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March 2004 : Prospect of a multimedia website

At the moment, this page is the only attraction my personal website offers. When I was very young, the Saturday afternoon circus that toured under my name had two attractions. I cracked a whip and my friend Stanley Moulton stood on his head. If artistic differences had not led to a split, we might still be touring the block today. But I can safely predict that this new cyber-carnival, also, will be notable for its variety. It should be starting up some time in April. My initial aim is to set up three sections which can be accessed separately: video, audio and text. Working with my young colleague Simon Larcey through his Welcome Stranger organisation, in the last two years I have hosted eighteen video interviews using my London apartment as a studio: hence the general title, Talking in the Library . The aim has been to capture the sort of conversation that is rarely heard in ordinary TV studios. Among the founding interviewees are Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Terry Gilliam, Cate Blanchett, Deborah Bull and Jung Chang.

On the Welcome Stranger website these programmes, though they stuttered in narrow band, were a notable technical success in broadband ( Prospect magazine called the venture a revolution), but the penalty attached to the success was that too many people watched, and the cost of streaming rapidly became prohibitive. So we took the site off the air while we worked on the question of how to bring the programmes back on a basis of sample and subscription. (On a smaller scale, the same questions applied to our more than twenty audio dialogues between myself and Peter Porter.) Soon we hope to reopen access to our archive. When we re-launch the video webcasting, we might try streaming half a dozen of the programmes free for a three-month period, to see if they arouse interest in the other dozen. If it turns out that we can stream all the programmes without going broke, we will start adding to them again. Especially for the video programmes, there is a sell-on demand from digital arts TV channels in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. This could help with our production costs, but our idea is to make webcasting work by itself, and not just as an alternative supply system for ordinary broadcasting. The way to the world, after all, is through the web.

The third area of material, text, is less problematic from the angle of expense. If the legal angle can be sorted out, I should be able to feature some of my own back catalogue and even sell books direct from the publisher. There is also the possibility of a forward catalogue. Recent articles and poems that will one day be collected into books can have their first life on the website. A weekly column, if I can commit to so taxing a venture at my age, is also a tempting prospect: for the writer at any rate, if not for the reader. But the main effort in the text section will be to make free browsing the background and the basis for any further ventures. When we get closer to launching the separate departments, I will update this page. Meanwhile please log on with your details if you would like to be informed of developments as they take place. Anyone who follows this enterprise will be participating in something new, just as I am. As we already learned from the test site we called Welcome Stranger, the sense of a world-wide thought process getting under way is the essence of the adventure.

April 2005 :

Last year I rather grandly announced in this space that a multimedia personal website was on the way. The contraption took so much work to prepare - most of it done by young helpers talking a language I don't pretend to understand - that I never had time to ask myself whether it would be of any actual use. Now it's here, and I could well find out the hard way that nobody needs it. But in the event that somebody wants to try it out, here's how it is meant to work. Selecting from the three square click-buttons grouped around my nervously smiling face at top left, you will be able to see what the Text, Audio and Video sections have in store. Later on, I hope, there will be more available in each section, and perhaps there will even be other sections as well, not necessarily featuring myself. It might seem strange to say so, in the face of the evidence, but this project is not meant entirely as an ego trip, although I suppose the Pharaohs said the same when they were approving the designs for their individual pyramids. It would be tactically unwise, at such an early stage, to say how excited I am by this new venture. Equally unwise, perhaps, to say that it will need a lot of time to organize, and probably too much money to maintain, and I might easily run out of both. Death and destitution aside, however, this note will be updated as the project develops.

Update: As of April, 2005, a new section has been added here which features work not by myself, but by other people. "Guest Poets" will be, I hope, only the first of several click buttons, in various departments of the site, that will lead through to the work of writers and artists in different fields who are kind enough to look with favour on the idea of my sharing an enthusiasm for their accomplishments with anyone in the world who comes to visit.

