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Kesey's Jail Journal: Cut the M************ Loose

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Get ready for quite a trip...this really isn't a book, it's a time machine. Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the journey, courtesy of the one and only Ken Kesey.

Many of the icons of the counterculture movement spent 1967's famous Summer of Love in places like Swinging London, Monterrey or Haight-Ashbury. Kesey was far removed from the heart of the action during those months--he was serving out a jail sentence for his conviction on a marijuana possession charge. Thanks to his lack of a previous record, Kesey was able to do most of his time in a sheriff's honor camp, an experiment in rehabilitation nestled in the California redwoods.

Kesey managed to keep a journal of his days in confinment, pouring forth his raw emotions, vivid dreams, sometimes gentle, sometimes agressive encounters with authority figures and fellow prisoners. He supplemented his writings with a series of vivid paintings and drawings that helped capture the chaotic nature of the experience.

After his release, Kesey had hoped to publish the journal, but found that the available printing technology couldn't do his illustrations justice. By the mid 1990s, he had revived the project, and was in the final stages of preparing it for publication at the time of his death in 2001. So, if you are a lover of Kesey's works, get this volume, read it, celebrate it, and hold it close. This is a stream-of-consciousness, often profane, nakedly honest record of a pivotal summer in one of the great creative lives of the 20th century.--William C. Hall

The main question examined in this boisterous, original work of art is when you should "hold your mud." Ken Kesey - Hippie Number One - spent the summer of love incarcerated for a drug conviction. He was America's most promising young novelist when he announced that he was taking an indefinite break from writing novels. His first creative work after this was an unfinished marathon film of a bus ride to Furthur. What he produced next was an amalgam: a personal collage that grabs the reader's eyes and heart on every page.

If Kesey's Jail Journal had been published in its entirety when it was finished, (instead of decades later with some pages lost to prison guards) it probably would have been a sensation. At least it would have gotten a wide audience to see how a blend of images and words could be more immediately affecting and powerful than straight prose. Most pages of printed text are accompanied by that text incorporated into a collage drawing he made in jail. These pages appear like displays of Japanese Calligraphy at the Met. The words are given extra meaning by how they are presented visually.

His illustrations are disarming and masterful. The accompanying text tells easily understood stories in simple, poetic prose. These are seemingly small snippets of life, but Kesey uses them to demonstrate the power structures, personal motivations, and racial tensions underlying every interaction. Kesey wants to create, be free and play - but he must hold his mud enough to keep from losing all of his privileges; along with the book that he is making - which begins to have an importance of its own.

Every page of this book is an ode to the artistic spirit. In prison and at a work camp, Kesey has to contend with the whims of guards and their rules in order to keep his book alive as he creates it. On some pages, he has more varied materials to draw with than on others. The dance between Kesey's creative impulse and the repression of the state institution plays out within and above the book. The effect is a touching display of creativity rising above the obstacles it encounters.

Anyone who wants to have a discussion or book group on "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" should read this genre-busting book. From the institutional setting; from the imprisoned individuals who have transgressed society's mores; from the blunt way rules are imposed on the deficient; from the wily, red-haired, Oregonian protagonist; from the detailed look at the daily mechanisms of an on-going power structure; all the way down to the farcical (and mandatory) group meetings: there are numerous parallels to Kesey's first novel.

But this was Kesey's real life, not McMurphy's fictional morality play. Kesey has a wife and kids on the outside. He does not reach a point (like McMurphy does in "Cuckoo") where he sees a moral imperative to throw himself into a bitter and mortal struggle on behalf of his fellow inmates. In his Jail Journal, the real Kesey is careful to hold his mud: keeping a lid on his emotions, allowing guards to paint over his decorated shed, at times hiding and smuggling his book.

While he looks out for himself, he looks out at others and provides touching portraits of interesting characters he meets.

Kesey is a master at understanding power and how it is used and abused. His Jail Journal (which the publisher, holding his mud, calls "Kesey's Jail Journal" instead of its real title, "Cut the M************ Loose") is a universal description of the struggle of the individual against the institution. (played out externally against the power structure's guardians and within the individual who pits his courage and principles against his pragmatic self-preservation)

It is also an important document of its time. Kesey sees and unflinchingly displays the divisiveness of race - the veneer of calm on the surface with root conflicts simmering below. Kesey also demonstrates the distrust of the establishment towards drugs, and how conservatives viciously defended the status quo on day-to-day behavior in the sixties. His fate and his evolving ideals serve an important counter-point to the standard tales of reckless freedom and blindness to consequence that are often set in the summer of 1967.

Highly recommended.

I recently saw the original Jail Journal on display in Eugene, Oregon at an art museum. It was filled with excellent illustrations (very 60s, of course) and some wonderful diary entries by Kesey (who really has a way with words). I had a great time reading the pages, which were arranged on the walls in order, and am going to be pruchasing this book so I can have a version at home to look at in the future.

Ken Kesey was quoted after handing out free acid at a concert, "All I could think of, if I were a cop, is I wouldn't know where to begin." That is characteristic of his life in general - where to begin. A star wrestler in college, a writer who captured a generation's rebellious spirit, head of the merry pranksters and an artist at large. I have been keeping journals for over a decade now and if anyone is interested in what I aspire to, just look at this book. His art work is almost as great as his writing. If you are to buy it, buy it for the art work, because the writing is more Beat - stream or ... steam of consciousness. It has some rather good insights at times and then there are the ramblings that a jail sentence could only produce. The lettering particularly captures the 60's style, but the work is something to enjoy. Done with water colors and colored pencils he achieves some distinction as an artist. If you are an aging hippy and want to keep a journal, this should be your paragon.

This tall tale from the late sixties concerns Ken Kesey's six month stint in jail, his 'straight time'.

In some respects this journal is a art deco paisley snapshot of an uncomfortable moment in Kesey's life. Like Leary, Ken had a good time tuning in, turning on, and dropping out, but the sub-text of this cheerily defiant counter-culture rave, like the poem at the beginning of Demon Box, is that he paid for it dearly.

That aside, Ken's writing in the jail journal as in Demon Box, was pretty damn good. Reading his clean, wry, and self-reflective prose, I wish he had continued to turn out this kind of writing (Perhaps he did?). One can only imagine the blog he would have put out.

In short, popular culture depicts the later Kesey as a kind of burnt out counter-culture warrior but these two bits of writing suggest otherwise.

i love the artwork in this book - and keyz's letter to a friend named jerry at 710 ashbury street certainly doesn't hurt at luring your attention.. i bet even if you couldn't read you could find something stimulating about this book - check it out