KESEY AT THE BAT

Yeah, Ken Kesey (Nov. 3) hasn’t written the other Big Book yet. But he remains, in the Mailer tradition, an alert and spirited thinker.

His essays and ideas tend to float by unannounced (unlike Mailer). You have to keep an eye out: imagining “cops without guns”; declaring Woodstock as “possibly biblical” but knowing that Altamont was “far more honest”; daring to discuss abortion and euthanasia as a question of moral philosophy rather that the typical civil-rights harangue.

Kesey walks a fence line straddling the fringe and the heartland, taking vital signs, in the best tradition of a prophet . . .

SCOT SEA, ALTADENA