February 2006 :

Addendum as of August 2005: Since the site went to air, it has been subject to the same sort of unannounced expansion that eventually became familiar to Professor Quatermass. The Audio section has increased from one set of dialogues to four, and the Text section has expanded in the same proportion, with the new sub-section Guest Poets presaging an era when the proprietor will retreat to the status of an incidental player in his own establishment, thereby demonstrating his essential humility. (A note to journalists: irony was employed in the previous sentence.) Additions to the Video section are contemplated for next year, now that the final technical bugs are being worked out of the system and the costs of streaming have been brought under control. Until these matters were cleared up I took care not to publicise the venture as anything more serious than a new toy. With due discretion, it might now be time to dial up the power on the homing beacon, if only because there is now audited evidence that people have been looking for it. Compared with words, figures have never been my thing, but one statistic relating to this enterprise impresses even me. It has already had visitors from more than fifty separate countries.

Addendum as of October 2005: A new section called Gallery is now open.

Addendum as of February 2006: Since late January, major reconstruction has been under way in the Text section, with various sub-sections being shifted to different levels so that this part of Gizmo City can go on propagating without bumping into itself. As a spokesman for the Acropolis once told the world: excuse the chisels and the marble chips, we never expected to get this big. The development programme is designed so that no component needs to be closed down: all the material should be continuously available. Meanwhile, despite the noise and rising dust, individual precincts such as Pieces from the Past continue to expand inexorably. While Nicholas Watts and Simon Larcey of Welcome Stranger, and Cécile Menon, omnicompetent CEO of this website, supervise these operations, high above them all, on his glittering balcony in space, the Proprietor, intoxicated by the smell of his burning money, gazes out over the busy fulfilment of his dream. Music by Vangelis.

December 2006 :

When this website took to the air under my name in 2004, it was the first personal multimedia extravaganza of its type anywhere in the world. Now everybody's doing it, so the topic arises of what exactly is being done. In other words, running such an airborne emporium is no longer a miracle. The question is about what it sells. The first answer, where this site is concerned, is that it doesn't really sell anything. Eventually it might sell a few books, and even then most of them might not be mine. Even the television shows cost nothing to view.

At the moment, the contraption, built in a garden shed and first tested off the tops of small hills, is more like a free university having a love affair with a space station. Another useful analogy might be with a clearing in the jungle. The web is certainly a jungle, and without a few clearings it is hard to see how the innocent can stay sane in there, and it might soon be hard to see anything at all. There have to be at least a few areas that unashamedly represent civilized achievement, if only because there are so many that represent the exact opposite, all fangs bared. So the serious proprietor can persuade himself he is doing good, even as he seems to be concentrating on his own preservation with a whole new kind of embalming fluid. Since a successful liberal democracy pretty well depends on enlisting human weaknesses on behalf of the general welfare, I can do something to exculpate the vaulting effrontery of my own ego by emphasising the altruistic form of its expression.

But somewhere underneath those fine feelings there undeniably bubbles a desire to assemble everything of mine that I want to keep and get it safely into permanent orbit. That might seem like a glory ride. To help offset this last suspicion, I continue, with the invaluable help of my second-in-command Cécile Menon, to bring in contributions from guest writers, guest artists, and guests generally, in the hope that those combined contributions might outweigh mine when the time comes for my physical demise. The aim could be defined as throwing a party in my own tomb, with a turn at the microphone for everybody present. But the only way I can prove it is to invite the visitor to take a look. The major areas of the project can be reached through the squares at the top left. There will be more to come, I hope, but I also hope that a first-time visitor will find more than enough for now.

July 2007 :

This website began as an airborne library in which I planned to preserve my written work. The airborne library lifted towards orbit when I realised that it could carry audio and video material as well. Orbit was achieved when I finally got wise to the possibility of expanding the increasingly elaborate vehicle's cargo hold so as to take in the work of other people. Somewhere between a space station and a free university campus, the machine is now embarked on its true voyage, dedicated to the premise that values can be stable and permanent, even when they are packed into a dot in the middle of nowhere, where nothing weighs anything and all the signals move at the speed of light.

The squares at the top left of the screen lead to the website's separate departments, and every department leads to shelves, galleries and studios in a building made of corridors whose walls are made of doors. Nobody who builds a thing like this should be suspected of suffering from self-effacement, but I should say at the outset, and before you press the button to gain entry, that the day is already gone when I thought this invention belonged to me. By now I belong to it: an edifice that weighs nothing, and can disappear at the tap of a key. But that was how it appeared in the first place. Feel free to wander.

