nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/47

Spengler is a great writer. His startling similarities are indeed similarities. More modestly I see the connection now between such things as jazz, bull-fighting and six-day bike races. Jazz is easy to understand once one has the key, but no one ever offers the key, and it is so simple. Instead of trying to understand the “beauty” of jazz, one should understand it as something which is constantly triumphing and failing. Particularly in modern jazz one notices how Brubeck and Desmond off entirely on their own with nothing but their nervous systems to sustain them wander through jungles of invention with society continually ambushing them. So the excitement comes not from victory which is the pleasure of swing (more later) but from the effort merely to keep musically alive. 
So Brubeck, for example, will to his horror discover that he has wandered into a musical cliché (society) and it is thrilling to see how he attempts to come out of it, how he takes the cliché, plays with it, investigates it, pulls it apart, attempts to put it together into something new (for in every cliché there is an ocean of truth once we truly look at it), and sometimes succeeds, and sometimes fails and can only go on having left his record of defeat at that particular moment. 
That is why modern jazz despite its apparent lyricalness is truly cold, cold like important conversations or Henry James. It is cold and it is nervous and it is under tension, just as in a lunch between and editor and an author: each makes mistakes and successes, attempts to expand the successes and turn the errors into smaller errors or even successes, and when it is done one hardly knows what has happened and whether it has been for one’s good or for one’s bad, but an “experience” (a communication between the soul and the world) has taken place. It is also why I find classical possibly less exciting for that merely evokes the echo of a past “experience”—it is now part of society, one of the noblest parts of society perhaps, but still not of the soul. Only the echo of the composer’s soul remains. And besides it consists too entirely of triumphs rather than of life.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/48

Swing in jazz is different. Swing is a distillation of the competitiveness of social life. One follows the patterns, one loafs until it is one’s turn, and then one is out and racing in a “jam” with victory as the only end. Is a mistake made? Does one falter? No matter; the purpose is not to turn back, to re-explore, to attempt to convert set-back into progress, but instead to go on, to “ride”—to “go.” One is like an automobile driver in traffic who leaves the ensemble of cars and sets out to race, turning corners at hottest speed with no regard for whether a truck is coming the other way. If it is coming perhaps one can swerve at the last moment, but that is around the corner, and the road-race is on. So with bullfighting which is a tableau of the vast competitiveness of life.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/49

When Susie speaks of “war,” she means strife. And strife is something a child understands very well, for a child is a human whose soul is being pinched, and so a child is always forced to enter the world of plans and manipulations where perhaps it may be able to save a piece here and a dent there of its soul, occasionally by strife, occasionally guile, and often by silence. So, “exile, silence, and cunning” were the tools of a genius who kept the child in him alive.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/50

There is a lesson for me in the above. In a way I know more about jazz now after a month or two than aficionados can know in life-time. But that is not because I am exceptional, but because occasionally I have the gift of trusting my instincts and learning about something which interests me. So if I am interested, I can learn an enormous amount in a week or two weeks. If I am not interested I can spend years and never really learn the basic jargon. I have to heed what I have always been frightened of: my lack of caution. That is my special quality—I usually refuse to consider the consequences—and so I continue to learn. Caution is the high priest of society.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/51

A remark on why psychoanalysts have such difficulty in treating psychopaths. Apart from the dilemma of whether a psychopath with his special knowledge can really bear to enter the world is the other premise that the analyst is a concealed psychopath, and so in attempting to treat the open psychopath an enormous effect is exercised upon the analyst—dimly he senses that his own psychopathy will be revealed if he allows his sensitivity. So his sensitivity clams up, and with it his ability to reach the psychopath.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/52

When the businessman thinks of an embarrassing overture he may make which has a small chance of success, he thinks to himself, “After all, I’ll try it. What can I lose?” And the answer, of course, is himself. But businessmen, most of them, lost themselves a long time ago. The rare ones who generally late in life are trying to come back always attract my sympathy. I realize now why I always like them so much.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/53

Perhaps the reason Susy was so flat with Millie is that she sensed how little soul Millie has, and Susy can never react nor open to a person with little soul. What I have neglected to say in all my writing about saints and psychopaths is that the psychopath has no soul, or rather has used all the energy and beauty of his soul to destroy the world with the tools of the world. Instead of being entire-detachment-of-soul from society, he is total-engagement-of-soul in society, so children turn away from him.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/55

