Blogcritics Author: Lisa Albers

Book Review: Titanic's Last Secrets by Brad Matsen

Lisa Albers — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:13:42 EDT

A new book on the most important development in the Titanic mystery since the discovery of the wreck itself.
The last thing Brad Matsen wanted to do was add to the world’s voluminous collection of books about the Titanic. There are at least 1,000 treatments written in the English language, according to one collector, and a recent Amazon search turned up 3,434 books on the "sinking of the Titanic.""There are three things about which...

San Francisco Zoo Tiger Attack: A Story With Two Morals

Lisa Albers — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:23:37 EST

Don�t poke sticks at wild animals, and don�t ever blame the victim.
This past fall I was walking the beach at Seattle's Golden Garden Park during extreme low tide when I came upon a man and his daughter poking a stick at a seal pup. The man was talking to a friend on his cell phone. The seal pup was anxious and responded to the pokes in a defensive way, barking and trying to move away from them. It appeared a few...

Channeling E.B. White on Election Night

Lisa Albers — Wed, 7 Nov 2007 21:08:07 EST

Democracy, like White's definition of you, may you survive long.
A journalism professor once turned me on to the writings of E.B. White--the adult stuff, not Charlotte's Web; I'd already been through that phase but hadn't known White was not only a children's book author. The gateway drug for my mature addiction to E.B. White was a short essay published in the New Yorker in 1944.I think about his 12-sentence...

Chasing More Than Tales: An Interview with Gallery Owner/Author Lanae Rivers-Woods

Lisa Albers — Mon, 1 Oct 2007 12:28:53 EDT

A true renaissance woman applies Alaskan self-sufficiency to art, literature, and life.
I met Lanae Rivers-Woods in 2005 when I responded to her call for artists who worked collaboratively with other artists in their own families. She wanted to host such shows in her Seattle art gallery. My husband and I held a cross-genre duo show at La Familia last year, his art serving as visual representation of themes and metaphors I explored in...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Book Review: The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty by Julia Flynn Siler

