Mental clinic

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Lilya:

Hello! I'm now in the middle of reading of the first part. Well, I would say it is really interesting and thrilling novel. And what's more important, it sets thinking. I can't say a lot about Randle Patrick McMurphy, because it's not clear for me yet, what kind of person he is. But what I have already understood is that he is a rough guy!He was sent to prison (for battary,gambling...) but decided to transfer himself from a prison to a mental hospital, because he thought it would be easier to spend the time and serve out his sentence there. What a clever guy! He appears in the story almost from the begging and all the patients straight away realizze that he is not just another Acute (the patient who can still be cured), or Chronic (who will never be cured) and he will change their regular life.

But I would like to say some words about the narrator - Chief Bromden, or Chief Boom,as he is called by the staff and the other patients. He is the son of the last Chief of one of the Native-American tribes. He pretends deaf and insane. Why, I haven't understood yet. So it is a mysterious person. I hope I'll manage to clue.

It's the foto of Ken Kesey statue in Eugene, Oregon (from Wikipedia.com)

1 comment:

Anna V. Filatova said...: Lilya,
Thank you for the post and the photo. I am glad you find the beginning of the novel to be thrilling. It's a rare reaction and I do share it. I've asked Elya about it and I really want to know your opinion, too.
What is the atmosphere in the ward? How would you characterize it?; March 21, 2007 at 12:54 PM

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Here are some independent ruminations (Anna Vladimirovna, thanks)

Maybe it would be better if you observe not only our way of thinking but also native American perseption (http://www.halfmoonbaymemories.com/category/ken-kesey/ ) I never knew Ken Kesey personally but one of the first books my father gave me was “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” “Cukoo’s Nest” made such a deep impression on me, and when I discovered that he lived in woodsy, isolated La Honda, and I saw the cabin he lived in, I felt very close to this author I so admired. It was the 60’s–almost “romantic” now–remember Kesey’s day glo spray painted bus (now in the Smithsonian museum, driven there by Kesey himself a few years before passed) and the Merry Pranksters. The folks in La Honda did not appreciate Kesey choosing their neck of the redwoods to live and write and play in. Legend has it that on more than one occasion Kesey walked to his mailbox outside to find bullet holes in it. And of course Ken Kesey had his share of legal problems–I’ll try to get into a more detailed bio of the famous author in a future post because his past directly relates to the writing of that great book, “Cukoo’s Nest”. Ron Duarte of Duartes Tavern in Pescadero, Ron’s Aunt Carrie, now gone, once told me Ken Kesey came down from the mountains to take out books at the local library. She was the librarian, she would get to know everybody who took out books. When I was on the San Mateo County Historical Museum’s Board of Directors some years ago, I wrote Ken Kesey and asked him if he would contribute an article–or even a “fragment” to our historical publication, “La Peninsula”. I typed the letter on a typewriter, I think, and mailed it to his farm in Oregon. He had moved there from La Honda. I’m sure life there was more peaceful. Was I surprised when I received an answer from Ken Kesey. I must have been jumping up and down–he had used my typed letter to create a work of art with his magic marker pens. Here’s Kesey’s response to my request that he pen “something” for the county’s historical journal. (Imposed over my letter Kesey’s colorful magic marker words read: “La Honda is a slingshot at the sky!”) When Ken Kesey was delivering the historic day-glowed magic bus to the Smithsonian in D.C., he stopped off in San Francisco at a book fair and I almost talked to him but he was in motion, moving here, moving there, physically, a small man, but he was a muscular ball of energy. I never knew Kesey personally but I will never let go of my old copy of “Cukoo’s Nest”, both a reminder of the culture-changing 1960s and of a great book filled with truths that will remain relevant forever.

About the book

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962, is the product of both the personal experiences of its author, Ken Kesey, and the specific culture in which it was written. Kesey developed the novel while he attended Stanford University as a graduate student in their Creative Writing program as the winner of a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. The novel was partially inspired by Kesey's part-time job as an orderly in a Palo Alto veterans' hospital. It was also as a student at Stanford where Kesey began participating in experiments for the psychology department that involved the use of LSD. This use of LSD prompted Kesey to have hallucinations while working as an orderly. Kesey hallucinated seeing a large Indian mopping the floors of the hospital; this hallucination prompted Kesey to add the character Chief Bromden as the novel's narrator. Kesey published One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to great critical and commercial success, but for one reader the factual information that he included from his experiences at the veterans' hospital proved problematic. Both Kesey and his publisher, Viking Press, were sued by a plaintiff who claimed that a minor character in the novel, a Red Cross nurse, was based on her and she was unfairly portrayed. The case resulted in revisions to subsequent editions of the book. The Red Cross nurse was changed to the nameless character Public Relation. The plaintiff in the case later became a novelist herself, and wrote a novel set in a California spa. In an ironic twist, she was the subject of a lawsuit from a doctor who claimed that a character in her novel defamed him. The novel in some sense forms a bridge between the bohemian beatnik movements of the 1950s and the 1960s counterculture movement. Kesey was significantly inspired by the beatnik culture around Stanford, and in the novel Kesey deals with a number of themes that would be significant in the counterculture movement, including notions of freedom from repressive authority and a more liberated view of sexuality. Kesey himself became a highly influential counterculture figure as part of the Merry Pranksters. Despite the counterculture themes of the novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a popular and critical success. Dale Wasserman adapted the novel into a two act play in 1974, while Milos Forman directed a successful film adaptation of the novel the following year. This film, recently named as one of the twenty greatest films by the American Film Institute, featured Jack Nicholson as R.P. McMurphy and Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched. The film won the Academy Award for Best Picture and gained awards for Nicholson and Fletcher. It remains only one of three films to sweep the top five categories at the Oscars.

Mental clinic

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

1 comment:

Let us introduce ourselves...

Meet Mc'Murphy

That notorious Big Nurse

The sixties

Here are some independent ruminations (Anna Vladimirovna, thanks)

About the book