Library series reveals Ken Kesey

Author Ken Kesey will be featured in a series of lectures and presentations offered by the Deschutes Public Library. The first of these will be in Sisters on February 5.

Kesey is best known for two major novels, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion." Kesey was a key player in the counter-culture of the 1960s - often seen as a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies. Kesey and his group of friends, known as the "Merry Pranksters" inspired Tom Wolfe's book "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test."

Ken Kesey died in 2001 at the age of 66, but left behind an enduring legacy that has contributed greatly to Oregon's literary landscape.

"Never give an inch" was a defining phrase from "Sometimes a Great Notion," a book that describes lives that soar, crack and split like the giant Douglas fir trees that Kesey's Stamper family cuts and sends to local mills. That life is mostly gone from Oregon now, but for generations it defined much of the Oregon experience.

Kesey captured it as perhaps no other author could, and the true nature of what it was like to grow up in a nearly prehistoric landscape of rain, ferns, rivers and fir trees. Kesey was a spiritual man who defied religion, a writer who defied convention, an individualist who believed in community.

At the time he wrote his two great novels, America was changing, a great cataclysmic change - not unlike the changes facing our culture today. Children raised by soldiers returning from World War II were questioning their parents' values.

The wealth spawned by America's victory in that war was being rejected by the generation that most benefitted from it.

"Drugs, sex, rock and roll" became the anthem. Kesey, in a very unique way, caught the essence of the generational divide first in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," a short but very intense "first novel" by a young writer that took the literary world by storm. When "Sometimes a Great Notion" arrived, so had Kesey, landing right in the middle of the San Francisco epicenter of a cultural revolution.

Ken Kesey embraced the irrational at the edge of darkness, recognized that there lay creation, there lay individual freedom, liberty. But he was a spiritual man, and there were contradictions.

Followers spoke of "free love," yet Kesey spoke against abortion. To a woman who asked what to do if raped, Kesey replied, "God doesn't care whose shovel plants the corn."

Kesey celebrated the individual, yet recognized each of us is but a thread in a piece of cloth; without the weave we would be lost.

It was a disappointment to many that his writing essentially ended with "Sometimes a Great Notion."

There were other efforts, including "Sailor's Song," and a collection of pieces called "Garage Sale," but nothing to match his first work.

Kesey told someone once "I would rather be a lightning rod than a seismograph."

And so he was.

The February programs are as follows:

• "Above all, to make you see" - Out of the Nest & Into a Notion: Thursday, February 5, 1 p.m., Sisters Public Library. University of Oregon professor David Scott Arnold discusses the profound style differences in Ken Kesey's great novels.

• Reading the Wonder of Kesey's Notion: Thursday, February 5, 6:30 p.m., Bend Public Library, Brooks Room. University of Oregon professor David Scott Arnold takes an in-depth look at Ken Kesey's novel, "Sometimes a Great Notion."

• Read Watch Discuss: Thursday, February 19, 5:30 p.m., Bend Public Library, Brooks Room. Showing of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest." See the film this week, then join a February 26 discussion of the film and book by Ken Kesey.

All programs are free and open to the public. For more information visit http://www.dpls.us/cal or call Lisa McGean at 312-1034.