Word: kesey
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...Wolfe wreaks havoc with the old, comfortable under/over thirty dichotomy. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test--published simultaneously last summer with The Pump House Gang, his second collection of essays--established Wolfe as the Boswell of acid beside Ken Kesey's Doctor Johnson. The book's ecstatic, exploding prose reads like the litany of a convert. Yet while he sees Kesey's Merry Pranksters as the hippie prototypes of an increasing search for religious experience in America, Wolfe himself felt no personality change during his contact with them. Unlike Mailer, Wolfe appears to have preserved the distinction between participant...
...book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, has put into print a lot of the key phrases we used to describe what's happening in the experience (like: 'go with the flow," "synch," "kairos," and "total attention"). Here is Wolfe describing Kesey on one of the first acid trips in history: "The first thing he knew about it was a squirrel dropped an acorn from a tree outside, only it was tremendously loud and sounded like it was not outside but right in the room with him and not actually a sound, either, but a great suffusing presence, visual, almost...
...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...
...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...