The word is a flat non-conductor put across the infinite variety of experience felt in the fraction of a second. Crudely, very crudely, it is the equivalent of a cheap phonograph’s rendition of a note to the sound in all its variation and multitude on hi-fidelity. Which is why many intellectuals abhor hi-fi. They prefer the flat passage of the word.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/56

In the larger sense, is . It does not go far enough. But Doctor Lindner is a more stimulating, entertaining and important writer , than most psychoanalysts are in their successes. He is one of the very few analysts who, in my opinion, creative , and this book, written properly around the edges of psychoanalysis, is not only fascinating for its stories, but encourages the mind to lose itself upon speculations and journeys.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/57

The Stalinists have sneered for decades at bourgeois writers, at their concern with mysticism, God, morality, etc. etc. And there is a curious half-justice to what they deride. For it is undoubtedly true that a man turns to such thoughts only when his needs are taken care of. That is the great promise of socialism—that it offers the possibility for everyone to engage in the mystic life, whereas now it is open to only a few. 
But what is vulgar and unjust is that deny the validity of the “experience” the great bourgeois writers undoubtedly have, and in denying the validity in criticism they proceed from having denied it in life. Orwell says somewhere that twenty years of socialism and everyone could have enough. He is right, but the difficulty is that we shall never be given the twenty years, not until the underground revolution takes place, not until men know in their bones that society destroys their soul, and literally kills them. (For again, anger is released as each arch of the soul is collapsed by the lead weight of society’s bottom.) Until then, the bourgeois writers will continue to be blind to the realization that mystic revelation is always destroyed by the world until its opportunities are open to all men, and Stalinists will continue to war against cosmopolitanism, jazz, and, if it ever came up, bull-fighting. For are the culture bearers of the hipster, and the hipster is the underground proletariat of the future, eating away at the husk of society.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/58

My characters in The Deer Park are called “unsympathetic” by everyone. And how unsympathetic they must be to the liberal pluralist who represents unhappily the best among editors. For after all, none of my characters go to to Parent Teachers Meetings, they are not responsible members of the community, they do not debate whether their little good actions will make the world a little better. They are all psychopaths and saints and people torn between the two, and they wrestle for their souls in a most terrible society, and almost always lose them. Certainly, it is a depressing book, but they are not unsympathetic, my characters. They are souls in torment, and The Deer Park is a journey through torment. It would be a better book, a greater book, if the journey were even more terrible. I held back on Marion Faye.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/59

Equations: Man is born with a soul which is part of the collective soul. Society is composed of the net of men’s unwilled actions. It is opposed to the soul.
Each child enters the world with a pure soul (probably). (It is worse if they enter with souls already partially destroyed by their parents.)
Society attempts to destroy the soul in order to maintain its stability. The soul fights back. The war between the two is what we call the world which is the battleground between society and the universe (the collective soul—how inadequate are all these words).
Through history up to now the soul of the savage, which was all-soul, relinquished a part of its soul to enable man to battle against nature for until nature was conquered, at least in its inhospitable manifestations, man was doomed to remain an animal.
The movement of man to find his soul worked its drama upon society, for as society (which is the concretion of the collective surrender of man’s will) developed and altered men, removing them further and further from their souls, so did man fight back, occasionally altering society, the movement of his soul (with what endless waste) improving social structure. But usually losing his soul.
The twentieth century marked the point in history where society was ready to conquer nature completely. But the tragedy was that by then the majority of men had virtually lost their souls—they were psychopaths, and leaders, and unfeeling. So society instead of being finally conquered by men as was conceived in the original contract, instead drew away from men. The interrelation between man and society was broken. Society went its way, and man (those who had souls) retreated, or gave themselves up to being the machines of society. And the revolution never took place. And its only substitute, its echo, its polarity, was totalitarianism.
War is the symbolic collective act of man’s anguish—“They got tired of living at home, and so they went to war.” Living at home is not a home, it is a war against society, and when it becomes collectively intolerable, it is turned against society, but a false image of society—the enemy. It is also society’s way of not allowing the battle against nature to be won by sheer development of technique. If man wants socialism, and from that, God, he must win it by revolution.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/61

