by Clive James
GATEWAY TO INFINITY
In 2005 I finally managed to buy my domain name www.clivejames.com back from a British pirate. Before the pirate got hold of it, my domain name belonged to another Clive James, a jet-ski instructor in Miami. I waited a long time for him to have his accident, but when I lunged forward to grab the vacant domain name it turned out that the pirate had already bought it. He sold it to me for only slightly less than it would have cost to sue him, but it was worth it. My fledgling multi-media website could now carry my name, an attribute that might come in useful when trying to attract the attention of anyone who remembered it from the days when I had my face on the box in the corner of the room, instead of on the screen of a computer.
By that time my plans for the website were already changing. My first idea was to set up an on-line archive of everything I had ever written. There were practical reasons for doing so. On the Web, your books need never go out of print. They can be made available while occupying no physical space at all: a reasonably humble aim, surely. But I have to admit that megalomania was part of the initial impulse.
I was building a memorial to myself: not a very charming idea even when the pharaohs did it. Luckily I soon realised that the project might be more useful if I included the work of other people. Some of my own work included other people anyway. I was already, in the Video section of the site, running little no-budget television interviews that I was making in my living room. Jonathan Miller, Cate Blanchett, Terry Gilliam, Julian Barnes, Ruby Wax, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and others (the complete line-up of twenty-five half-hour interviews is still on the site now, and still growing, with a new series of nine to be uploaded soon) all contributed their services for not much more than a takeaway Chinese meal and cab fare. In the Audio section, I had been streaming dozens of radio dialogues that I had done with Peter Porter for the ABC in Australia. I had a Gallery section, and all its painters, sculptors and photographers were my guests. (By now there are seventeen of them, with seven pages each.) So why not have Guest Writers and Guest Poets?
Worldwide, there were journalists and essayists who were taking their business seriously. I wanted to help shine a light on their best work. When I was a journalist, I always thought that an individual piece was like an individual poem: if it was well enough done, it deserved to live. On the Web, nothing need disappear. There were poets who deserved a world stage. I wanted to help provide that. If I could load my website with enough permanently valuable material, people from all over the world might visit, not just because it was an example of one writer expressing himself, but because the site itself was expressing a wide range of human creation. A limitless range, in fact: because there were already countless good things glittering among the junk out there on the Web, so a site’s grizzled proprietor could turn his years to use by guiding visitors to the treasure.
You could say that this was megalomania taken to a further stage and disguised as altruism. But whatever the motive, after five years of steady construction the site has become the focus of my later life. I used to do several different things for a living. But they were all linked by writing, and now they are all happening in the one place, and I have to do a lot of extra writing to explain what’s going on. By the nature of the Web, this explanatory writing has to be terse, but that requirement never hurts.
The site’s comprehensive redesign, which has just been completed after months of work, looks a lot less tentative. It looks, as we used to say in television, ‘meant’. And so it should, because a lot of people are giving their efforts to it for small financial reward. They are headed by my copy-editor Ce´cile Menon, who can also converse with computers fluently enough to run the site. Powerfully persuasive for someone no bigger than a piaf, she recruits out in cyberspace the ghostly technical experts whose time is worth a fortune. Somehow she persuades them to work, like her, for a pittance. She is also gifted with adventurous taste. Many of our painters and sculptors are found by her. Sometimes she has to convince me, but only by making me look more closely, and invariably they prove to have a quality that my unaided eye might have skated over. Thus my education continues, and I get the chance to write outside my usual frame of reference. In this way, one’s mental range is increased. It’s the thing I like most about the Web. It can get you beyond yourself.
It can also get you bankrupt, but there is less reason to be afraid of that than you might think when you read press stories about dotcom entrepreneurs going belly up. For a start, you don’t have to be an entrepreneur. My aim is not to make money, and I have the account books to prove it. Google has now started advertising in our right-hand margin, but the revenue will probably fall a long way short of paying even for Ce´cile’s croissants. (J’ai faim! is her constant cry.) In fact the site was a steady drain on my savings until quite recently. But by now it is almost paying for itself. The drawback of webcasting is that you pay to send the signal, and the cost goes up with the number of viewers, so you can die of success overnight. The cost of streaming the shows could have been fatal, but luckily Slate magazine in the US offered to send out the signal and pick up the tab.
The cost of shooting the shows could have been fatal again, but the British cable channel Sky Arts stepped in to pay the bills, and soon, I hope, a further alliance with Times Online will make another season of programmes possible. The bottom line – I love this business talk – is that I not only choose the guests and run the show, I get to run the finished product on the site forever. The same goes for the radio material: all my ‘Point of View’ pieces that I record for BBC Radio 4 are mine to keep. The Gallery section acquires a new artist every month, and the library of guest writers grows, and . . . well, I’m not exactly planning to install a swimming pool, but there’s already the beginnings of a virtual bookshop, although browsers will have to make their own coffee at home. Wandering the gangways of this transparent space vehicle that we have been building as it flies, I try to see it through the eyes of the viewers. There is already plenty for them to choose from. But who are they?