Lisa Albers — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:40:58 EDT

Julia Flynn Siler's fascinating new book, The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, begins and ends with sibling rivalry. Two brothers — Robert and Peter — vie for decision-making control of the family business, which is none other than the Charles Krug Winery, the first winery in Napa Valley, which dates back to 1861. There's Robert: aggressive, innovative, market-savvy, a judgmental perfectionist. And then there's Peter: technically astute, methodical, cautious, perennially jealous of his older brother. Peter whines about Robert's house on the vineyard, about Robert's recognition in the papers, the credit that goes to Robert for Charles Krug's success instead of to him. He whines in particular about a mink coat, accusing Robert of stealing money from the business to pay for it, without intent to repay. The accusation leads to blows. Their father, Cesare Mondavi, who dusted off the derelict Charles Krug and renewed its reputation, wished that his sons would combine their talents and always work together. However, though they shared blood and wine, the two brothers' basic philosophies were diametrically opposed, and they engaged in a decades-long feud that led to Robert's ouster from the family business and rent the family forever.Cesare had passed away by the time Robert was ousted, but their mother Rosa supported the move, in effect, choosing one brother over the other. Robert's response: "If that's the case, Mother, what I will do, I'm going to build a winery."And build, he did: Robert Mondavi's name is of course synonymous with wine. Noted wine historian Paul Lukacs once said, "The construction of the Robert Mondavi Winery marks the effective beginning of American wine's rise in both quality and prestige." Don't read this exposé on the infamous Mondavi wine family for the beauty of the sentences, which are rather workmanlike. Flynn Siler is a Wall Street Journal reporter who sticks to the unadorned facts. In this case, the facts need no adornment — they're far more entertaining than the average soap opera, with all the attendant themes of family betrayal, corporate maneuvering and long-standing personal grudges, but with more authenticity. Readers will find some of the drama amusing. Third-generation Michael Mondavi enters into an ill-conceived partnership with Disney, for instance, despite the obvious foolishness of mixing Mickey with merlot. Walt Disney himself was a teetotaler when it came to his theme park: "I like a drink, but if people want one, they can get it elsewhere." The people, in this case, agreed. California Adventure regulations mandated that wine be served in acrylic instead of glass, so Mondavi had them custom-made. They outfitted the working winery-cum-amusement park exhibit with granite wine bars and hand-forged, wrought iron doors, which closed to the public when the experiment failed after just eight months.The failed venture presaged the hostile takeover to come. While Flynn Siler overdoes it on the details at times (do we really need to know what Isabel's bridesmaids wore at her wedding to Michael Mondavi?), there's a redeeming lesson for a capitalist society at work in this tome: You can be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, or in this case, a silver wine cork, and still lose it all. Nothing is ever guaranteed, not even wealth and power. Not that you should cry a river for the Mondavis; it's unlikely any of them will be taking on minimum wage jobs anytime soon, or worrying over health care.And it stands to reason that what fueled Robert Mondavi's aggressive promotion of Napa Valley wine for four decades was the choice his mother made. Perhaps he wanted to prove to her that she had backed the wrong son. "There are clues that he wanted to learn from the French, go globally even while he was still with Charles Krug," says Flynn Siler, "but I have a hunch that those ambitions were fueled by a sense of proving his mother wrong." He certainly built his own winery in a big way. Robert Mondavi hired celebrated architect Clifford May to design it, and the image of the Mission-style tower and graceful winged arch adorn wines like Fumé Blanc to this day. Then he set out to change attitudes toward California wine, beginning with the French, who thought that wine from the U.S. was for cooking, not drinking. The pejorative "wino" came about during Prohibition, when rot-gut wines, some from Napa Valley, were the norm.The next generation gave rise to another case of sibling rivalry, this time, Robert's two sons: Timothy and Michael. Echoing the relationship of the generation before, these two could not agree. Long-haired Timothy sees winemaking as fine artisanship and was frequently late to meetings. Clean-cut Michael wants more wine for the masses; he launched a partnership with Disney, which failed. Michael even whined about his father's philanthropy because it would dilute his own family's inheritance, to which his father replied, "You children have enough."Where one brotherly split gave rise to the Robert Mondavi Corporation, the other results in the family losing the same, for the Mondavis no longer own the company."One thing I see as a recurring pattern that wreaked havoc in the Mondavi family is this condition that people with very different personalities have to work together," says Flynn Siler. First it was Cesare, telling his sons to cooperate and telling Rosa to make sure that the winery was never sold. "It was inevitable that they would collide," she says. "Likewise, Robert's dream was that his boys would work together, and you can't find two radically different people than Tim and Michael. Trying to force two people to work together who are radically different is a recipe for disaster."Ironically, the new owners of the business are two brothers. But the differences between these and the Mondavi brothers are profound. Where the Mondavis made many mistakes — positioning one brother as the subordinate of another, failing to draft a workable succession plan, confusing business expenses with personal expenses — Richard and Robert Sands demonstrate a single-minded dedication to the bottom line. Perhaps most importantly, they focus on wine instead of whining.

Lisa Albers' writing has appeared in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Woman, Poets & Writers, scores of literary magazines, and elsewhere. One of her Blogcritics book reviews was picked up for syndication by the Boston Globe last year. She is deputy editor for Crosscut.