December 2007 :

If only the web were the work of a single giant spider, we might teach it to behave. But the web is more like a jungle, and the most we can hope to do is make the occasional clearing, in which a civilized form of safety may be found. The visitor needs a refuge not just from nihilism, prurience and insanity, but from the meaningless, which is practically the web’s binding force even when it is providing necessary information. There have to be places where coherent expression can be found. After five years of work, I am at last ready to claim that this website might be one of them.

I would be less ready to say so if I were speaking only on my own behalf. I admit that the project started its career as a personal archive. But such has been the generosity of my guests in all media – a truly international cast, with more to come – that the steadily expanding principality would be of interest even if its instigator were to disappear from it tomorrow. So at last I can begin to be proud of it instead of apologetic.

Since the beginning, I have written and rewritten this opening paragraph several times, and it might have been thought from some of my terminology that I wasn’t being apologetic at all about what we were building. As well as a gizmo, a gadget and a contraption, I called it a bespoke pyramid, a space station, a free university campus, a café in Atlantis, an outpost of Arcadia, a crystal palace, a song of lights. But I was whistling to keep my courage up while the work went on. Now that the clearing’s outlines are harder to mistake, I can adopt the more modest tone that should be the true mark of confidence. Thousands of people from all over the world are coming to visit. I can give up saying that this is something new, and simply be glad that it feels new to them.

February 2008 :

Note: This site is still under construction. To reach any of its four main areas, click on one of the squares grouped around the proprietor's face at top left. Once inside, you should find all the links to further levels on the right of the text. But if you are viewing on a small screen, be sure to scroll down on any introductory page to find the links below the text. In an upcoming development, the links will be immediately accessible on any size or resolution of screen.

This website started out as a personal archive, but after five years of steady work I hope it now stands revealed as something more useful. A click on any of the square buttons grouped around my mug-shot at upper left should soon reveal that I have a bigger aim in mind than mere self-perpetuation. In times gone by, when a ruling megalomaniac got the urge to immortalise himself by building a personal mausoleum on the grand scale, there were obvious drawbacks. A pyramid, for example, took up a lot of lateral space and carved a large triangular piece out of the skyline, thereby ensuring that it would defeat the proprietor’s initial purpose. It might as well have carried a large neon sign saying “Treasure Buried Here”. This multi-media website gets bigger by the month but it takes up no room whatsoever. It all unfolds from a single dot in cyberspace, and positively invites tomb-robbers to visit its every chamber, the idea being not to guard the treasure but to give it away for free. Once you get inside, you will find that the inmates include a lot of other people besides myself, and most of them are very much alive. They, too, have brought their treasure with them. Then you will notice that the pyramid is made of glass, like the one at the Louvre. And then you will notice, by the stars streaming past outside, that the whole thing is flying. Where to, I still have no idea, but anyone in the world is welcome to climb in and take a look around. Feel free to wander.

September 2008 :

This website started out as a personal archive, but after five years of steady work I hope it now stands revealed as something more useful. A click on any of the square buttons grouped around my mug-shot at upper left should soon reveal that I have a bigger aim in mind than mere self-perpetuation. In times gone by, when a ruling megalomaniac got the urge to immortalise himself by building a personal mausoleum on the grand scale, there were obvious drawbacks. A pyramid, for example, took up a lot of lateral space and carved a large triangular piece out of the skyline, thereby ensuring that it would defeat the proprietor’s initial purpose. It might as well have carried a large neon sign saying “Treasure Buried Here”. This multi-media website gets bigger by the month but it takes up no room whatsoever. It all unfolds from a single dot in cyberspace, and positively invites tomb-robbers to visit its every chamber, the idea being not to guard the treasure but to give it away for free. Once you get inside, you will find that the inmates include a lot of other people besides myself, and most of them are very much alive. They, too, have brought their treasure with them. Then you will notice that the pyramid is made of glass, like the one at the Louvre. And then you will notice, by the stars streaming past outside, that the whole thing is flying. Where to, I still have no idea, but anyone in the world is welcome to climb in and take a look around. Feel free to wander, perhaps starting with NEW, which gives a quick guide to the latest postings month by month, and thus a history of how the site grows.