Today's News: Against Blogging

I don’t think Susan Sontag would have blogged.

*****

This morning as I stood at the kitchen counter, the pages of tsunami coverage spread out before me, my mother commented, “I see you still read about disasters obsessively. There’s a movie coming out about Patty Hearst.”

In 1974, I would lay the newspaper out on the living room floor every evening to find out the news about Patty Hearst. I read from the kidnapping, through the bank robbery and the fire, to the arrest and the trial, as if by reading, by grasping every bit of information available, I could somehow wrap my head around this incomprehensible event.

Trying to wrap my head around the tsunami stretches it so far I feel like it’s going to break. The story about the Indonesian mother searching for her 11 children. The picture of the Swedish boy missing his parents and two brothers. The numbers. The images. I don’t need to link because you’ve seen it. I suppose more eloquent bloggers might have something to say worth reading, and I’m sure bloggers there are contributing valuable accounts. But for me, this is way beyond the bloggable.