Interview: Globe-trekking with Anthony Doerr

Lisa Albers — Sun, 8 Apr 2007 18:18:53 EDT

Anthony Doerr is the author of the novel About Grace and a debut collection of short stories, The Shell Collector, for which he won the Rome Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A memoir of his year in Italy, Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World, will be in bookstores this June. LA: I note that your first book, The Shell Collector, begins with a description of a water taxi sloughing the tops off a coral reef, and that your most recent post at The Morning News contains a reference to coral reef devastation. What’s going on here? Why do you care about the coral reefs of the world? Have you seen any of them in person? AD: I guess I look at it like this: To care about the ecology of coral reefs is not to care about some distant, isolated, irrelevant issue: Everything is connected, the world’s ecologies first and foremost. Perhaps the way I might ask the question is: How could someone NOT care about the health of tropical seas? Any single ecological issue is not worth caring about merely for the “benefits to humanity” (though reefs offer plenty), but to try to stay informed about coral bleaching, say, or wastewater, or oil consumption, or the war in Iraq, for that matter, is a part of being a responsible, curious adult. We all share this one big clump of iron and magnesium and nickel whirling around the sun, and it is the one thing we will bequeath to our children. So why not be as deeply curious about it as we can? Why not try to understand what is happening to it in the pitifully brief time we’re here? I’ve been lucky enough to spend time on lots of reefs, and I hate to see them change for the worse over time — even as I’m aware, despite myself, that my own visits have added to the devastation in whatever small degree. All that said, fiction is never quite the place for focusing energy for change: Fiction exists to transport a reader into another person’s life: her time, her place, her heart. But fiction that feels at all political usually falls apart. So I try to keep this in mind always in my own writing: that my first and most important job is only to persuade a reader to allow him or herself to be transported. LA: I agree. I don’t think you made that mistake in The Shell Collector. To the contrary, the description of the coral reef isn’t there for the purpose of taking a momentary stand against coral reef devastation; rather, it effectively foreshadows the obliviously destructive mindset of the boat’s passengers. I think the way that nature exists as a respected backdrop in your stories, maybe even as a character itself, is what made me feel kinship with your writing. Still, it’s not that political topics — and by that I mean anything important enough to warrant public discourse — should be avoided in fiction, but if one sets out with only a political motive in mind, or even foremost in mind, the project usually fails. What do you think? I recently re-read George Orwell’s 1984. Highly political stuff — and brilliant. I also read a poem in an online magazine the other day that was just dreadful, the politics right on the poet’s sleeve. AD: Sure, exactly. A writer asks a reader to believe in an imaginary world, a world made out of letters and words, and if the reader gets the slightest sense that the world is false, then the contract is broken.LA: There seems to be a bookend quality to your first two published works. In About Grace, you are interested in the properties of water in extreme cold conditions; the protagonist, David Winkler, travels to the Alaskan tundra to photograph snowflakes. You organized the novel in six books in correspondence with the six corners of a snowflake. In The Shell Collector, you begin with the story of a man in self-exile in the tropics who is obsessed with exotic shells. Two men, two obsessions, two ends of the earth, two products of nature that seem to simultaneously possess both pattern and random properties. What is the story behind the twos?AD: Thanks for noticing. It’s a hard question to answer, since, as you know, lots of decisions you make when you’re writing a story are subconscious. I try to write about, and research, the things I’m most passionate about, and for some reason or another, among lots of other things, I’m interested in shells and snowflakes. Spider’s egg cases, hummingbird’s nests, pebbles: little artifacts of the world. It’s hard to say why, though a lot of my fascination probably started in childhood. Every spring, growing up, my mom and dad used to drive my brothers and me back to Ohio from Florida in a big, rusty Suburban, and in the backseat we would have all sorts of stolen sea-bounty for our aquariums: anemones in gallon jugs of seawater, octopi in sloshing pails, murexes and stone crabs. And I’d usually have a tennis ball can stuffed with shells. It was only after rediscovering one of those tennis ball cans, two decades later, that I got started on the story “The Shell Collector.” Likewise, when I was a kid, I had a copy of Wilson Bentley’s 1931 book, Snow Crystals (I give this book to Winkler in About Grace.) For fifty years Bentley, a Vermont farmer, caught snowflakes on a smooth black tray, transferred them to a glass slide, brushed them flat with a feather, centered them over a low-powered bulb, and took photomicrographs of them. He never sold any of his prints; his neighbors made fun of him. Who would study something so ordinary and troublesome as snow? In all that time Bentley managed only about 5,000 successful prints. Two thousand of them are collected in Snow Crystals, and to page through this graveyard of long-vanished crystals is to be astonished, once more, by the sheer inventive power of nature. And also by the man, the unique kind of assiduousness Bentley possessed, his almost religious dedication to beauty. These are the things I’ve been drawn to for a long time: those miracles of the world that we sometimes need to be gently reminded to pay attention to, and the kinds of characters who are interested in them. LA: