at creating an atmosphere of portentousness then he is at delivering the payoff.

I first noticed this years ago when I read The Names, which gave every appearance of being an ingenious metaphysical mystery—except that the mystery is never solved.

In a short book like Point Omega it’s probably harder to generate the necessary special effects for this kind of thing. In one scene, a young filmmaker is alone with a secretive professor who has become an influential advisor on matters of war. They have this exchange:

“You told them things. Were these policy-board meetings? Who was there?” I said. “Cabinet-level people? Military people?”

“Whoever was there. That’s who was there.”

I liked this answer. It said everything. The more I thought about it, the clearer everything seemed.

Hmmm.

Just Give Money to the Poor

Books like Lords of Poverty and The Road to Hell have left me skeptical about the intentions and effects of much development aid (though not as skeptical as Dambisa Moyo, author of Dead Aid.)

AfricaFocus alerted me to a new book that argues what we might have suspected: that poor people can use money effectively on their own, and that the best way to help them may be simply to give them the money.

Discussing poverty with a Washington Post reporter last month, 5th graders at a Southeast Washington school (the poverty rate for Washington, DC is 32 percent) came up with an obvious solution. “Why not just give them money?” (Washington Post, May 11). Experts and policy-makers have found it easy to dismiss this common-sense suggestion, in favor of magical belief in trickle-down economics or of elaborate poverty-reduction plans. But a new book brings together weighty evidence that in fact the children are likely to be right.

In “Just Give Money to the Poor: The Development Revolution from the South,” Joseph Hanlon, Armando Barrientos and David Hulme look at the experience of recent cash transfer programs, in countries ranging from Mexico and Brazil to South Africa, Namibia, India, and Mongolia. The verdict: cash transfers work if they are both fair and assured. If poor people have even small amounts of regular ensured income, they are in general well-equipped to decide how to use it most productively. And the results not only alleviate immediate hardship, but also contribute to longer-term economic development and poverty reduction.

Africa Focus provides some links for buying the book.

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil

There are many “thou shalt nots” in the Old Testament, only a few of which made the final cut for the Ten Commandments.

Some of these, such as “Thou shalt not plow with an ox and an ass together” (Deuteronomy 22:10) have limited relevance to the modern world.

But ever since I first read it in Exodus 23:2, I thought this one should have received serious consideration: Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.

Thoreau once wrote, “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.” And in the same way, there must be a thousand going along with evil for every active evildoer.

As High a Heaven

Reading Henry David Thoreau: An American Landscape, with its passages on trees, reminded me of a book I heard about some time ago: As High a Heaven: Meditating on Trees with Thoreau.

Written by Richard Higgins, As High a Heaven was allegedly published by Beacon Press on April 1, 2005. (Is it significant that this was April Fool’s Day?) The jacket looks attractive, and the description at Amazon sounds interesting. The book’s title presumably comes from a passage in an essay on Maine that Thoreau submitted to The Atlantic Monthly. To Thoreau’s fury, editor James Russell Lowell deleted the final sentence, apparently considering it blasphemous.

I have been into the lumber-yard, and the carpenter’s shop, and the tannery, and the lampblack-factory, and the turpentine clearing; but when at length I saw the tops of the pines waving and reflecting the light at a distance high over all the rest of the forest, I realized that the former were not the highest use of the pine. It is not their bones or hide or tallow that I love most. It is the living spirit of the tree, not its spirit of turpentine, with which I sympathize, and which heals my cuts. It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.

Yet no one seems to have the book: not the New York City or Brooklyn library systems, not Amazon or Powell’s or Alibris or Abebooks, not even eBay. The book isn’t listed at Beacon’s website, and when I wrote to Beacon to ask about I didn’t get an answer.

I’m assuming, until proven otherwise, that the book was never actually published. Were there permission issues involved in using the Edward Gleason photos? Who knows?