SMU Reads: an urgent message for our time

For the third year, I’ve attended SMU Reads, an annual summer event to encourage reading and community awareness among Southern Methodist University students. It just keeps getting bigger (and, if possible, better) with this month’s appearance by Matthew Desmond, author of the 2017 SMU Reads book pick, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

Evicted had the right pedigree for an “important” book: New York Times bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, Pulitzer Prize winner for nonfiction. But a book about one of the most degrading aspects of poverty, presented to students at a pricey private university sited in some of the priciest suburbs? And in a metropolitan area struggling with populations who are completely homeless? With a city landowner termed a modern-day slumlord for its dismal low-rent houses that often lack such basic amenities as reliably-running water.

How many people would want to hear about that, much less read a book about it?

I was pleasantly surprised to find a standing room only crowd at SMU’s McFarlin Auditorium and lines of questioners following Desmond’s discussion. The Dallas Morning News aided the university by making Evicted the pick for its own summer book club.

Tall, booted, and briefly donning a cowboy hat, Desmond welcomed the student crowd, some worried about their own future ability to find affordable housing, to deal with a problem that requires “so many brilliant young minds around the table.”

“Eviction used to be rare in this country. It used to draw crowds,” he said. Now, it’s become commonplace. And the more evictions, the more families break up, the worse their economic prospects become because they can’t find replacement housing in the places where there are jobs. It’s an issue that cuts across all ethnic groups, because “without stable shelter, everything falls apart.”

He began his research in a place he already had some acquaintance with – Milwaukee. Starting with about five months of life in a trailer park, then 10 months in a rooming house, he followed eight families of the often-evicted, surveys of 100 renters (with 84 responses), tracked 100,000 court cases, and contacted 250 tenants in those cases (with a 66 percent response rate).

Finding that the majority of the families lived in privately-owned rentals, he also formed relationships with landlords doing the evictions. “I at least know more about what makes you tick – (and) what ticks you off if you’re a landlord.”

“For about a hundred years, we’ve had the consensus in America that we should spend no more than 30 percent of our income on housing.”

Instead, he learned that most poor renting families spend more than half of their income on housing. For families with the lowest education, incomes in recent decades have flatlined while housing costs have increased over 70 percent. And present public housing can’t solve the problem, Desmond cautions.

“Three-fourths of renter families below the poverty line receive no housing assistance. The waiting list for public housing in our large cities isn’t counted in years. It’s counted in decades.”

Not that all the news is bad. “We took on the battle of the slums and we won. We’ve made steps in the right direction. When we as a country want to take on big problems, we come up with big solutions.” Including his recommendation of expanding the housing voucher program to everyone below the poverty line.

What’s the cost of such a solution? About $22 billion worth, Desmond said. “Not a small number, but we can totally afford it. Vouchers have already lifted 2.8 million families out of poverty.” If $22 billion sounds overwhelming, consider, he said, that the U.S. currently loses approximately $171 billion yearly on homeowner tax benefits. With home mortgage interest in most cases fully deductible on debt up to $1 million, how much would even reducing that cap by half save?

“That’s just one idea. Let others come.”

And for those who want more ideas, try the Just Shelter site to help at community and national levels.

Wordcraft – Reading ‘n’ writing ‘n’ fall literary events

School has started in North Texas, and autumn’s literary events are coming as fast as the falling leaves already littering my lawn. The literary leaves are heaped so high, I’ll take two posts to blog about them, starting with today’s events:

August 25: (Yes, that’s today!) This year’s SMU Reads book is Emily St. John Mandel’s bestseller, Station Eleven, dealing with the aftermath of fictional pandemic. Don’t let the subject scare you away from today’s panel discussion about emergency preparedness, followed by book discussions, a pop-up performance of King Lear (yes, there’s a connection), and culminating in the September 9 visit by Mandel at Southern Methodist University. See the Dallas Public Library for events, and be sure to reserve a free seat for Mandel's appearance September 9.

August 25: Monthly script reading by Dallas Screenwriters Association. Only members may have their scripts read by local actors, but anyone’s welcome to drop in for a free listen, at 7 p.m., in the community room of Half Price Books, 5803 East Northwest Highway, Dallas. Event repeats the last Tuesday (usually) of each month.

August 28 - 29: The Tulisoma South Dallas Book Fair and Arts Festival, with most events at the African American Museum at Fair Park, 3536 Grand Avenue, Dallas. Events Friday (August 28), including the Tulisoma Heart and Soul tour, are free but require reservations. Events Saturday (August 29) are free, with no reservation required, beginning with the 10 a.m. Art Smart workshop on preparing children to learn. Author readings, entertainment, and discussions, continue through 4:20 p.m. Saturday. While you’re there, take advantage of the museum’s free admission to check out the galleries on black arts and culture in Dallas.

August 30: Don’t forget to contact points@dallasnews.com to reserve a seat for a free forum 2-4 p.m. at University of Texas at Dallas to discuss the Dallas Morning News Points Summer Book Club. This year's book is Being Mortal: Medicine and what Matters in the End, by Atul Gawande. A blog discussion is currently in progress.

