2025.10.28
rechristening
Earlier, this 1992- piece was rechristened Neuters Descending a Staircase. Hence, a color-adjustment's forthcoming.
2018.10.28
page painting 001
2004.10.28
Re: SURVIVOR ST. HELENA
Maxentius falls into river and is ultimately voted off the island.
Apparently he's the third so far. Marie Antoinette lost her head right away.
Rumor has it that both sets of Matta-Clark and Bijani twins are on the island.
2002
Denis Diderot "Encyclopedia"
Diderot, Denis. "Encyclopedia." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004 (accessed 28 October 2026). Originally published as "Encyclopédie," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 5:635–648A (Paris, 1755).
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Time however lifts the veil; each is judged according to his merit. The negligent laborer is distinguished from the hard-working one who has done his duty. What a few have done shows what all should be expected to do; and the public names the ones with whom it is dissatisfied, and regrets that they should have answered so poorly to the importance of the enterprise, and the choice which had honored them.
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I express myself on this subject with all the more liberty that no one will risk this kind of censure more than I, and because, whatever criticism is made of our labors, either in general or in particular, it will be none the less true that it would be very difficult to create a second society of men of letters and artists as numerous and better constituted than the one which collaborates on the production of this dictionary. If it would have been easy to find someone better than me as author and editor, one must agree that it was, for these two functions, infinitely easier to find someone less able than M. D'Alembert. How I would gain from the kind of listing where some men would compensate for others! Add to this that there are sections for which one does not choose, and this problem will obtain for all editions. Whatever royalty a man were offered, he would never put in the time requested of him. An artist must work late in his shop; a public man must attend to his duties. The latter is unfortunately too busy, and the studious man is unfortunately not well enough informed. In this case you do what you can.
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But if it is a simple matter for a dictionary to be well written, there is hardly any work in which that is more important. The longer a journey must be, the more desirable that it be pleasant. Besides, we have some reason to believe that from this standpoint we have not been altogether unsuccessful. There are people who have read the Encyclopedia from one end to the other; and if we except Bayle's dictionary which loses some of this prerogative with each day, there is hardly any other than ours which has enjoyed and still enjoys it. We hope it will not retain it long, since we prefer the progress of the human spirit to the durability of our productions, and we would have succeeded beyond our hopes, if we had rendered knowledge so popular, that the average man required a work more challenging than the Encyclopedia , to captivate and inform him.
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As far as style goes, it would be desirable to be able to imitate Petronius, who provided at once the example and the precept, when, having to depict the qualities of a fine discourse, he said: Grandis, et ut ita dicam pudica oratio neque maculosa est neque turgida, sed naturali pulchritudine exsurgit. Description is the thing itself.
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We must especially avoid obscurity, and remember at every line that a dictionary is made for everybody, and that the repetition of words that would be annoying in a book for entertainment becomes a character of simplicity that will never displease in a large one.
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Let there never be anything vague in the expression. In a philosophical work it would be wrong to use the most ordinary words when they convey no fixed, distinct, and determined notion; and such terms exist in very great number. If we could give them definitions, according to nature which does not change, and not according to the conventions and prejudices of men which change constantly, these definitions would become the germs of discovery. Let us also point out here our continual demand for an invariable and constant model to which our definitions and descriptions can be linked, such as the nature of man, animals, or other extant beings. The rest is nothing, and he who does not know how to dispense with certain specific, local, and transitory notions, is impeded in his work and constantly risks, in opposition to what his conscience tells him and his mind's inclination, saying things that are incorrect for the moment, and false or at least obscure and conjectural for the future.
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The works of the most intrepid and lofty geniuses, of the greatest philosophers of Antiquity, are somewhat disfigured by this flaw. Those of our time are far from exempt. Intolerance, the lack of the double doctrine, the defect of a hieroglyphic and sacred language, will forever perpetuate these contradictions, and continue to blemish our finest productions. Often we do not know what a man has thought about the most important matters. He wraps himself in affected abstruseness; even his contemporaries do not know his sentiments; and it must not be expected that an encyclopedia will be free from this defect.
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The more abstract the topic, the more we must strive to make it accessible to all readers.
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An editor with some experience, who can discipline himself, will place himself in the middle class of minds. If nature had raised him to the first level of genius, and he had never descended lower, ever conversing with men of the greatest insight, he would be able to contemplate objects from a viewpoint to which the throng cannot aspire. Too far above them, the work would become enigmatic for everyone. But if he were unfortunately, or had were condescending enough to act, beneath them, the material presented as if for imbeciles would become lengthy and tedious. He will therefore consider the world his school, and the human race his pupil; and he will dictate lessons that will neither cause good minds to waste precious time, nor discourage the mass of ordinary minds. There are two classes of men, about equally narrow, who should be equally ignored. These are the transcendent geniuses and the imbeciles, neither of which needs teachers.
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But though it is not easy to grasp the common capacity of minds, it is much less so still for the man of genius to stop there. Genius naturally tends to rise; it seeks the ethereal regions; with a moment's inattention it is swiftly swept away, and soon ordinary eyes can no longer spot and follow it.
2002.10.28
Re: Duchamp says viewer finishes the work of art?
Having thus been prompted by YaLing Chen's post, I went to read "The Creative Act" within a copy of the latest reprint of Salt Seller, a book I purchased at the Philadelphia Museum of Art something like two years ago. I know I never read this book cover to cover, but I probably read the short 'essays' when I first bought the book. Anyway, before reading "The Creative Act" today, I first (re?)read the text right before it, namely, "Regions which are not ruled by time and space....", text of a television interview of Duchamp by James Johnson Sweeney January 1956 filmed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. [I was in Philadelphia at the time, but still in my mother's womb, waiting for the last hours before Spring it turned out.] This reading turned out to be completely apropos because earlier today I composed and uploaded a series of webpages entitled Dossier Duchamp which comprise [almost] all the images I've taken of/within the Duchamp Gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art since 11 February 1999.
Being now more aware of "Regions which are not ruled by time and space...." I propose Museum Studies 6.1 where visitors to the PMA Duchamp Gallery are encouraged to bring along a copy of the Duchamp/Sweeney interview text and then speak some of the passages while in the Duchamp Gallery, thus somewhat closely reenacting sound waves first produced by Duchamp and/or Sweeney within the same space, yet at a different time, obviously.
The next time I visit the PMA Duchamp Gallery you can be sure I'll reenactingly speak "There is a symmetry in the cracking, the two crackings are symmetrically arranged and there is more, almost an intention there, an extra--a curious intention that I am not responsible for, a ready-made intention, in other words, that I love and respect."
1965.10.28
1965. Thursday, New York City
Enjoying an "orgy of movies", after seeing recently the Beatles' second film Help!, Peter Sellers in What's New, Pussycat? and The Knack or How to get it, directed by Richard Lester, in the evening Teeny and Marcel see The Loved One, based on the novel by Evelyn Waugh.
Ephemerides
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