Word: kesey
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...KESEY and TOM WOLFE--Wolfe wrote the book (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) about Kesey's organizing the Merry Pranksters, who crossed the U.S. in a bus with him, and threw huge parties in California with LSD in the Kool-Aid. The book is a milestone in acid literature, and probably the only good thing directly about the experience. Kesey has written Sometimes A Great Notion, a book that really flows, since he started taking the drug. And the Merry Pranksters are the ones who put fluorescent paint in psychedelics...
...finest writers of the century. Despite his remarkable talent at self-portrayals, Lowry's power derives almost solely from the infernal torture of one two-year period in his life which he somehow survived. In the end, his contribution may come down simply to the fact that, as Ken Kesey put it, "He's been to the edge and looked over...
THOUGH little of what I have said is explicit in Wolfe's book, many of Kesey's actions do seem to point towards the meanings I've described. In effect these meanings are attributes of the acid experience, and Kesey was among the first to explore...
...KESEY'S only explicit political advice was given in a speech to a huge Berkeley peace rally. It was "to say fuck the war and just turn your back on it." This leads Wolfe to an asinine prediction of the "death" of radical politics, the end of organized demonstrations. He not only predicts, but at the end of the book describes this non-event as if it had actually occurred...
...means of his style Wolfe does attempt to force feed a significance into what we read. For a moment the trick works, and an aura of newness shimmers about Kesey and the Pranksters. I believed myself to be in the presence of some new prophet, of a new and radical insight. But then, a moment away from the presence of the style, and the outlines of the event began to blur, the figure of Kesey himself became insubstantial. In the end the Christ-like robes Wolfe fashioned for Kesey are much too large. We are left with another acid-head...