Ah, that explains the origin of Winkler’s work in the story. You must have been quite taken with Bentley’s book, and it’s easy to see why. I know the appeal of patterning; my husband paints this way, playing with the idea of chance operations. ‘Who would study something so ordinary and troublesome as snow?’ you ask. That’s the kind of question that one answers by writing a novel! Yes, much of this is subconscious. I recently began writing about vegetarianism only to discover my real subject was meat—in all its connotations. Lately I’ve been taken with the word’s homonyms: meet, mete. Did you find as you wrote About Grace that you altered your original plan in the course of writing? How did the seed idea presented by Bentley’s snowflake plates grow as you wrote?AD: Yes, yes, everything changes. Subjects morph; settings prove unreliable; first person becomes third; present tense needs to become past tense. About Grace started as long stretches of short story about a weatherman who is losing his sight and takes a prostitute down to Mexico and accidentally drowns her. I had to keep hammering away at the sections for several years; adding a mother for Sandy, taking her away, shuffling settings, introducing Naima, etc., and none of these things were part of my original plan for the novel. Probably the only constants through all the false starts and half-done drafts were that I wanted Winkler to wear thick glasses and own a copy of Bentley’s book as a boy.Writing narrative is almost entirely trial and error for me, and the status of whatever I’m working on changes from day to day. I can envision what I think might be a skeleton for the story, but by the time I’m lumping flesh onto, say, the leg, both the arms have changed. Endings are rarely what I think they will be; middles often become beginnings. Sometimes someone I thought would be a minor character actually becomes the protagonist: This happened in a short story I wrote called “For a Long Time This Was Griselda’s Story.” It’s not the most efficient way to work: I usually generate at least 100 pages of prose for a 20-page short story. I probably have a couple thousand pages of prose that I wrote for About Grace. But I wouldn’t want it any other way: It is the surprise, the joy of inventiveness, that keeps me coming back to the desk. I write because I never quite know what the finished product will be, because I never quite know how I feel about something until I start laying out sentences. In that sense, writing is a kind of thinking, really. LA: Your stories are often set in unconventional locales — the Alaskan tundra; Lamu, Kenya and Liberia, West Africa; rural Montana and Idaho; Lithuania; an island in the Caribbean — not what one might expect from an Ohioan. One of your characters moves from Ohio to the East Coast to become a shipbuilder, a romantic venture that cannot be supported. Many of your characters move from one place to another that is very much unlike the first. What are your characters seeking, and what do they find? Why this emphasis on the journey, the extremes in setting?AD: I think movement is a kind of narrative I’m preoccupied with. I like stories that establish two places and string a character out between them: Huck Finn, Madame Bovary, Disgrace. Pynchon’s new novel seems to be about movement more than anything else; places and times serve as poles, and characters serve as vehicles shuttling between them. (By “places,” I suppose this can be as figurative as it can be literal.) All of my favorite stories, I think, involve some kind of duality — that’s where tension comes from, and conflict. A character is in one place but wants to be elsewhere. A character is trapped somehow, and works to free him or herself. So these are the kinds of stories I try to write. Even in my new book, which is non-fiction, I tried to build the narrative around the central idea of displacement: being an American in Rome, being a parent of brand new twins, living in an ancient city that is struggling to modernize. Storytelling itself is, maybe, the act of moving from one place to another, or leaving one place and returning to it once more, but changed somehow.But, again, unfortunately, it’s hard to know exactly why I make certain decisions in my work. I’m sure the same must be true for your own work? Often structural decisions, in particular, are instinctual: you just try and try different ideas out until something feels interesting, and then you try pursuing it for a while. Maybe the simple answer to your question is that I love to travel; I get stir crazy if I’m in one place for very long.LA: Yes, I think that structural decisions are often instinctual, or maybe subconscious as well. My first manuscript, Nobody’s Brat, came out as a series of short stories with separate characters, and for years I fought the unification because I wanted to capture the fragmentary nature of military childhood. However, unifying the storylines was the easiest revision I’ve ever done. The threads were there, waiting to be threaded. By the way, I’m sure it is the nomadic quality of your stories that appeals to me as well. I have never lived in any one house longer than two years, so I have never become stir crazy. What are you writing now that you are ‘settled’ in Idaho? AD: Now that my Rome book is at the printer, I’m working on a couple of short stories and am trying to resuscitate a novel about radio resistance in World War II that I have hundreds of pages of notes for, but still haven’t quite figured out.LA: So, you’ve exhausted setting and are now going to play around with different time periods? AD: Maybe — hopefully. Eventually. I certainly haven’t exhausted setting, but there’s something about the ability of prose to resurrect the past that amazes. It’s still about setting, of course—only now you’re walking through a city or the countryside and trying to imagine it as it once was, and render that into sentences.LA: Any travel plans in your future?AD: Some backpacking trips. A small book tour in June. Teaching in Taos and North Carolina. The Oregon Coast this fall. But not enough!