I learned a practical matter the other day. When negotiations are going on, the Order of Procedure determines to a great degree whether one will get one’s point or not. It is critical whether one takes up first the items one is bound to win on or to lose on, depending on the psychology of the opponents and the totality of the situation. So in the U.N. when they argue whether a question is procedural or substantial, is no mere waste of words among diplomats. They are wrestling for what makes the victory. Their sensitivity to manipulation is as acute as a hipster’s ear for jazz. Essentially they are grasping abstract relations. So, too, for politicians, political leaders, athletes, etc. There is no such thing as a big or an important man who does not have some special sensitivity. That is why, try as we will, we are always obliged to respect big men. No matter how corrupt, they have the special sensitivity, one way or another, which makes for greatness. That’s why Bob always adores “name” people. It’s far from simple snobbery. He recognizes their special sensitivity.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/62

I have always hated sentimentality: mother and children, church, the flag, the nation, the good man, the affirmative novel. And there is a reason. For these are society’s what the soul knows. Sentimentality is the abuse of an abuse. It is the abuse of words which are already an abuse albeit a necessary one, so for good cause it was always intolerable to me. For what after all are the respective symbols above. They are 
# the mystery of the creation of life,
# God,
# the symbol of the brotherhood of men,
# the brotherhood of men,
# the man in possession of his soul, and
# the vision. 
But only compare the “vision” to the average affirmative novel with its last sentence, “John stood up and walked up the stairs. Up there she was waiting, and the sun was shining.”
 I still think the psychopath is close to the saint. He is the saint turned inside out, his soul exhausted upon the world, but let him withdraw from the world (harder for the psychopath than anyone else, for the ghost of his soul which is the only “me” he can feel has to be chased through all circuits of the world) and the “dark magnificence” of his life is converted to its echo.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/64

Advertising and television and radio and newspapers and movies, but especially advertising are society’s war upon each individual. It is the place where advertising reaches deep into each man’s soul and converts a piece of it to society. So there are good ads and bad ads but the good ads must always be studied for they sink deeply into the soul, and we receive them because finally material commodities are like petrifactions of love and of power, the two things the soul seeks for in life, legitimately, finely, the two things for which it entered its contract with society. (Power understood of course as the extension of one’s faculties which is noble; but in society we can extend our faculties only by control over other people.)
So, too, do mass entertainers accomplish bastardy. They join men in false brotherhood, link them in sentimentality. But one hopeful sign is that the hipsters have entered mass entertainment, and preach anarchy and disrespect, à la Ernie Kovacs.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 28, 1954/68

Over and over again, I discover these days that the big truths are to be found in the little things, and not the big things. So, with cigarette smoking. Dimly, it may be a spiritual experience. One has only to blow one’s smoke into a shaft of light, and a universe of space is revealed with gas nebulae meandering through the universe and iotas of dust swimming like stars and planets through the cosmos. Dreamily, it leads one to suspect that in the microcosm, if one could only enter it, there are universes within universes, and within the atom, within the electron, there are still infinite subdivisions, universes, what-have-you. Perhaps for little enormous reasons like this, we find it so difficult to give up our smoking.
Category:December 28, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/103

Given my intellectual verbal mind, Lipton’s was a great aid. To a poor bootblack, it probably can do no more than ease him from an intolerable existence into a cloudy nothingness. That is my great adventure with Lipton’s. I will journey into myself with the hope that I, the adventurer, can come out without being destroyed. But I am terrified. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/104

A possibility occurs to me on The Deer Park. To wit, Marion Faye starts sending his journal to Sergius—in prison he has finally made it on Lipton’s. So, when The Deer Park ends, Sergius appends an addition in which he says that now he is finished as author and must become editor. There is this flood of notes from Marion Faye, and he has not the courage to rewrite his novel in view of this new information. So he submits it to the reader who may have been bored, irritated, or enthralled by The Deer Park itself, and he invites the reader to read it, and if it interest him, to then reread The Deer Park and see it as Marion Faye would have seen it.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/107

Marion Faye’s note: Re: Teddy Pope, he’s beautiful, the poor bastard. (Then an expansion of the note on the idea of how beautiful men go homo out of cowardice, because so much sex is open to them as heterosexuals and they have such sexual souls that they retreat into homosexuality where at least it can all go on underground.)
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/111

