Word: kesey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Kesey told his merry pranksters, Be what you are. It didn't matter what, as long as it was what they really felt they were. Being what you are was a revolutionary, radical notion then. Now it is pretty much accepted...
Names are changed to protect the guilty as well as the innocent. The result is a fictionalized autobiography in which Kesey is called Devlin Deboree, a once celebrated novelist who served a short jail sentence in California for marijuana possession. Tracking the cast requires some familiarity with Beat Generation hagiography. The names Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso are included in a straightforward litany. But Neal Cassady, the loquacious speed demon, is swathed in multiple fictions. He is called Houlihan by Kesey-Deboree, who complicates matters by saying that Houlihan, rather than the real Cassady, was the model...
...Kesey, too, means to convey the imperative of motion. At the center of his loosely related narratives is the Oregon farm, which serves as both the setting for pastoral romances and a pit stop for the wrecked and restless. Old Pranksters pass through on their way from nowhere in particular. The proprietor can be as hospitable as a Bedouin, but not when he is accosted by footloose youths smelling of "sour unvented adrenaline...
...Cairo or covering an international marathon race in Peking, Kesey practices what has come to be known as gonzo journalism. The reporter, often intoxicated, fails to get the story but delivers instead a stylishly bizarre account that mocks conventional journalism. Kesey may have quit the literary major leagues but can still be an exciting writer, whether describing a rampaging billy goat or a fatal car wreck in Egypt: "It's two flimsy Fiat taxis just like ours, amalgamated head on, like two foil gum wrappers wadded together. No cops; no ambulances; no crowd of rubberneckers; just the first of those...
...title Demon Box refers to Physicist James Clerk Maxwell's colorful explanation of perpetual motion. In the book Maxwell's model is used by a California therapy guru, fictionalized as Dr. Klaus Woofner, to explain human behavior. Kesey the globe trotter and spiritual joker seems entranced. But Kesey the planter of corn and milker of cows presents Woofner as another psycho-alchemist trying to turn a metaphor into a 14-karat gimmick. The point is made admiringly by one skilled fancifier to another. After all, the charlatan, like the artist, exploits illusion and a sense of mystery. Behind the plow...