A return to beneficence (with apologies to l oshins)
I think it's time to start writing journally again. It's been so long since I've done this that the activity has, in the interim, acquired its own common noun (or gerund or whatever). And I'm certainly no longer interested in doing whatever it was I did before--agonized semi-public grousing about my own personal trivia, mostly, I believe. But it seems a good idea still, for all kinds of reasons, the foremost having to do with the sudden change my life has undergone, and the doldrums of orals study that I assume stretch uninterrupted from here to Sept. 14. (Mostly, I imagine that this will in some way induce a daily cognitive regularity. And, I remember this activity--although this was tied up in the trivia-grousing--functioning as a shunt or spigot for venom tapped into one of my atria or ventricles: a good way of feeling less pissed off about personal problems or, as the case now appears to be, their lack.) Shit, I'm at it again, and parenthetically no less.
I take my title from Leland's essay on doctor-patient privilege. I don't know what beneficence, in my case, means, but that's largely why it seems like an appropriate borrowing. I don't think Leland knows what it means, either. "Beneficence" is apparently the artful legal term used to characterize the late-Victorian, Milly Theale--Luke Strett style relationship of patients to doctors founded on nothing but suave professional kindness and infinite reserves of unarticulated professional confidence, which gave place to all the modern fussiness about science, knowledge, accountability, standardized practice, etc. This is what Leland would like to see us return to, despite certain irritating historical impediments. So here is a return to whatever I was doing before: blogging without all the horseshit, but inevitably updated for the modern era.
There will, apparently, be quite a lot of bullshit, though.
Today I'm reading King Lear. This is a sharp left from the comedy kick I've been on recently, and probably I will founder discouragingly, maybe not even finish today. My orals study has not begun well, as intimated above. I still have a lot of Shakespeare, and I'm nearing the end of the time I blocked off for Shakespeare study. I am, as always, first and last a Bad Worker. Last night I watched about half of Kenneth Branagh's unbearable Love's Labour's Lost before giving up with drooping eyelids and going, panty ripper despairingly in hand (yes, indeed), to watch episodes of Arrested Development.
Better luck today.
I take my title from Leland's essay on doctor-patient privilege. I don't know what beneficence, in my case, means, but that's largely why it seems like an appropriate borrowing. I don't think Leland knows what it means, either. "Beneficence" is apparently the artful legal term used to characterize the late-Victorian, Milly Theale--Luke Strett style relationship of patients to doctors founded on nothing but suave professional kindness and infinite reserves of unarticulated professional confidence, which gave place to all the modern fussiness about science, knowledge, accountability, standardized practice, etc. This is what Leland would like to see us return to, despite certain irritating historical impediments. So here is a return to whatever I was doing before: blogging without all the horseshit, but inevitably updated for the modern era.
There will, apparently, be quite a lot of bullshit, though.
Today I'm reading King Lear. This is a sharp left from the comedy kick I've been on recently, and probably I will founder discouragingly, maybe not even finish today. My orals study has not begun well, as intimated above. I still have a lot of Shakespeare, and I'm nearing the end of the time I blocked off for Shakespeare study. I am, as always, first and last a Bad Worker. Last night I watched about half of Kenneth Branagh's unbearable Love's Labour's Lost before giving up with drooping eyelids and going, panty ripper despairingly in hand (yes, indeed), to watch episodes of Arrested Development.
Better luck today.