portmanteau post

1. You hear a name you've never heard before and suddenly it pops out of everywhere. Frederick Seidel this time. I realise, of course, that almost everyone's been suddenly talking about him because of this article, but still. So I've been listening to poems from here. More later about this.

2. Everyone's gifting Szerelem doors. Here's a blue door from Banno's. Not quite the regular door this one, Szer.

3. I am fascinated - fascinated, I tell you - by doctors and their stories. I realise this is actually a morbid fascination and something I probably need to go into therapy for (I also love House), but as in all such cases, I just can't help myself. This is one book I want to read:

Indeed, more than a couple of doctors in these tales would be brought before a state medical board today, if not put in jail. In “The Anesthesiologist’s Tale,” a surgeon with bipolar disorder stops taking his medications and loses his mind during a routine gallbladder operation, cutting wildly, lopping out part of the stomach, lacerating the aorta, eventually being jumped and restrained by orderlies, all the while threatening to sue. In “The Chest Surgeon’s Tale,” a self-described scoundrel boastfully recalls bedding student nurses while a young married surgeon; lying to get a nursing supervisor fired; and, in the most disturbing anecdote, purposefully thrusting an ungloved hand into the chest of a 14-year-old boy undergoing a heart operation.

...

The fact that we can treat disease, Nuland suggests, does not always mean we should. Would that more doctors today followed this basic maxim.

4. Saw Osaka Elegy in Bombay. My favourite bit is the scene at the theatre, though there's lots of stuff there. All on youtube.