I Snuck into Ken Kesey’s Fiction Class (2017)

https://lithub.com/lidia-yuknavitch-the-time-i-snuck-into-ken-keseys-fiction-class/

by 8bitsrule • 3 years ago

25 10 3 years ago

lithub.com

bradleyjg• 3 years ago

If you haven’t read Sometimes a Great Notion, run don’t walk to your nearest bookstore.

Yes, even if you didn’t like the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest movie.

pengaru• 3 years ago

Great books!

Sometimes a Great Notion was also a decent film starring Paul Newman.

davewashere• 3 years ago

And a fun piece of trivia: it was the first movie ever aired on HBO.

jobs_throwaway• 3 years ago

2nd this. Absolutely glorious novel. Heck of an ennui buster

btilly2• 3 years ago

Meh...?

My ex's father thought that was the best book over. I read it and found warmed over Freud.

Every single "real man" in that family became real men by somehow symbolically having sex with his mother and killing his father. It didn't have to be an actual death, just somehow destroying the father. It didn't have to be the real mother and father, but it was always a real mother figure and father figure.

No, I'm not kidding. Every. Last. One. Did. This. Even the wimpy protagonist followed this recipe by the end and therefore grew up into a Real Man.

Don't believe me? Read it again. It's there, I promise.

soligern• 3 years ago

Well you just sold me on reading Ken’s books. Out of curiosity, who was the father figure in cuckoo’s nest? For that matter, who’s the mother, there was no sex as far as I can remember.

gruntledfangler• 3 years ago

That article was, at most, 5% about Ken Kesey and his course and had very few insights outside of the author’s opinion of him. Most of the article is about the issues of some other woman.

Liquix• 3 years ago

Weird article - two sentences on sneaking into Kesey's class, a clumsy transition from his incarceration to his death to the theme of misfits, and then an "excerpt" from a third author about her journey of self-discovery which runs longer than the article itself?

rainworld• 3 years ago

Piece is not really about Kesey. Here’s something about Kesey:

Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA, by MK-Ultra, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb, although of course he never knew that name.

NPR talking to Stephen Kinzer about his Poisoner in Chief: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/758989641 (The following paragraph, unfortunately, is extremely boomer and a grave misunderstanding of the situation.)

I Snuck into Ken Kesey’s Fiction Class (2017)

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