Illustration from "The Beat Experience"

On CD-ROM, the movement's pulse is faint

---

"The Beat Experience" CD-ROM, the Voyager Company

"A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus" CD-ROM, Penguin Electronic

"Images. Millions of images. That's what I eat."

The gravelly voice, ushering in a new CD-ROM called "The Beat Experience," can only belong to William Burroughs. Though his pronouncement refers with apparent relish to the overripe bounty of late 20th-century culture, his sepulchral tone implies a revulsion at this overload of visual stimuli. Listening to Burroughs rasp, you get the sense he's not having a very enjoyable meal.

Multimedia publishing, of course, is all about finding ways to make images more appetizing. Mostly, this has become a matter of making games zippier and reference works more wowing. But at the higher-brow end of the CD-ROM spectrum -- where "The Beat Experience" hangs out with another recently published project bearing the unfortunate name of "A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus" -- there hovers a grander promise: that somehow the vast storehouses of stuff  collected under the rubric of multimedia -- words by the megabyte, paintings and photographs by the truckload, voice and music recordings, films, video and TV footage -- will coagulate and become greater than the sum of their parts. Plug into this torrential media input, the pitch goes, and something transcendent will take place. You will have an Experience.

Alas, when you're sitting at a desk, mouse in hand, staring at a computer screen, experience is hard to come by, at least experience as the Beats envisioned it -- pungent, messy and transforming.

On first blush, the Beat aesthetic seems like a perfect fit for multimedia treatment. Burroughs' "cut-up" literary technique, after all, anticipated the cut-and-paste world of digital art. Allen Ginsberg took poetry beyond the written word into a realm of incantation and musical performance. And Kerouac, famously, wrote on endless rolls of stenotype paper because he disliked the constraints of the 8-by-11 page -- so you have to imagine he'd have loved the Web.

But there is one crucial ingredient of the Beat stew that no one has yet managed to bring to the computer screen: the passionate sense of personal witness harbored in these writers' most lasting works -- like "Howl," "Kaddish," "On the Road" and "Naked Lunch."

Next page: Go! Yes! Howl! Just $24.95