Transport Travesty in Seattle

Lisa Albers — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 05:39:13 EDT

Everybody worries about the Alaskan Way Viaduct here in Seattle. Built in 1953, this elevated highway skirts the rim of the downtown area - blocking magnificent views of Puget Sound and quintessential green-and-white ferries traversing it. Beyond are the blocked snowy peaks of the Olympic Mountain range. Even so, there’s a '60s-era postcard of the highway that captures the relic’s original promise: broad boulevards of smooth asphalt unfettered by congestion or side street traffic. The best thing that can be said is this: a Sunday drive treats the motorist to panoramic views of the Seattle skyline, water, and mountains. The worst thing that can be said about the Viaduct is that you will die if you’re driving on it or walking under it during the next earthquake, because it will surely collapse.Much has been made of the Viaduct's importance to business, especially those in the maritime industry, but truth be told, local businesses - including those who depend upon the Viaduct for daily transportation - have not mustered much support for rebuilding it. I live in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood, just northwest of downtown, which means that the Viaduct is convenient. It’s a lot easier to take the Viaduct to West Seattle or to the Sea-Tac Airport, which I do often to visit or pick up friends and family – instead of taking the I-5 as the main north-south artery through the Puget Sound region. I work downtown, and since it costs me $17 daily to park in my employer's building (and that’s the early bird special), I never drive to work. I take the bus, and at lunchtime I make my way through one of the few passageways between downtown and the waterfront. I walk under the shadow of the creaking, imposing Viaduct to the docks lining Puget Sound, where a row of waterfront restaurants and businesses is mostly bisected by the Viaduct, separating the waterfront and its impressive views from the rest of downtown proper.This week, Seattle voters are supposed to vote for one of two options for replacing the Viaduct:1. A wider and certainly uglier elevated highway with larger supporting columns that will further obscure views of the water and cut off the crust of waterfront from the rest of the city2. A much more expensive option called the “tunnel” of which the tunnel portion is really only a small partThe real kick in the pants is that this vote is not binding; it is merely symbolic. Still, even a symbolic vote gives me a chance to speak my mind, so I voted NO on both options, and I predict that I will not be alone.An annoying aspect of modern-day democracy is that the average voter is too often presented with crappy choices. (Bush or Gore. Bush or Kerry.) Both the elevated and the so-called “tunnel” options are crappy choices, and voters know this. Very few are ecstatic. The “tunnel” option is not a true solution because it wouldn’t eliminate the need for a highway, presents a host of other logistical problems (such as dangerously slim shoulders), and adds significantly to the cost ($3.4 billion vs. $2.8 billion for the elevated highway). The elevated option doesn’t make any sense either except as a decision born of desperation, for what else can we do?, those in favor moan. Few deny that the elevated highway sucks the life out of Seattle’s downtown: culturally, aesthetically and environmentally. As oft cited by the press, most other cities have already or are in the process of tearing their versions of our Viaduct down (the Embarcadero in San Fran, the I-93 in Boston, etc.).More importantly, even those who favor rebuilding the Viaduct know that widening highways or building new highways only leads to an increase in traffic. You loosen the belt, buy a larger size pair of pants, and what happens? You fill it to meet the new capacity.In practice, people aren’t stupid or mean; when they choose to drive, they aren’t doing so out of a desire to fuel war in Iraq or contribute to global climate change. They make transportation decisions on the basis of cost and convenience. For example, the only people who drive to work in my department are the partners - they can afford the parking fees. All of them live within a 15 minutes’ drive of the office, as do I. If they took the bus each day, their 10- to 15-minute commute would increase to 30 minutes at the least and 75 minutes at the most. They would have to deal with always-crowded buses, too, which means enduring the 75-minute trip while standing, their laptops and briefcases swinging to and fro as the bus accelerates or lurches to a stop, not to mention the incessant private cell phone conversations conducted in public. For those with means, there’s little incentive to ride the bus, apart from altruism.If it cost just $3 for me to park every day, would I? Not every day, but far more frequently than I do now. Just this week, I left the office at 5:36 pm, only to discover that the last express had already been and gone. I had to hop on a local. Adding insult to injury, as we tooled along, making all local stops, the bus driver made inappropriate comments about wheel chair passengers and belittled two youths who had trouble working the bike rack on the front of the bus. Finally, as he charged up the hill near my house, and several of us rose to remind him that we’d pulled the cord for the next stop, he slammed on the brakes, sending us spiraling into seated passengers’ laps; my briefcase made contact with a woman’s iced coffee, showering her with it. My neck wrenched, giving me a headache that lasted through the evening. By the time I got home, it was 7 pm. I can get home in 15 minutes if I drive.The third solution to the Viaduct problem, which wasn’t on the ballot, is something called a “surface option.” It has not been adequately described by the press, and it has died, only to be resurrected and then killed again. The surface option calls for an investment in transportation alternatives such as more and better bus routes. Since riding the bus is often perceived (and sometimes, rightly so) as a more stressful alternative to the cozy solo drive, the bus as an option has to be a compelling one. The surface option gets to the heart of the practical problem facing the average Seattleite on her morning commute: How fast will the bus get me there? Will I have to stand? Will the bus ride suck the life out of me? What’s worse? Contributing to the impending demise of polar bears, or having to listen to strangers chatter on about their personal lives? If they simply increased the number and frequency of rush-hour express buses to and from Ballard, there would be an immediate improvement in the daily lives of thousands of commuters, and more might choose to join us.It can be pure pleasure to take the bus instead of commuting long distances by car in stop-and-go traffic. The real solution to Seattle’s Viaduct problem isn’t building larger highways through the city. It’s giving people better alternatives than driving.A bus ride isn’t bad when it’s relatively short and there are enough seats. On a good day, I can catch the express, take my seat, and watch the scenery roll by as I listen to music to drown out the cell phone conversations. I pass Pike Place Market, which was saved from demolition after the Viaduct went up and still stands in its shadow. I watch ferries making their way to Bainbridge Island, and am reminded of the cyclical nature of transportation. Once, waterways presented the most efficient travel routes. Then came the railroad; the Viaduct was built on old railroad tracks that had fallen into disuse. The Viaduct represents the age of the automobile, and that age is coming to a close.

