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Digital Beats

A new CD-ROM about Jack Kerouac complements a book on the beginnings of the Beat Generation

By Dave Shulman

Now that the second Age of Coffeehouses approaches its adolescence--our recent demographic surveys indicate that bold new concentrations of Coffeehouse II-ers have been conspicuously purchasing CD-ROM drives--perhaps we might do well to take a look at what happened during the first Age of Coffeehouses, so we can maybe screw this one up a bit less and avoid creating the second Age of Nixon.

Two places you might start: A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus (CD-ROM) and The Birth of the Beat Generation (book). Whether or not you plan on devoting your life to thinking about William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, their work and their fame, place in literature, heroin, Benzedrine, manslaughter, poetry, that kind of thing, you may as well take a peek at one of these titles. And what better peek to take than a shamelessly commercial multiplatform coffee-table tome.

Conveniently packaged as an interactive experience (turning the pages turns the pages), The Birth of the Beat Generation, Steven Watson's overview of the origins and explorations of the Beats, is a generally pleasant if fluctuant mix of cultural reference, research text and multibiography. Pantheon Books has amalgamated Watson's immense research-booty into an attractive object; it feels and looks good, and has those increasingly popular two-inch margins peppered with sound bites and photographs.

Seems like a lot less care went into the editing process. There you are, happily reading about these people writing and killing and everything, when you're confronted with, "Lying on his stomach with one arm raised over his head, Kerouac rolled over, blinked his blue eyes, and ran his hand through his dark brown hair as Carr tossed the dead man's steel-rimmed glasses on the table. ..." (Insert Twilight Zone stinger.) See what I mean? What the hell is that supposed to be?

Another one: "After [Burroughs] uttered one of his dryly lascivious remarks, stretched out on a long couch, Joan [Vollmer] would encircle his gaunt figure in her arms and exclaim, 'Oh, Bill!' " A pity, these excursions into the deep-set low-brow, because although all sorts of wonderful information can be found in The Birth of the Beat Generation (the index is excellent, as is the chronology chart preceding it), Watson's unchecked penchant for pulp-fiction stylistics keeps the book from achieving any kind of intensity.

Fortunately, Watson's research is solid, and most of his writing is skillful and eminently readable (though maybe a bit too stiff for the subject matter). Indeed, it's that consistent adequacy that makes the screw-ups figure so prominently.

By recounting the history of the Beat Generation in four semi-distinct phases--1) the writers meet; 2) they write; 3) they challenge literary and lifestyle conventions; and 4) they get variously published and famous--Watson emphasizes how the ongoing periods of convergence and isolation between Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kerouac and their cronies (especially Herbert Huncke, Carl Solomon and Neal Cassady) both focused and confused the hell out of them. He also stresses the extent to which their various camaraderies influenced their work.

The core Beats were fascinating fellows whose lives were and are full. Beat's strongest dictate--that "art supersedes the dictates of conventional morality"--sent them through extraordinary paces. And Watson has dug up some interesting stuff. Burroughs' highest term of praise, for instance, was (maybe still is) "Johnson," as in "Just when you think the earth is exclusively populated by Shits, you meet a Johnson."

And those generous margins contain all sorts of fascinating, arcane tidbits and definitions. Uncool, for instance, is an adjective describing one who doesn't take appropriate precautions, leaves himself open to the attention of the law--"It is uncool to give your home as a forwarding address for packages from Mexico." The cow ate the cabbage is a faux-folksy term for having oral sex.

If, after you've absorbed the general Beat background, you want to delve further into individual biographies, I recommend doing so in the direction of Kerouac and then spreading out from there. Uniquely conservative in a way that only the most catholic of Buddhists tend to be, Kerouac's ambitions were, as Watson puts it, "impossibly large: to prove that he was not the failure that his father considered him; ... to write the Great American Novel his first time out."

Dreaming of fame, capable of writing wonderfully in any style he wanted, Kerouac assigned himself, dedicated himself and lost himself to the most difficult thing he could think of, Spontaneous Bop Prosody: writing as a "tenor man drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone, till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence, his statement's been made ...."

Long sessions of nonstop, unchecked writing grew to be not just technique but religious ritual, an adult version of Kerouac's teen habit of writing as a buildup to ecstasy, often culminating in masturbation. (You see that? In college, you were probably told to wank before writing.)

After On the Road was published (a decade after it was written), the international press decided that Kerouac was the Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady-based) character--Benzedrine personified--and not Sal Paradise, the quiet guy observing America and trying desperately to have as little effect as possible on anything or anyone. So Kerouac got famous for being Neal Cassady, a fate he might have found funny for a little while, but soon grew to filter it with a daily quart of Johnny Walker Red ("My liquid suit of armor, my shield which not even Flash Gordon's super ray gun could penetrate") washed down with a couple Falstaffs. This new age of television spread image without substance, and he was one of its first victims; he'd become a famous writer--as he'd wanted--but not for his writing.

The story of Kerouac's transition from despondent prodigy of spoken language into the first literary media icon in the age of big-money youth-culture commerce ranks among the most profound of American tragedies. Simply reading Kerouac isn't enough to get an idea of what he did--converging Euro-lit and Afro-bop into a new harmony--it's essential to hear him perform. And A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus is a great tool with which to begin absorbing Kerouac.

From its startup video of Kerouac's singularly sad and melodic reading over Steve Allen's piano, A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus uses the CD-ROM (multi)medium to great effect. Producers Kate Bernhardt and Ralph Lombreglia have put together a wonderful and extensive collection of text and images, elegantly interlinked. If you spend the 40 to 50 seconds necessary to learn all aspects of navigating the interface, you'll be rewarded with hours of glitchless meanderings through the 600-plus megs of Kerouacian everythingness.

The home screen--soft, friendly, respectable-looking, like the label on decent bottle of Burgundy--is divided into seven exploration routes: an image archive of Kerouac's handwritten notebooks, journals, correspondence and memorabilia, with convenient typeset versions a click away (if you have trouble reading his writing); a gallery of photos and paintings; a sampler, with 28 readings of Kerouac by Kerouac and others, with accompanying video collages; the "complete multimedia edition" of The Dharma Bums, "copiously annotated and illustrated"; parallel time lines of major events in Kerouac's life and world history; an interactive diagram of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance; and a picture of a rumpled backpack with the word "Extras" beside it.

Clicking on the backpack brings you into an extensive library of QuickTime audio and video clips, most of which can be accessed from other parts of the CD. As someone who doesn't enjoy reading things on computer monitors (there's a reason why type is usually printed at resolutions 18 to 33 times the output of most computer screens: blindness), the audio- visual contents of the backpack--especially the interview segments of Kerouac's foremost biographer, Ann Charters--are worth taking the CD for a spin. Too bad there's not more footage of Kerouac reading his stuff. (Recommendation: Go get a copy of The Jack Kerouac Collection--all his recorded readings on Rhino/Word Beat audio.)

Although neither The Birth of the Beat Generation nor the ROMnibus CD will give you the dense, Dostoyevskian details of one of the many great biographies awaiting you at your local library (for Kerouac info, get Charters' or Gerald Nicosia's stuff), both are good starting points from which you might begin properly immersing yourself in Beat culture. And maybe that'll help bring our new Age of Coffeehouses through adolescence and into a Nixon-free future.

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The Birth of the Beat Generation by Steven Watson; Pantheon Books; 387 pages; $27.50 cloth.

A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus by Ralph Lombreglia and Kate Bernhardt; Penguin Electronic; CD-ROM for Macintosh and Windows; $49.95.


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