Beat Degeneration, page 2
It is entirely possible, of course, to deliver such works, or pieces of them, in a digital medium. "The Beat Experience" provides an anthology of texts, mostly excerpts of major works. The "Kerouac ROMnibus" goes further, providing the complete text of Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums." Yet no one of sound mind could argue that it makes much sense to read any great quantity of prose from a CD-ROM. Beat writing, after all, is best consumed via City Lights pamphlets and paperbacks fitted for back-pocket stuffing.
Each CD also strives to paint a broad portrait of the Beats themselves, their interrelationships, the artistic influences on their work and the postwar culture that they rebelled against. "The Beat Experience," which is spun off the recent Whitney Museum exhibit on the Beat era, compiles a range of artworks -- from a compendium of experimental film to a brief look at trends in postwar painting to a collection of jazz soundclips and bios -- meant to place the Beats in context. Yet a context never materializes; the fragments remain fragments, unless you already possess a fairly advanced sense of cultural chronology.
"The Beat Experience" is organized around a mock-up "Beat Pad" that serves as a home base, complete with period pinups (from girlie mags to full-frontal gay centerfolds) and used syringes (click on them and your computer will flash a "dead end" message and quit). The original design and animations are by artists like Sue Coe, Kevin Kerslake and Gary Panter, and their latter-day expressionist contortions lend the CD a raw hipness that's missing from the "Kerouac ROMnibus," with its more vanilla design and soundtrack.
Yet the "ROMnibus" delivers better-focused history. It provides fascinating reproductions of Kerouac diary entries, a helpful family tree of Beat relationships, and an introductory essay by Ann Charters. It's here, in the linear form of critical prose, that the contours of the Beat movement begin to fall into place -- like the affinities and differences between the East Coast Beats and the San Francisco-based poets who became associated with them in the popular mind.
One attitude that united every wing of this movement was a rejection of the bland conformities of mass culture, in favor of some dimly defined but deeply felt authenticity found among the young, the depressed and the down-and-out. (Though it's often misunderstood today, "Beat," of course, originally derived from "beaten" or "beaten down.") Any CD-ROM on the Beats is sooner or later going to bang into the irony that the medium itself -- costly and heavily hyped as it is -- is a product of the very kind of consumer capitalism the Beats detested.
The irony applies only glancingly to these CDs, which still deliver far more value than most of the multimedia junk in today's marketplace. (Furthermore, "The Beat Experience" CD was co-produced by the Red Hot Organization, a non-profit group dedicated to fighting AIDS, so any profits are going to a good cause.) But the question still nags: what good is a CD-ROM if you're -- literally or figuratively -- on the road?
More generally, and ultimately more importantly, both the "Kerouac ROMnibus" and "The Beat Experience" -- even with its playful animations -- share an archival deadness that feels antithetical to the Beat spirit. These are CD-ROMs created by committees of skilled collaborators rather than by an impassioned, Beat-style creator burning with inchoate vision. What's missing is what was central to every Beat classic: a raw, individual authorial voice, pulling us in and on and through toward some revelation or abyss.
Maybe that's expecting too much from a fledgling medium. Or maybe it's what the medium needs to make itself matter.
Both CDs excerpt Kerouac's celebrated TV appearance on the Steve Allen show, reading from "On the Road," and there is one naked moment, unlike anything you'll ever hear on TV today, when Kerouac blurts, "I wrote the book because we're all gonna die." Whatever blemishes and indulgences mar Kerouac's writing, that mortality-driven urgency continues to animate it for us. In the world of multimedia, meanwhile, we are still waiting for the equivalent -- for the CD-ROM someone had to make, "because we're all gonna die."