Distracted by the Spectre of Online Ads

Lisa Albers — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 06:17:52 EST

I was reading the newspaper online the other day, and part way through the article, I saw something move in my peripheral vision. Ignoring it, I read on, but there it was again - movement. It seemed to be coming from the Lamisil ad.At the top of the ad was a digital drawing of a big toe, its flesh rose-colored, suggestive of infection. The nail was yellowed, the hues of the ad garish. Nothing, however, seemed to be moving. Below the infected toe was a gremlin. Its name, according to the ad, was “Digger,” and I would be able to access its “full story” by clicking on a little orange arrow. I stared at the gremlin just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. It remained static for a full 10 seconds until - its eyes blinked!Admittedly, I am new to the animation that proliferates the Web now. I only recently upgraded my circa 1996 homebuilt computer to a newer, more powerful homebuilt that is equipped to handle animation and video. Consequently, I’d missed out on the slow advent of moving images on the Web, instead experiencing them in one shocking exposure, making me feel a bit like Miles Monroe waking up in Sleeper.Since upgrading, it’s been non-stop visual vertigo. I research hedge funds while ignoring a dancing couple. While reading about investment fraud, I try not to become distracted by a stockbroker holding an umbrella in a blizzard. After just a few months, I’ve grown weary of the animation clichés. I can’t tell you how many miniature cars have zipped across the top of my screen.Online text itself is always sans serif, which seems only to add insult to injury, as everybody knows that sans serif fonts -- those like Arial without the little serifs to guide the eye -- are more difficult to read. It hardly seems fair to expect text, especially sans serif text, to compete with the spectre of a diseased toe.The Wikipedians tell me, however, that “sans serif fonts have become the de facto standard for body text on-screen.” Apparently, the serifs don’t read well on monitors. On television, they have been known to flicker, much like Digger’s eyes. However, the wisdom of the Wiki collective notwithstanding, my favorite Web sites tend toward serifs like Garamond and Times New Roman. Text issues aside, is it really necessary for ads to jump and blink and cavort? Must arrows swish by, balls bounce, and signs flash? From a commercial standpoint, of course it is. Digger blinked - and I looked. The New York Times recently featured a story on the website LowerMyBills and its notorious Web ads filled with the silhouettes of dancing cowboys. According to the company the ads work -- and Web ad experts agree -- despite numerous reader complaints across blogs and elsewhere online.Web newspapers today do not constitute level playing fields. The non-commercial information, the news, and the story must compete with moving images like the broker and his snow umbrella or the eyes of a gremlin. Text simply cannot compete with colorful movement in one’s peripheral vision, no matter how well written. This means we are being cajoled, seduced, and driven against our will to look at things we did not click there to see. What is the answer? Should news articles also move? They’re working on that. More video clips and less text. The only problem is, I don’t want my newspaper stories to move. I want the stories to move me.

