Allen Ginsberg crystallized the cultural alienation of the post World War
II generation in the United States when he read his poem "Howl" at a San
Francisco bookstore in the 1950s.  He stands as one of the most recognized
American intellectuals of the 20th century.  In 1996, he was interviewed
on his 70th birthday by Steve Silberman, the cultural affairs writer for
the online publication Hotwired.  Steve was the first person to introduce
Allen ginsberg to the World Wide Web.  He describes below what happened.

The full article can be found at the url below.  Yes, this isn't about
disability, but it is about technology and how different generations
respond to it, including someone who is older and was at the forefront of
social change.

kelly

URL: http://www.levity.com/digaland/ginsberg96.html

Allen Ginsberg

      This has been a very prolific year for Allen Ginsberg, with the releases
      of his Selected Poems, Illuminated Poems, and The Ballad of the
      Skeletons. Allen joined HotWired's Steve Silberman to discuss these
      works, turning 70 years old, and the Beat-culture revival.

     [Interviewer's note: Following our conversation, I showed Allen the
     World Wide Web for the first time. I'd been telling him about the
     self-publishing samizdat aspect of the Web, knowing that he'd made
     a point of donating his work to small, labor-of-love zines even
     after he was the best known poet in America. I took Allen
     immediately to Levi Asher's Literary Kicks site, to the page on his
     work there, clicking through Jack Kerouac's and Neal Cassady's
     names to demonstrate hypertext to him.

     He didn't say much, and then I took him to a search engine, where a
     search on the phrase
     "allen ginsberg" called out 2,000 hits - probably the maximum. He
     looked at all the pages built in his name.

     "Thank God I don't know how to work this," Allen sighed. - S.S.]

[rest of article snipped]


VICUG-L is the Visually Impaired Computer User Group List.
To join or leave the list, send a message to
[log in to unmask]  In the body of the message, simply type
"subscribe vicug-l" or "unsubscribe vicug-l" without the quotations.
 VICUG-L is archived on the World Wide Web at
http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/vicug-l.html