Book releases pay further tribute to life of Ken Kesey.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

On the second anniversary of his death, Ken Kesey's friends and publishers have put out three books that should give his many admirers a pleasant afterglow.

Ed McClanahan, a Stanford University classmate and friend, wrote one of the books, edited the second and wrote an introduction to the third.

The University Press of Kentucky has reprinted McClanahan's 1985 book "Famous People I Have Known" ($19.95), which includes two Keseyan pieces: "The Day the Lampshades Breathed" and "Ken Kesey, Jean Genet, the Revolution, et Moi."

McClanahan edited the seventh and final issue of Spit in the Ocean, a literary journal that Kesey started in 1973 but set aside after putting out a Neal Cassady memorial issue in 1981. The posthumous volume (Penguin Books, $15) includes some short pieces by Kesey and tributes by everyone from basketball star Bill Walton to gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson.

Viking has published "Kesey's Jail Journal" ($34.95), which he wrote and illustrated in 1967 during his six months in the San Mateo County (Calif.) jail and sheriff's honor camp for marijuana possession.

Publication of the three books will be celebrated next week with three Oregon events, including two in Eugene, that promise to be more than just book signings.

A news release for the "Spitfurthur Tour" says it will include the current incarnation of Kesey's famous bus "loaded with Pranksters, Spitsters and assorted fellow travelers" for the Oregon events: 7 p.m. Nov. 13 at Tsunami Books, 2485 Willamette St.; 2 p.m. Nov. 15 at the Erb Memorial Union, 1222 E. 13th Ave.; and 5 p.m. Nov. 16 at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., Portland.

One of McClanahan's stories shows Kesey in top form, as an uninvited guest at a 1970 Palo Alto, Calif., party honoring the Black Panthers and their imported celebrity booster, French writer Jean Genet.

Kesey enters the radical chic scene at a Stanford professor's house wearing McClanahan's "Polk Street Sike-O-Deelic Swashbuckler" shirt and his own "neon red-and-white-striped hip-hugger bells and his bugeye blue reflector shades and his American flag front tooth and his new twelve-tone, hand-painted Day-Glo sneakers."

He then interrupts a Panther speech about armed revolution with these words: "Let me tell you about the Springfield Creamery basketball team."

Kesey's basketball story had a point, but one Genet and his Panther bodyguards stormed off without hearing and wouldn't have liked anyway:

"Our job is to watch the ref and keep him honest. But overthrowing the law, the idea of the law in its purest form, that's a mistake. Because without the ref, see, you can't play the game."

When another guest asked him why the Panthers didn't stay to engage in dialogue, Kesey grinned and replied: "I think that they were looking for a bunch of zombies. And some of us, some of us just didn't qualify."

Spit in the Ocean #7, titled "All About Kesey," includes dozens of stories by people who knew Kesey, including filmmaker Gus Van Sant, writers Tom Wolfe, Larry McMurtry and Wendell Berry and Prankster pal Ken Babbs.

Together, these poems, stor- ies and essays form what McClanahan sees as a tribute to Kesey's "genius, his vast energy, his generous humanity and his imperturbable spirit."

One of the most eloquent tributes is "The Prankster Moves On" by Noti writer John Daniel, who had this to say to those who deplored Kesey's Day-Glo lifestyle:

"For more than three decades, he lived a life of engagement with family and community, a life that offers very lean pickings to those who would tag him as an irresponsible misleader of youth."

In the "best and most basic sense of the term," Daniel continued, Kesey was a conservative. "He did not renounce psychedelic drugs or his distrust of power and authority or his flair for outrageous antics. He most certainly did not renounce the essential '60s vision that valued community over corporate profits, peace and tolerance over war and fearfulness, a sense of life's beauty and mystery over the customary trappings of career, money and piles of possessions.

"He conserved what was best in the cultural upheaval he had so boldly assisted and melded it into the traditional culture he had grown up in and returned to. He planted his values in place and community, even as Furthur, the original bus, sank slowly into a swale on his farm, young trees growing up around it."

In "Karma (and Other Sermons)," Kesey offers an observation that would have sounded great at a Nobel Prize ceremony, if he had ever won one:

"Martin Buber says there's a path of community," he writes.

"It's made up by a nation of people that extends over the whole globe - it knows no boundaries, it knows no ideologies, it knows no policies. It's a nation that has always been in there, in between various conflicting forces, trying to oil the waters as best as possible. It's a nation that knows itself and keeps track of itself, and if you think about it, wherever you've gone you've known this nation and you've always been strengthened by this know- ledge."

That was from a talk Kesey gave in 1975. "Kesey's Jail Journal," written in 1967, shows Kesey at what must have been a low point and may well have been a turning point in his life.

He had already written two highly regarded books, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "Sometimes a Great Notion," but he was equally well known as an advocate of psychedelic drugs. Busted for possession of marijuana, he became a celebrity guest of the San Mateo County sheriff.

Using Day-Glo pens and other art supplies provided by McClanahan's first wife, Kesey began work on a "luminous illuminated manuscript" about jail life.

Kesey spent most of his time in an experimental honors camp in the redwoods not that far from his home in La Honda, but that was not necessarily a good thing. Both the drawings and the writing in his jail journal make the experience seem hellish, although not without its humor and irony.

Written piecemeal, hidden by a friend and later smuggled out, the journal entries seem both controlled and chaotic, affected possibly by drugs Kesey was taking and definitely by the paranoid psychodynamics of a prison culture where the rules were not clear but consequences for misunderstanding them could be severe. Race and sex, or lack thereof, are among multiple sources of tension.

Lots of jailbirds keep journals and draw pictures. But not like these. These were produced by a real writer, a guy with a good eye and ear, a guy who had worked in a psychiatric ward and had experience with mind-altering drugs, could size up off-kilter people and was smart enough to know that this was not "easy time."

Reading "Kesey's Jail Journal" from start to finish is sometimes a slog, like reading James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake." But it's also visceral, dense, powerful and at times hypnotically fascinating.

An example: Kesey and others get their first look at a "new playmate" on their way to honors camp:

"He's not very tall - just about eye-level to Rhack's Adam's apple - while he gets one of his cuffs unlocked. And he probably doesn't weigh much more than me if we're just talking pounds. But he's too heavy to measure in pounds. He's like a black hole, a purple black hole, sucking in light like a blotter.

"Rhack links him to the end of our chain and gives a good yank to be sure it's secure. The man doesn't budge. He just stands there, massive as an anchor. `Mau mau,' Breems breathes, barely hearable."

Then they get a look at the other side of his face.

"He has an appalling scar across his face, nearly one inch wide and ten inches long, slicing from his hairline down to his opposite collarbone, right across the eye socket, leaving the eyeball a smoldering sulphorous yellow.

"You could feel that smolder right through the chain."

Paul Denison can be reached at 338-2323 or pdenison@ guardnet.com.