As some of you may know, I've been cross-posting my Multiply blog posts to my dormant blog, The Age of Brillig, which I otherwise been willfully neglecting. So it came as a surprise to me to learn that 10 days ago, this bit about this post appeared at the Today's Blogs section of Slate Magazine.
At Lazy Geisha, Japanese-American Nina Aoki praises the article for humanizing the tragedy. "Most of us know what it feels like when we lose one person we care about, but very few, if any of us, have any frame of context or reference to grasp death on that kind of catastrophic scale – which is why sometimes it takes a single human story to come out of such a tragedy to help put things into perspective, and to put a face on such massive human loss." At the Age of Brillig, the Manila-based blogger is touched by the pair's tale. "This story is the sort of gold mine demanded by newspaper editors -- the triumph of human love in the face of unspeakable tragedy."Love amid the rubble: Wang Zhijun and Li Wanzhi spent 28 hours in the remains of their crumbled six-story dormitory in Shifang, China, taking turns breathing and speaking of the need to survive for their 14-year-old daughter. xxx
Er...I wouldn't say I was "touched", that sentence having been written with tongue subtly but firmly in cheek. I had (and still do) some suspicions on the authenticity of the story, which seemed exceedingly apt (and the New York Times, which reported the story has had a recent unfortunate history of being snookered by fabricated but emotionally-charged tales). Ultimately, I decided to be oblique about my doubts -- too oblique it appears.
Still, Slate Magazine has long been a daily necessity for me (though its great film critic David Edelstein has since migrated over to New York Magazine), and that little shout-out did make me giddy.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment