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Laddar... Kesey's Jail Journalav Ken Kesey
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Four years after the legendary 1964 bus trip immortalized in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Ken Kesey began serving time in San Mateo County Jail for pot possession. Transferred to an experimental low-security "honor camp" in the redwood forest, he spent six months clearing brush and immersing himself in the life of the jail community, attempting to "bring light and color" to it. "This is crazier here than the nuthouse ever was," Kesey noted, and proceeded to record the scene in numerous notebooks, illustrated with intense and brilliantly colored artwork. Upon returning to Oregon, Kesey turned the raw notebook material into an illustrated collage that stretched across dozens of 18" x 23" boards. Upon realizing that publication of the elaborate, handwritten book was more than his publisher was willing to attempt, he put it aside. Almost thirty years later he returned to the project and brought it to completion during the final years of his life. Fans of Ken Kesey's singular American voice will rejoice to hear it again in this unique and long-overdue volume. Those unfamiliar with Kesey's artwork are in for a revelation. Inga biblioteksbeskrivningar kunde hittas. |
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Google Books — Laddar... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)818.5403Literature English (North America) Authors, American and American miscellany 20th Century 1945-1999 DiariesKlassifikation enligt LCBetygMedelbetyg:
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The fact that so much FBI time and energy was spent on a marijuana case, and that Kesey had to serve time, boggles the mind. Kesey spent some of his time in the San Mateo County Jail in downtown Redwood City before being transferred to the Sheriff’s Honor Camp near La Honda, a work facility in redwood country that closed in 2003, and is now part of Pescadero Creek County Park.
Part of the enjoyment of reading what he wrote while imprisoned was in looking up all these local Bay Area places he referenced – Perry Lane (now Perry Avenue in West Menlo Park) where had led a bohemian life and frequently run afoul of Wallace Stegner while at Stanford beginning in 1958, the VA hospital in Menlo Park where he had voluntarily taken psychedelic drugs in 1961 as a part of CIA-financed research (which of course led to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and the houses he frequented at 710 Ashbury in San Francisco (inhabited by the Grateful Dead) and the one across the street at 715 Ashbury (inhabited by the Hell’s Angels), where one time he was driving and his brakes gave out, causing him to crash into the latter.
Kesey describes his experiences with his guards and fellow inmates with honesty, and his artwork on the original pages (and also transcribed) is beautiful and livens the work up. Always with an eye for playfulness and satire, he also shows an honest sense of humanity towards those he meets, like Joe Meeks, the “sex fiend” who had done something so heinous that he was on death row (though in looking him up, it appears he ultimately was not executed, instead getting sentenced to four consecutive life terms). Kesey is not judgmental, and includes some of the poetry Meeks wrote.
We also get a glimpse into the sometimes uneasy race relations and the evolution of Kesey’s own views, as he recounts Jerry Garcy telling him “Hey, Keez…the appellation ‘spade’ is permissible only if you’re a jazz musician.” It was nice that these things that were less flattering to Kesey weren’t edited out. One seriously cringe-worthy bit was when Kesey writes of talking to another prisoner in for a rape charge, and saying “I sympathize, telling him about various Hell’s Angels sex raps that are like this – ‘Some chick thinks she can do the whole Angel thing and about half-way through a chapter she gets scared or sore and freaks and hollers rape…’” Ugh.
These moments are mercifully few in number. Most of what Kesey describes are things like life around the camp, the work, listening to music, playing a game of pickup football, and visitations from his wife and friends that sometimes resulted in drugs being smuggled in. The journal entries and letters have a stream of consciousness, informal style, and yet the quality of the writing is high, and Kesey was able to paint a picture of his experience. As to one inmate’s baritone, he says it’s “a voice so heavy it’s beyond sardonic or bitter or cynical. It groans under a burden of sorrow so immense it sounds Biblical.” Of a time he expounds in a group therapy type session, he says he held forth on entropy thusly: “Entropy is the anarchy of sunshine off a chrome bumper. Entropy is Owsley’s story of the runaway train, highballing down a steep grade, overloaded with passengers without any knowledge of the tight turn coming up at the bottom of a hill…” Of the group being implored by a guard to watch the film Shane, he writes that a black inmate quips “Them westerns ain’t so great to this cat; the redskins never win.”
There is also an afterwards of sorts written by Kesey decades later, a poem references his son’s tragic death in 1984, and his explanation of how some (but not all) of his journals survived, given county officials wariness over the author creating a book out of them. All in all, this is a window into the life of a fascinating author, a guy who wrote two monumental books in the early 1960’s, and then chose to take the road less travelled. Certainly recommended if you’re a fan of his. ( )