The weekly digest debuts this Sunday. If you’d like to switch your subscription from daily to weekly, send an email to chris+weekly@katexic.com and I’ll take care of it. Note: the weekly digest will be lengthy, containing everything from the daily editions. No "best of" or summary items here...I include the items I do for a reason!

WORK

“But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They’re both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They’re all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what’s actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man’s ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn’t want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”

—Samuel R. Delany
—from Dhalgren

WORD(S)

snickersnee. verb or noun. To fight with knives; to cut and thrust. A large clasp knife used in such fighting. From “snick or snee,” derived from Dutch steken (thrust) snijen (cut).

“I seized him by his little pig-tail,
And on his knees fell he,
As he squirmed and struggled,
And gurgled and guggled,
I drew my snickersnee,
My snickersnee!”
(Gilbert & Sullivan)

“Otto, indeed, had convulsively grasped his snickersnee, with intent to plunge it into the heart of Rowski; but his politer feelings overcame him.” (William Thackeray)

“Not at all like me, like my brother; not at all clever clean no-mess bloodless razor-sharp Moondancer snicker-snee Dexter and his very own brother.” (Jeff Lindsey)

“The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!” (Lewis Carroll)

WEB

1. “Amazing Little Flip Books Use Negative Space and Secret Compartments” via Reader K.

2. There are many sites that talk about how to survive in the days and weeks after an apocalyptic event…but what about the knowledge needed for long-term survival? Meet the Survivor Library: How to Survive when the Technology Doesn’t.

3. “Why would someone steal the world’s rarest water lily?”.

4. I had no idea there were so many Spam-like products that a guide was necessary.

5. Today in 1558, Elizabeth Tudor accedes to the throne in England, saying to her privy council “…as I am but one body naturally considered, though by His permission a body politic to govern, so shall I desire you all […] to be assistant to me…” A religious pragmatist, Elizabeth I restored Protestantism to England, mandating a common prayer book and compulsory church attendance but leaving people to practice how they wanted in private (a marked difference from her sister, “Bloody Mary” I). Elizabeth would never marry, though she had a 30-year relationship with the married Robert Dudley, who likely killed his own wife in hopes of gaining her hand. Though her legacy is complicated by a combination of pragmatism and passivity, England mostly thrived under Elizabeth’s reign, the arts particularly benefiting from her (relative) tolerance and a general prosperity.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

• (Now former) Reader H. is unhappy with me: “I used to look forward to your email. Now I find myself avoiding them. Too much ‘humor’ not enough art.” — ummmm….sorry?

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