In that question lies the only thing for the aspiring webster to be really scared of. You can throw a party, and nobody might come. As of now, there are at least seven million websites in the world, and about ninety million blogs, and it’s already obvious that when everyone on earth is building a personal display case they won’t have time to look at anybody else’s. As many lone bloggers have already found, their regular audience is only going to be a handful of people like them. Some of the handful are in Iceland or Venezuela, which can be a thrill, but on the whole, no matter how well the bloggers write, if they haven’t got a selling point beyond their own opinions they are digging their own graves under the impression that they are putting up a building.
But when I wake up sweating in the night, wondering if I am going broke to no purpose whatever, I can check the viewing figures and remind myself that at any given moment, as the sun comes up around the world, there are people on line to find out what we’ve got to offer. Not a lot of people, perhaps, but they come from more than fifty different countries. Since most of them, if they decide to browse around, will read as well as look and listen, it’s a safe assumption that they are good at English, which they got from books. The fear that the Web necessarily erodes the ability to read is groundless. The Web is fundamentally literate, even if only at a low level.
At an even lower level, alas, it is also frightening, because a huge percentage of it consists of pornography, eked out by master classes in bomb-making, conspiracy theory and religious terror. The word ‘jungle’ is almost too genteel to apply. But if the whole thing really is a lethally dangerous primeval forest, then a crucial battle will be lost if clearings are not provided in which people can find nothing but civilisation. I suppose the most glittering prize the Web offers is that it gives you a chance to put your life on the line in a constructive way. Even the brightest young people, wherever they come from, are more likely to find an older voice worth listening to if it is talking about somethi
ng beyond wealth and power. It can talk about value, saying not just ‘This is what I have done’ but ‘This is what others have done, and I find it valuable beyond price.’
I wouldn’t want to sound too worthy, because I have never had so much fun since my first trip to the movies. I wish, though, that the Web had been around a couple of decades earlier, because a site on this scale is so obviously the ideal form of self-expression, where you get your name on the gateway to infinity. What would a pyramid be beside that? Just a pointed building sticking out of the sand.
The Times, May 16, 2008
Postscript
My website www.clivejames.com can be defined in two ways: as the first personal fully fractal multi-media archival-critical instrument on the Web, and as an unbeatable method for going broke slowly. The video department is its most money-hungry feature, and to offset the production and transmission costs I have formed various alliances, always with the aim of giving the ally something he needs for the moment while I get something to keep for my Casaubon concordance, my scheme for joining the stars. Forming an alliance with Times Online, I ran the risk of looking as if I had gone to work for its proprietor. But the executives were very kind about allowing me to proclaim my continued independence, and I am grateful to them for giving me the space to do so. Meanwhile, the other departments of the site continue to grow, unhindered by any considerations except those attached to my diminishing supply of time. I wish that last thing were not so pressing, but I would never have started building the site in the first place if I hadn’t thought that the day had arrived for getting things together. How to keep running it after I conk out is the big question now. But my Web editor, second-in-command and sole crew member Ce´cile Menon is already testing an early model of a cyborg boss, which has a close physical resemblance to Gerard Depardieu. It makes strange noises, but so do I.
Back on the Road
This note was included in the programme for a Song Show tour of Australia in 2004.
The show Pete Atkin and I perform on tour spares every expense. All we need is two chairs, a small table and a piano. If the theatre has no piano, Pete has a portable one in the back of the car. At the start of the show, the curtains are already open. We just walk on. The houselights remain undimmed. There are no theatrical effects. For two hours with an interval, he sings our songs and I do most of the talking in between. Nothing else happens, yet the show is far and away the most fruitful artistic venture I have ever been mixed up in. It wouldn’t do for me to go on about how interesting I find it. The audience must judge. But I can say something about how much fun it is to do.
People who see the punishing tour schedule often commiserate with me. I wish they wouldn’t, just as I wish young men wouldn’t offer me their seat on crowded trains. I actually like being on the road. I was born to be a rock star. I just had to wait a few decades before it all happened: the endless travelling, the anonymous hotel rooms, the soulless existence. I can’t get enough of all that stuff. I can’t get enough of what it hasn’t got. For one thing, it hasn’t got complication. On tour, we know exactly what we’re doing tomorrow. We’re moving on to the next date, and we’ll be eating Crunchy Bars in the car while listening to Credence Clearwater Revival’s greatest hits. Or anyway, we’ll be eating Crunchy Bars while touring Britain. Touring Australia, we might be eating Cherry Ripe chocolate bars. Almost forty years ago, when Pete and I first met in Cambridge, I told him that the greatest taste thrill in every young Australian’s life was the Cherry Ripe, eaten chilled from the fridge on a hot day. Over the last two years, as we toured Britain, I have told him many times that although Crunchy Bars are no doubt very nutritious, when we got to Australia he would at last find out what a Cherry Ripe can offer.
