Greg Stant, spoken poet, photographer, and friend was the very first person to put my voice on the internet on his pioneering and still going strong Spoken War. That was in 1998–99. He’s vowed to keep “Make Death Die” up forever there and has several other examples of my beat-up howl posted at www.spokenwar.com. A good friend of Greg’s came along around 1999—Wang of Wang Zen—and the rest, as they say is history. Wang’s site is still out there in cyberspace too at www.wangzen.com. My great thanks to both. Dan Sendecki first read—and heard—my work at these two outposts on the cyber frontier and that was the beginning.

Ahadada books is a good example of the super-new technologies available for publishing. In the face of the ease of putting your words on the net and having them read by hundreds of thousands of people from all parts of the globe, I’ve been creating small volumes of my own work, with my own designs and illustrations, and coloring them with watercolors, markers, colored pencils and inks. The “editions” are tiny—and each book is different. They take weeks to do and the results?—Well, the results please me. This tiny “press” I call “Hand of Glory” and I now have eight different books that I’ve published over 2006.

The logo for Hand of Glory is a flying eye—a Lebnizean monad, though the eye is the result of my interest in them, as Leibniz’s were completely blind yet gave the illusion of sight—which appears over and over. Also Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad (a nifty symbol that incorporates many arcane concepts makes an appearance or two.

Needless to say I’m glad to have two of my painted books in the same vast collection that includes William Blake, Samuel Palmer, and Hans Holbein!

We should also thank the Tate for still having faith in the avant garde while conserving the sometimes smelly results! I recall my visit last summer to the Beuys collection as one fraught with olfactory dangers! (All of that old fat ya know.)

Still, I can imagine a future in which all of the painters-on-velvet, the purveyors of kitsch, the Sunday primitives, will storm the walls of the Tate Modern as the walls of the Bastille were once breached and set up flea markets and “Starving Artist” sales and the people crowding in behind them to buy buy buy!

Here’s the link to my books at the Tate on-line catalogue.