Yes, Shawn is Resilient

Lisa Albers — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 05:38:49 EST

His face is everywhere: front page of the dailies, the cover of Newsweek, next to Oprah on national television. Although 15 now, he’s still a sweet-faced boy with curly dark hair and wide eyes. He looks relieved, tired - but normal. Maybe even resilient. Yes, there is a resiliency in Shawn, and this quality has prompted the questions. How could this capable-looking 15-year-old remain with his captor without telling the police or another adult close to him that he’d been kidnapped? Why didn’t he give them some indication of his—and Ben’s—plight?Judging by the letters to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch or reader comments on websites, many people are deeply enraged by these questions. They cry out against the way the media has abused Shawn by speculating to the point of blaming him for his captivity. Take the airing of the so-called “shocking photos” of Shawn wearing a red bandana and brandishing what appears to be a gun. St. Louis’ Fox 2 TV ran the photos with accompanying commentary that dripped with insinuation about what the photos might say about Shawn - and not about Michael Devlin, the man who admits to ripping Shawn away from his home four years ago and doing unimaginable things to him since. Fox 2 claimed the photos reveal Shawn’s “other side.”What this “other side” might be, exactly, the newscasters would not say, perhaps out of cowardice to go that far, but more likely due to their inability to state with any conviction what the photos reveal about Shawn. Which is nothing. This is a sad commentary about the environment in which this media travesty occurred.The photos might be those of any 15-year-old boy in America trying to cop a gang image for the camera. In St. Louis, you often hear talk on the street about the legendary gangs: the Crips and the Bloods. Shawn wears a red bandana, which might have signaled to TV newscasters an affiliation with the Bloods. St. Louis is plagued by racial tension owing to its geographic location (think Missouri Compromise) and its population, which is about 30% African American, with a European-descended majority. Tenuous racial peace There is an atmosphere of détente between these two cultures, a tenuous peace that can flash at a moment’s notice. Just an hour’s drive north is where Mark Twain penned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American classic that is notorious as much for its profligate use of the n-word as for its indictment of the failures of Reconstruction to bring any justice or quality of life for the freed slaves. St. Louis County long ago legally separated from St. Louis city government. White flight gutted much of St. Louis’s downtown, and the city proper is only now beginning to recover.Thus, photos of Shawn Hornbeck in gangster garb were aired in a climate that permits racist nudge-nudging. The newscasters would not have to explicitly state what “other side” of the photos reveal about Shawn. It is assumed their viewers will “get it”. As recently as Feb. 2, in fact, the director of the St. Louis City Health Department resigned after using the n-word as a racial slur in a staff meeting in which he also apparently maligned “poor white people.”Of course, there is the gun in that one photo of Shawn. Fox 2 TV “investigated” this aspect by interviewing one of Michael Devlin’s neighbors, who said she found it very disturbing to think that Shawn might have had a gun, because it could have gone off any time. No one asked whether Michael Devlin had a permit or questioned what kind of man would have Shawn pose with a firearm for photographs, if indeed Devlin took them. Is what Shawn holds in his hand in the photo even a real gun? It could be a paintball gun. I’ve read of several incidents of robberies being committed with them, as they look more like a real gun than does an index finger in a coat pocket.The irony is that Shawn lived with Devlin in Kirkwood, which is a far cry from St. Louis’ mean streets. Kirkwood really is the suburbs; past gang affiliation is undoubtedly the least of Shawn’s troubles. These aren’t the affluent suburbs of St. Louis’ well-to-do (some of those townships boast the highest per capita incomes in the nation), but neither is this the urban ghetto that fearful citizens studiously avoid.Too many in the media seek to blame the victim in this case, precisely because the truth might be far more disturbing. Wouldn’t it be comforting if Shawn was simply a wayward youth who befriended some gullible, lonely pizza store manager who let him skip school for four years, get his lip pierced, and play gangster? Then we could all go on pretending that we live in a world in which unspeakable acts committed by the nice guy at the local pizza parlor on