I think they’re called Crunchy Bars. Pete buys them in bulk, and for all I know they’re really called Neutrogrit or Yorkiechaff. I have never been able to look at the labels, which carry lists of all the desirable ingredients – sugar, calories, flavour, etc. – that the contents haven’t got. This was the second year Pete and I took a song show on a thirty-date tour of Britain. This year’s show was entirely different from last year’s but the living conditions were the same. Most of the daytime between performances we spent on the motorway, with him driving the car while I changed the CDs and the floor filled up with Crunchy Bar wrappers. (Neutrochaff. That was it.) In Australia, on those occasions when the dates are close enough together to drive between instead of fly, we will both be in the back of a tastefully luxurious chauffer-driven Lexus provided by the sponsor. Cherry Ripe wrappers will be folded up neatly and retained in the pocket. In Britain, most of the nights after performances were spent in one room each of a motorway Travelodge. My room always looked so much like the room of the previous night that I would search it for a missing sock I left a hundred miles away. In Australia we have been promised proper hotel accommodation by our generous impresario, Jon Nicholls, but I have already told him, on Pete’s behalf, that we quite like the simple lifestyle of the troubadour and won’t mind at all if the taps in the bathrooms of our interconnecting suites are merely gold-plated instead of solid platinum. After all, I’m not Saddam Hussein, nor is Pete Ivana Trump, although there have been lonely nights when I wished he were. In the first few days of last year’s tour of Britain I quickly realised why this superficially austere way of life felt so sumptuous. It was because I had been thirsting for simplicity. After too many years in television I was worn out from being looked after. Television isn’t the movies, but for anyone with his name in the title of the show the pampering is decadent enough. You never buy an airline ticket yourself. Someone puts the ticket in your hand. You soon get used to the huge basket of fruit waiting for you in the dressing room. You never eat any of it, but if the huge basket of fruit isn’t huge enough then your agent will instruct you to eat the furniture, thus to express anger at being slighted. In America it’s a huge basket of huge fruit, and the artist’s attorney weighs the apples.
Out on tour with our song show, I buy my own apples, and sometimes, even in Britain, I actually eat one, if we have run out of apple-flavoured Fergiecrunch. In Australia I will introduce Pete to the concept of limitless fruit, along with all the fast yet fabulously healthy food that can be bought by the roadside in a nation where not even the shopping malls have yet succeeded in becoming impersonal. It beats being waited on. (For one thing, you can’t be waited on without being made to wait: have you noticed?) It’s a simpler, saner way of life. I like to think it is matched by what we do on stage. Last year, getting ready for the first tour of our revival phase, we had to choose from more than a hundred songs we wrote in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period in which Pete released six albums commercially and the record companies could never decide how to promote the stuff, because they didn’t know what it was.
Thirty years later, with the blessed Internet having made the music industry less omnipotent at last, we were able to jump to the right conclusion: trust the audience. It doesn’t matter what category our songs fall into, as long as people listen. The trick is to make sure nothing gets between the songs and the listeners. So the answer was, in both senses of the phrase, simplicity itself. The word got out, the tour organisers got their money back, and there was an unexpected result. For both of us, being on the road was like being back in our first days in the Cambridge Footlights, when we sat up late in the ratty old clubroom and wrote song after song because there was nothing to stop us except the usual essay crisis. Last year, as if all that elapsed time had never been, we started writing songs again. This new show, the one we are taking all the way to Australia, is largely composed of the new work we have done in the past year, and I am sure that while we are on tour with this show there will be yet more new work getting started, and so on until I am old and grey. But I can just hear Pete saying: ‘You already are.’ He’s a bit like that. A realist. It would be bad manners for me to praise his other qualities, except to say that if my lyrics helped him to discover the melodies of Winter
Spring, then I have justified my long career of misspent youth. Whether or not my homeland thinks the same I will now find out. I am bringing home my best stuff. Much of it is the sort of thing I am lucky enough to be known for: tall tales about childhood in Australia, unreliable accounts of strange journeys to the magic land of Pracatan. But right at the heart of it is the work I am least known for, but would still like to be, if only as the writing partner of a unique musician. It is the work I have done with Pete Atkin, so I am very glad he has agreed to come with me, to see for the first time the amazing nation that he has heard me talk about so often.
Postscript
An important form of the handbill is the programme note. The audience is already in the theatre, but the programme note helps to orientate them before the lights go down, and after the show they will take the programme home if they think it has enough interesting material in it. A programme taken home works like a handbill, so you win twice. The Australian tour did good business. In the big cities we filled the concert halls, and up country we filled the theatres, the town halls and the function rooms of the hotels. (Only Australia could come up with a title like ‘function room’: it sounds like a plus-point in a sales pitch for underpants.) Whatever the venue, we were cost-effective, because apart from the two of us we had only our roadie on the payroll. In Australia it was Mark Wilkinson, who has a background in rock music and knows all about sound. Our regular roadie in Britain, Steve Mitchell, has similar qualifications. The sound-check is the most important part of the day, and it’s vital to have a man on your side who knows what he’s doing. You could leave it to the on-site staff and save money, but only if you felt suicidal. As for the album, Winter Spring, it did well enough to make us confident that self-publishing was a viable prospect, and paved the way for a later album, Midnight Voices, which is the album I would recommend as a first purchase for anyone who feels the urge to get acquainted with our work. It’s still there on Amazon. End of plug.