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February 6, 1968

Mr Dan Flavin
Lake Valhalla
New York

Dear Dan,

Thanks for your letter of the 4th. I think I had told you that I had written a series of comical alternative headings in response to your letter, and that it what you will find in the ltters column: I will be surprised if you are angered by it, or find it offensive, but as you say, regardless of whatever our private motives might be, the "credibility gap" between us is widening.

I cant do more than repeat my disclaimers about The Letter of January Eighteenth.

Listen, regarding the Smithson thing, something indeed incorrect may have happened. You will find his name listed among many in one of the proposed alternate subheads, and it is possible that it is incorrect: I assumed that Smithson was the person you had in mind in the entry of [[underline]] some other comments [[/underline]] which begins: "I scanned an article by _____ _____ in [[underline]] Arts [[/underline]]. He keeps striving to induce a current psychological "high" etc., and it was on this basis alone that I threw his name in among the others. If I was incorrect in thinking this -- the psychological high bit seemed to me an exact description of his efforts -- I will be happy to make some kind of correction. T at's all there is to that.

My reference to hyocrisy in The Letter of January Eighteenth was general rather than specific -- I have no specific instances of hypocrisy to detail. I had in mind the idea that there was something hypocritical about the attacks, endless, minute and unvarying on an art milieu in which you continue to work and to plot and plan, on art journals in which you continue to propagandize, on art critics who were instrumental in bringing your art to the attention of the dealers and musueums in which you remain interested. Naturally you cannot agree with this -- that would be insanity -- but I must ask you to understand it as a criticism of your posture rather than a personal attack.

Why should you have hoped that I was "an editor?" On the single occasion, in all our dealings when I had some reason to offer my advice as an editor you found no value at all in what I had to say. I'm a pretty Jeffersonian editor -- ie, most of the time I subscribe to the idea -- which surely your own experience will verify -- that that editor is best who edits least. On the rare occasions when I have advice to offer, my system is to say, "Please look at these suggestions. If you dont think they will improve the manuscript, we'll run it the way you have it." The only time this didn't work was with you: you astonished me by saying I "got you" in "one or two places" as if we were involved in some kind of struggle. My faith in my ability to know when a lineor a section is not clear is pretty substantial: when Gladys (my wife) read the galleys she asked me about the line we had been discussing here (the one we showed to Pincus-Witten), wondering if it were an error of some kind. Also, when she finished the article I asked her to tell me in her own words what she understood your program