Six degrees
Olivia Rosenman
Ken Kesey (pictured) was a little-known author of a very well-known book – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the play adaptation of which is being staged at the Sheung Wan Civic Centre tonight. Kesey’s novel was inspired by his employment at a hospital where experiments were carried out for the CIA-funded Project MKULTRA, which examined the effects of psychoactive drugs on humans and is now infamous for its insouciant use of unwitting subjects. Rumour has it the Jim Jones People’s Temple in Guyana, where more than 900 Americans died in a mass suicide in 1978, was a test site for Project MKULTRA. An official inquest, however, attributed full responsibility for the event to Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham …
The Guyanese international cricketing star was the first Indo- Caribbean to play 100 tests for the West Indies. The acclaimed batsman has more than 11,000 runs to his name, despite a bizarre crab-like batting stance. Chanderpaul says he stands facing the bowler, rather than at the usual sideways angle, to get a clear view of the ball with both eyes. It’s a technique that yields results: last month he became the first 40-year-old to make a Test century in 20 years. Chanderpaul was born on August 16, 1974, the same day an East Village club in New York introduced the world to the punk band of Joey Ramone …
The late lead singer of The Ramones was born Jeffrey Ross Hyman and grew up in the middle-class New York neighbourhood of Forest Hills, in Queens. Some blamed Ramone’s awkward demeanour on his height (six foot, six inches) while others attributed it to an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he was diagnosed with aged 18. His stature and anxiety disorder were features Ramone shared with famous Englishman Samuel Johnson …
Tall and burly, Dr Johnson – as he is popularly known – was cursed with strange gestures and nervous tics. Despite this, he wrote one of the most important English language books (A Dictionary of the English Language) and his life story, as written by James Boswell, is often described as the world’s greatest biography. Johnson spent most of his life in London, where he penned a famous poem that satirised the filth, crime and corruption in the city. The work features in A London Year, an anthology of life in the British capital, along with the musings of another writer who had a distaste for the Big Smoke, George Orwell …
The old Etonian went undercover as a pauper for Down and Out in Paris and London, his chronicle of poverty in the two capitals. As part of his literary pursuit, Orwell – who was born Eric Arthur Blair but chose his pseudonym, “because it’s a good round English name” – spent time in jail, in order to witness conditions inside. He was arrested in London’s Mile End for being drunk and disorderly. Thirty-four years later, another writer was arrested, this time for possession of marijuana. The scribe, who escaped the police by faking his own suicide and fleeing to Mexico, was Ken Kesey.
