Pubdate: Wed, 14 Jan 2004
Source: Red Deer Advocate (CN AB)
Copyright: 2004 Red Deer Advocate
Contact:  http://www.reddeeradvocate.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2492
Author: Jeff Barnard

KESEY'S JAIL JOURNAL 'FAR OUT'

PLEASANT HILL, Ore. - When Ken Kesey was kicked loose after spending the 
1967 Summer of Love in jail for a marijuana bust, the guards asked the 
famous author, psychedelic explorer and prankster if he was going to write 
a book and include them in it.

''I think so,'' Kesey replied.

Two years after the author's death, Kesey's Jail Journal is out. The book 
includes two dozen colour plates of collages Kesey made from ink drawings 
entwined with his handwritten reflections.

They were all laid down in notebooks that were smuggled out by a buddy who 
was busted with him.

Looking for something that went beyond the two novels he had already 
written, Kesey melded words and drawings in a psychedelic 1960s version of 
an illuminated manuscript that contains echoes of the battle between 
freedom and authority he described in his most famous book, One Flew Over 
the Cuckoo's Nest.

''He was trying to make the whole page move, so it would convey something 
beyond what the words themselves could say,'' says his widow, Faye, at the 
Willamette Valley farm where the family moved after Kesey got out of jail.

Perhaps the best stuff never left jail, she says: his last two notebooks 
were confiscated by guards just before his release.

''Ken had always hoped the other journals would show up,'' she says. ''It 
would have made it so much more complete if they had. I have a feeling they 
are still out there somewhere.''

In 1967, Kesey was a star of the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll freak show 
going on around San Francisco. It was five years after publication of 
Cuckoo's Nest, and three years after his psychedelic bus ride across 
America, chronicled in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Kesey's six-month sentence to the San Mateo County Jail stemmed from a raid 
on his rural home at La Honda in the Coast Range above Palo Alto, Calif., 
where he and his Merry Pranksters partied with Hells Angels, tried to make 
sense of the movies they had taken on the bus trip and orchestrated the 
acid tests that helped turn the world on to LSD.

Kesey was busted along with Page Browning, and together they did their 
time. Described by Kesey as ''a big ex-Shore Patrol Navy man with arms like 
hawsers and a face like a barnacle (who) made a very valuable backup in the 
lockup,'' Browning kept the journals hidden from guards and smuggled them 
out in adult magazines.

The duo started out in the lockup, but soon qualified for ''honour camp,'' 
an experimental program where jailbirds who could be trusted spent their 
time clearing brush - in the redwoods not far from Kesey's home at La Honda 
- - and talking about their problems in group therapy sessions.

Ed McClanahan, a writing pal of Kesey's from Stanford, visited him on 
Sundays. McClanahan's wife gave Kesey the art supplies he used for the 
drawings.

''He was a terrific graphic artist,'' says McClanahan, who wrote an 
introduction for the book. ''I remember one time we were wandering around 
downtown Eugene (Ore.) somewhere. We were both pretty thoroughly loaded.

"He had some artist friend. We wandered into his studio. Ken picks up a 
scrap of paper. It was an odd shape. He wrote the word 'space' on that 
paper. Then he filled the whole paper up with those letters. Everything he 
touched turned to art.''
- ---
MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens