![]() Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) that means to achieve a calm ecstasy, to contemplate the present moment. One of the main avenues to this new type of life and freedom was mind-expanding drugs, which allowed them to grok, a word from Robert A. At the core of the protest was the value of individual freedom. They protested by experimenting with Eastern meditation, primitive communal living, unabashed nudity, and nonpossessive physical and spiritual love. Originating with the 1950’s Beat generation, the 1960’s counterculture youth were disillusioned with the vast social injustices, the industrialization, and the mass society image in their parents’ world they questioned many values and practices-the Vietnam War, the goals of higher education, the value of owning property, and the traditional forms of work. To understand some of the ideas behind the counterculture revolution is to understand Ken Kesey’s (1935 – 2001) fictional heroes and some of his themes. As my own father said "Illegittimus Non carburondum.By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on Decem Big men doing what needs doing, and the sage advice to always, always keep your eye on the doughnut and not the hole. Small men (and women) trying to drag big men down off their high horse and big men never giving in. People blaming other people, and the weather, and the government, for their problems. Nevertheless, the story is timeless-as relevant today as it was then. Maybe it was the Publisher’s pressure to finish? Maybe it was weariness. Kesey seemed to have lost the voice and vision he had in the first 550 pages. My only complaint is the final chapter’s ending. (Tom Wolfe tells his story in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.) No doubt heavily impacted by the mind expanding drugs he used – Kesey breaks ground in story telling and this novel remains one of the greatest ever written for its voice, style, characterization, and descriptive nature. Kesey was at the time of writing, one of the first hippies and Acid Heads. The author, Ken Kesey, paints a stunning, realistic and poetic, portrait of coastal Oregon, logging, small towns, and “manly men.” The characters and their personalities literally leap from the pages. (The role of wife at the Stamper’s was to take care of the menfolk so as they could wup whateverthefuck it was needed wupping.) Stealing Viv away from Hank would be the ultimate triumph. He plots revenge on big brother Hank – Superman – and fancies himself Captain Marvel – SHAZAM! By now, Hank has his own lovely wife, “Viv-an orphan he plucked out of a rural, Colorado melon-growing community-“an anomalous combination of demure coquetry and brazen diffidence.” Lee hatches his plan: Take Viv away from Hank. Pot-smoking graduate student, and failed suicider, Leeland, decides why not. the contract that puts the Stamper family at odds with the rest of the folks of Wakonda, unionized and on strike. Timely, the Oregon Stampers send Lee a note, requesting he come out and help them meet a logging contract with Wakonda Pacific Inc. When Lee is twelve, Myra takes him back East to save them both from the harsh, depressing life that is Oregon, and Henry Stamper untamed.įast forward to 1961, when Myra leaps to her death (lovesick for Hank and depressed) and Leeland fails in his attempt to kill himself. Lee watches this unfold through a knothole in the bedroom wall. Lee grows up in Hank’s shadow and Hank becomes Myra’s lover. Henry sires another son, Leeland, (a “pantywaist”) twelve years Hank’s junior, with his second wife, Myra-a woman less than half his age who he scores on a trip back East specifically for that purpose-scoring a wife. Hank, that son, becomes just like him, “well known as one of the Ten Toughest Hombres this side of the Rockies.” (p,105) His motto is “NEVER GIVE A INCH,” which he paints on a plank and nails above his baby son’s bed. He is confident, independent, self-absorbed, vain, successful and defiant. Henry Stamper is the quintessential self-made man. The story takes place in a costal logging town in Oregon, 1961. … he can look back and say there was the why of it …” (p.450) “Looking back a guy can always pick him out some top-notch reasons to explain what happened. Looking back now, I see how much it influenced me-in my writing and life. ![]() ![]() The first was in 1971 when I was twenty-one. This is the sixth time I’ve read this novel. ![]()
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