their child victims do not occur, and with heinous frequency, and in average-looking apartment buildings in ordinary Midwest cities under the very noses of neighbors, employers, customers, and law enforcement. What’s “bizarre” about this case wasn’t Shawn himself; it’s the media’s reaction to it.While it is understandable that some people need to believe that Shawn’s behavior during captivity points to a lack of torture or even contentedness, this is a dangerous, malicious ignorance at work. Didn’t try to escape?Here’s what no one wants to talk about: Perhaps Shawn didn’t try to escape for the same reason that a child whose own parent has raped him -- for that is what child molestation is, rape -- isn’t likely to try to escape. Children love their parents unconditionally. They are dependent upon them for comfort, identity, security and sustenance and will protect and obey a parent even in the face of the cruelest abuse or neglect. For an adult, it is remarkably easy to, first of all, win a child’s trust, especially when he’s been traumatized and scared, and second of all, to manipulate a child into doing whatever you want him to do. In the confined world of that little apartment in Kirkwood, Shawn Hornbeck was destroyed, and Shawn Devlin, Michael’s son, was born. Michael Devlin passed Shawn off as his son to anyone who saw him; he listed him as such on the lease. To Shawn’s neighborhood friends, that’s who he was.Michael Devlin is by all accounts a nice, even likable guy. Contrary to the extreme characterizations of sex offenders in popular culture, probably most of these criminals are people whom those around them would never suspect capable of such evil. “We never knew,” the family members say. “He seemed like a regular guy,” the neighbors concur. Yet in the Devlin case there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary: He’s now admitted to stealing these two little boys from their families, and to something we call in legal terms ‘forced sodomy.’ What if Shawn, like everyone else who met Devlin, found him likable, despite the torture? More than suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, Shawn may even have felt responsible for causing his family distress for his disappearance. No weapon, not even a psychological one, is beyond the grasp of a man intent upon possessing two children. Devlin may have demanded Shawn’s help in hiding Ben Ownby, thereby making Shawn feel complicit in Devlin’s alleged crimes, though by no means was Shawn actually complicit, as the most despicable media reports have implied. The guilt Shawn may feel, no matter how irrational, may itself explain Shawn’s behavior. Convicted sex offenderFurthermore, the NY Post uncovered this: Shawn Hornbeck’s biological father, Walter Hornbeck, now deceased, was a convicted sex offender. Walter Hornbeck was charged with rape in 1992, and though the case is sealed, the charge reportedly involved assault on a minor. Shawn was only six months old at the time, but his sisters were aged six and seven. When Shawn himself was six, Walter Hornbeck was released from prison, but according to Shawn’s stepfather, he had no contact with Shawn. What bearing, if any, this has on the kidnapping case is not yet clear, but it does warrant mention in light of Devlin’s alleged motivations and Shawn’s psychological well-being.Although this practice is sometimes debated, most news media refrain from publishing the names of rape victims, let alone broadcasting images of them or splashing their photos across front pages and websites. They act out of respect for the victim’s privacy, recognizing that rape victims are stigmatized, and because it is well known that the possibility of public stigmatization deters victims from going to the police. It is simply astounding that the media universally failed to act with great care in the case of Shawn Hornbeck and Ben Ownby. The excuse that newscasters were simply covering a breaking story of recovered kidnapping victims does not hold. To be fair in the extreme, before these new charges were pressed, it was remotely possible that, possession of child pornography aside, Michael Devlin had allegedly stolen Ben and Shawn because he was “lonely” and wanted only to have surrogate children - that whatever sickness drove him to keep those two boys in his custody need not necessarily encompass pedophilia. But even so, the possibility that pedophilia was a component in Michael Devlin’s alleged motivation should have been obvious from the start. The privacy accorded to adult rape victims was egregiously denied these two children. Picture Shawn and Ben, on the cover of last week’s Newsweek under the headline, “Living With Evil.” Now, you can also imagine them as Michael Devlin’s rape victims. They’ll have to live with this man’s evil for the rest of their lives.