August 31: Tickets for Richardson Reads One Book available at the first floor information desk of the Richardson Public Library, 900 Civic Center Drive, Richardson, beginning at 10:30 a.m. Free tickets are available for Richardson residents, but maybe a friend who lives there can snag you a ticket to hear author Laura McBride discuss this year’s book, We Are Called To Rise. McBride will appear September 15 at 7:30 p.m. at Richardson High School, 1250 Beltline Road.

September 9: For SMU Reads, Emily St. John Mandel discusses her bestseller, Station Eleven, at McFarlin Auditorium, 6405 Boaz Lane, in Dallas. Free, but be sure you’ve RSVP’d for a reservation.

September 10: Deadline for the Young Author’s short story contest of fantasy/science fiction convention FenCon. No fee to enter, for authors in grades 3-12.

September 13: Dallas Arts & Letters Live continues its 2015 season with R.L.Stine and Marc Brown, author/illustrators of The Little Shop of Monsters, September 13 at 4 p.m. Horchow Auditorium, Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 North Harwood, Dallas. Tickets for the presentation are $20 for the public, $15 for DMA members, $10 for students and children (under age 5).

September 15: Richardson Reads One Book: We Are Called to Rise, by Laura McBride. Author reading 7:30 p.m. at Richardson High School, 1250 Belt Line Road in Richardson. Did you remember to get your free tickets?

(Next Tuesday: Wordcraft continues its preview of autumn 2015’s literary events in North Texas)

Wordcraft -- Is it still reading if it's on the internet?

Nicholas Carr had trouble adjusting his microphone during Saturday’s appearance at the Dallas Arboretum. “I often have a problem with technology when I speak because the technology doesn’t like me,” he said.

The audience laughed because Carr has written about technology since the 1990s. And because his recent book -- Pulitzer Prize finalist The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains -- describes in eerie detail how the use of technology trains its users. Particularly, how the internet molds users, through methods reminiscent of a rehabilitation camp, into its own image.

The discussion’s host was the Points Summer Book Club of the Dallas Morning News. A book club conducted online. The irony was not lost on Carr.

He’s the first to admit that he had a long term love affair with computers as a nonfiction writer who finds research much easier and faster with the internet. And then, in 2007, he said, “I seemed to lose my ability to concentrate, to make my mind stay focused on one
thing.”

At first, he told the audience, most of them fellow members of the boomer generation, he attributed his problem to “middle age mind rot.” But he found that “it felt as if my mind wanted to behave the way it behaves when I was online. My brain seemed to not want to behave in that attentive way.”

That was troubling enough to lead him down two lines of research. One led him to the structure of the brain. The other research avenue led to the past, “to see if there were other examples of tools that changed the way people thought -- examples of what I called intellectual technology.”

Who knew until Carr told them, that technology as simple as maps and mechanical clocks would alter the anatomical structure of our brains, opening doors to new ways of thinking while closing doors on our previous mental landscapes. Alternations in structure validated by research dating back to the late 1960’s on the evidence of neuroplasticity of primate brains.

As Carr relates in The Shallows, “It’s 1968. . . 2001 is having its first theatrical run, leaving moviegoers befuddled, bemused or just plain annoyed. And in a quiet laboratory
at the University of Wisconsin, Michael Merzenich is cutting a hole in a monkey’s skull.”

What neuroscientist Merzenich found was that, in response to his experiments, the monkeys’ brains reorganized themselves to a degree formerly believed impossible once an animal or a human being reached adulthood.

In a similar manner, Carr believes today’s degree of immersion in the internet and the  repetitive activities it generates can cause the reorganization of its human users' brains. A reorganization at the expense of the deep attentiveness that has characterized innovative human thought since the advent of mass printing more than five hundred years ago. 

There is hope for our minds amid the total immersion of the internet in which our culture swims, he said, but it will require increased mindfulness of the effects, especially the unintended effects of technology.

“While researching and writing The Shallows, I sometimes felt as though I were paddling a very small and very empty rowboat against a very strong tide. That impression, I was happy to discover when the first edition of the book appeared in early 2010, was mistaken. The boat may have been small, but I was not the only one manning the oars. . . There’s still plenty of room inside. Feel free to grab an oar.”

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Ann Weisgarber, author of The Personal History of Rachel DuPree, will be the featured writer at the fifth annual Do the Write Thing writing workshop at Tarrant County College’s Northeast Campus this Saturday, August 13. The college is located at 828 W. Harwood in Hurst. Online registration is available for previously-registered students of Tarrant County College. Others may bring the form to the workshop or fax it to 817-515-0683, attn Brenna. Conference sponsor Brenna Saunders of TCC- Northeast Campus-Continuing Education must receive the form before Saturday for a reduced cost of $50 to apply. On site registration is available Saturday for $75. Download registration form and a list of speakers and workshop at www.thewritethingworkshop.com or call 972-533-3543.

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Bedford Library Friends announce their annual short story contest through September 3.  See
www.bedfordlibrary.org/ for details.