Ken Kesey – One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, July 25, 2020

First edition cover Feb, 1962

Ken Kesey's story of One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (OFOTCN) began when he started working in 1960 as a paid volunteer in a Stanford University program to test an experimental drug Lysergic Acid Diethylamide (LSD) which they hoped would cure the insane. He discovered instead it could drive normal people insane! Twenty years later it became known that the funding agency was the CIA, the agency of the US Government infamous the world over for its dirty tricks.

Later he worked in a hospital’s psychiatric ward at the nearby Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. During the night shift there he used to converse with the patients. He observed that many of them were thinking people who acted abnormally according to societal standards, but who were otherwise fine. It was the push to conform that had ejected them from the free society in which they lived.

The book depicts therapies for the insane ranging from group discussions under an iron-willed nurse, to the invasive Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT) and surgical Lobotomy. The inventor of Lobotomy, Egas Moniz, won the Nobel Prize in 1949; but its use has been entirely discontinued after the 1950s because the results were poor. Besides, newer psychiatric drugs were coming on stream with hopes for better results. 

Ken Kesey – the Oregon Author who lived a colourful life

ECT has remained on the treatment list as a last option for maladies like depression and bipolar disorder, but with two radical changes: 
1) it is performed only under anaesthesia, and 
2) it is done with far lower currents and voltages than originally used and employs an ultra brief pulse of less than 0.5 millisec

McMurphy – locked up and alienated, he nevertheless tried to resurrect the spirits of the inmates

The novel can be read as McMurphy’s attempt to liberate the patients of the asylum from the tyranny of Nurse Ratched and the system she represented, so that they could live with dignity even within the precincts of the loony bin.

As before the readers gathered online using Zoom (courtesy of Rachel Cleetus) and were immensely comforted to listen and talk with each other in these trying times of Covid-19. Here is a group picture – only Kavita is missing:

Poetry Session – June 26, 2020

Most of the poets read at this session were American, barring three famous Englishmen (Byron, Tennyson and Kipling), an Irishman (Gogarty), a Greek (Cavafy), and an Indian (Hoskote). The poetry was rich and varied, and gave rise to much discussion.

George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall © National Portrait Gallery, London

The world is beset by several crises at the moment. The extreme cruelty of the deliberate slow murder by asphyxiation of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, has given rise to reactions around the globe against racism. This is partly reflected in the discussions below of two poets on opposites sides of that divide: James Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling.

James Baldwin – 1963 portrait by Richard Avedon

The Covid-19 crisis also found its way into our discussions when the role of policing in general was discussed. Too often the police is seen as an instrument for political coercion. If the government has not earned the trust of its people, by acting in the public good, in turn the public will hold back from cooperating with the policies of the government.

Rudyard Kipling

One of our readers (Geeta) raised the point about what constitutes 'literary value’ in a piece of writing, and how do you assess it. It comes into play when KRG readers select novels for the year’s reading. It was essential to the famous case of the obscenity charge against the novel Ulysses. The disposal of the case with the finding against the charge, established once and for all that a work of literary merit will not be treated by the law as an obscenity.

James Joyce

For lovers of literature the manner in which the Judge John M. Woolsey arrived at his decision in December 1933 has a certain piquancy in its phrasing:

“I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.”

Emetic, but not aphrodisiac.

As before we are under a Covid-19 sentence of social distancing and had to congregate in a virtual manner with Zoom. Here we are: