Word: kesey
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...busy living his autobiography to write it. For this reason he entered modern folklore through the eyes of others, his adventures fictionalized or romanticized. By the time he appears in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as the bus driver for Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters, he is an aging parody of himself. Carolyn Cassady does not allow this to happen in her book. Even when she is describing her former husband at his most impossible, she never totally forgets the possibilities of his youth. Others obviously felt the same way and wanted a piece of Cassady...
...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...
...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...