From the Editor

Ken Kesey died on November 10, 2001, and it has taken the town of Eugene, Oregon, two years to bring themselves around to celebrating their friend and hometown legend without tearing themselves up with grief.  The 1st Ken Kesey Symposium was held this November amid the fanfare of celebrities and statue unveiling ceremonies and the presentation of the refurbished replica bus FURTHUR and the Merry Pranksters doing battle with various dragons like they do "by any means necessary" and talks by academics taking Kesey seriously for a change.  The statue, unveiled with words by Kesey's widow, Faye, was designed and shaped by sculptor, Peter Helzer, and shows a life-size Kesey reading to three children in the center of downtown Eugene.  It was something that Kesey liked to do in life.  His children's book, Little Tricker the Squirrel Meets Big Double the Bear, published in 1992, was written for his grandkids.  Sponsored by Paul Newman, Michael Douglas, Bob Weir, Milos Forman, Tom Robbins, Larry McMurtry, and many others, the sculpture was successfully commissioned.

Driving into Eugene from Portland, the radio told the story live, and the cheers resounded on the last sunny day western Oregon would see in a while.  Arriving in time to hear the first presentations that would attempt  to put Kesey and his work in a scholarly context, there was a deja-vu-you-too feel to the place that was like home.  There appeared in the audience a rag tag band of locals that could have fit the bill much better than Henry Fonda or Paul Newman in Sometimes a Great Notion.  Why would you need actors in such a place when the real thing is all around you?   Kesey's words to the wise: "Always stay in your own movie."

Coinciding with the event was the publication of two new works by and about Kesey. Kesey's Jail Journal published by Viking (2003) is an illustrated account of his five-month stay in 1967 at the San Mateo low-security work farm for a marijuana violation.  He kept a notebook while there, chockfull of impressionistic sketches of the inmates and guards, the signs of the times from inside the fence, and illustrations loaded down with psychedelic graffiti.  Some 30 years later, Kesey began reworking the notebook for publication.  And also newly published, Spit in the Ocean: All About Kesey, edited and introduced by Ed McClanahan and available from Penguin (2003), features essays by Larry McMurtry, Hunter Thompson, Robert Stone, Paul Krassner, Tom Wolfe, and several by Kesey.  This will be the last volume of the Spit in the Ocean series titled after Kesey's favorite card game and begun in 1973.  The first volume was subtitled "Old in the Streets," after the cult film Wild in the Streets that supposed what would happen if young people under 30 were to take over the government.  This first volume, edited by Kesey himself, would instead concern aging hippies.  Over the next twenty years other volumes of Spit in the Ocean mysteriously appeared, including a volume edited by Timothy Leary, fresh out of jail, and Ken Babbs's Neal Cassady issue.

Of course, there was more to life than the public party image captured and iconicized  in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (not that the party wasn't or didn't or couldn't exist) -- of course, it did and does and will.  After all, there is this bus to explain.  There is this Cuckoo's Nest we find ourselves in.  There is this tension of wanting to live on our own terms while most everything works against it and most everybody else doesn't think that's such a good idea.  Kesey was an ardent practitioner of ritual.  He was the prankster, the tribal trickster on and off the page, who knew where and how the tragic and the comic met, and how serious it was not to take yourself so seriously.  He quipped, "If you got it all together, what's that all around it?"  Today, he is still the high culture outlaw, even after the accomplishment of Notion, incredibly.  Not knowing how to take him or how to be taken by him, scholars are either enthusiastic in their acceptance, or quick to dismiss him as ephemeral.

On his gravestone are the words, "Sparks Fly Upward," taken from the mystery of Job, "Man is born into Trouble, as sparks fly upward."  The tension, the struggle, the mess of it all, is the tragic thread running through Kesey's work and life, no matter how many ways you spell "merry pranksters."  And Kesey had his share of trouble, including the death of his son Jed in 1984.   A few years ago, a man asked Kesey quite disdainfully, if he thought psychedelic drugs held the only path to enlightenment.  Kesey was quick to answer, "Oh no, grief will do it for you. But if I had a choice, I would take acid everytime."