MY ELECTRONIC POSTCARDS (October 7, 2003)
I started printing out pieces from my Residua and pasting them on postcards in 1993 or 1994. At first, the postcards were few and far between, and they went to a handful of friends only. By 1995 the circle of friends widened considerably. More and more of my pieces ended up on postcards. If I remember correctly, my first bulk mailing went out in 1997, when I sent a cocky piece about art to all the art critics from London whose addresses I could find in the public domain. There were more than one-hundred postcards in the batch. The largest batch I have ever mailed at any one time was more than twice that size. However, I turned to electronic postcards in 2000 or 2001, soon after the repository of my selected writings appeared on the World Wide Web. The mailing list quickly grew to more than two-hundred people, most of them from the world of art, but then it shrunk considerably when I abandoned that embattled world. Earlier this year it counted no more than thirty people, all friends, but the count has more than doubled by now. Although I still send out an occasional postcard by snail-mail, electronic postcards are my favorite means of keeping in touch with so many people around the globe. A fair number of them comment on my writings, too. Some of the comments are barbed, but most are earnest and helpful. Every now and then someone asks to be removed from the list for one reason or another, but that is rather rare. By now, nearly everything I write goes out to the list. I have become so used to this form of instant publishing that I can hardly imagine my life without it. My electronic postcards are here to stay, just as is my book on the Web. The point of this somewhat boring account is pretty simple: I wonder why would I ever wish to have better readers or better means of access to them than I already have? Why, indeed?