Marion Faye Journal. It begins with following note: “I have finally started to make it on tea. Three cheers and over for the institutional life. Tea flows through this place like ice water in a first-rate hotel. And things are beginning to come clear to me. To really make it, I should put nothing into words, but I still want to try. I suppose what I suspect deep-down is that I’ll never make it, but I want people to respect me for how close I came. I, too, am a slob.”
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/115

(My journal) Arrogance. To declare that one’s previous works were bad is also arrogance for it assumes that one’s present works are good. Yet, arrogance is better than indifference, for indifference is the drugged sleep of the soul, while arrogance is the record of a man’s struggle against his soul, and by so describing it there may come the day when he will find it.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/121

Marion Faye’s note about the argument he had with red-headed Stalinist, and then the fistfight with the yard-bird while the Stalinist kept saying, “Fellows, you’ll catch pneumonia.” The red-headed Stalinist might be one of the people Eitel had mentioned in his testimony. A former screen-writer.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/69

“Vested interest” is enormously more powerful than we think. It is society’s substitute for the soul, and the abstract man who lives totally in society has no identity, no “I” other than his vested interest. Which in its extreme case is an explanation of the totalitarian personality. It is vested interest which allows us to dismiss other people, to say of them that they are Negroes, Jews, homosexuals, anal-compulsives, hysterics, hicks, city slickers, etc. etc. etc. In effect by putting a label on a person we commit assassination, we cease to allow them existence in our minds. The echo of the word “liquidate” is “to petrifact,” and that is what the Stalinist does.
He can kill by categories because the categories have become lifeless to him, no more than concepts.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/71

The gossip is the great adventurer without courage to begin—feeling out the world, measuring its retribution, seeking to discover the ends of his own personality, but doing it in the world’s way, spreading tales about the wildness of others, because essentially what the gossip wishes to discover is how the world reacts to wildness—whether it is indeed as dangerous to go off on the exploration of his own personality as he senses that it is. Much the same may be said of the person who is without caution—it is just that he is a little further along.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/73

The concealments of language: Perhaps under Lipton’s we do not hear certain phonetics very well. Thus “royal purse” may sound like “royal pus,” or “oil pus.” But it is possible that each word says many things at once, and languagecontains in its phonetics whole parallel layers of meaning. So, man talks to man, and society talks to man through Aesopian sounds as well as Aesopian words. Perhaps that is why we laugh at the stammerer—he is always revealing other meanings of words, and often they are terrible truths. So, by suppressing consonants and vowels, look what we get with Mother. Here are the echos: 
* Other, Mither, Moher (More), Meter (Motor), Mothir, Mothe (Moth); 
* Church: ’Er (Her), Chirch, Chuch; also Urch and Chur;
* F.B.I. (of bee I) bee I, of I, of bee—or—be I? if I? if be? Altogether—(If it be I (who is guilty));
* Cock: OK, Kick, Ok, Coc;
* Cunt: Unt, Kint (Can’t), Cut, Cun (Gun?);
* Fuck: Uck and with different vowels—Fick, Fake, Fahk, Fack, Fehk, Feek, Fike, Foke, Fyuke.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/77

The power of the word Red in American political life.The Second Red Scare from 1950 to 1956 (the first took place in the years 1919-21) was characterized by rabid anti-communism and the hunt for communist sympathizers, as well as strong anti-Stalinist movements. Joseph McCarthy (1908-57), Republican senator from Wisconsin, was the leading red-baiter of the period. took part in the struggle against McCarthy and his followers, for example, aligning himself publicly with blacklisted Hollywood actors and writers. Americans put into it all their buried sensuality, especially Catholics. Red is simply The Flesh to them, and that is why they call Stalinists (of all people!) free-love atheists. Here we have the hatred of the soul, the hatred of Americans for the deep love they actually bear toward their misplaced idea of what Communism is—the irony is that deep in them they believe Communism, indeed especially Stalinism, is utopia, free-love, free-income, free communion, and all this is Red, it is forbidden, it is flesh.
Echoes of Red: Ed and Re. More significantly, Raid, Rod, Raad, reed, ride, road, rude.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/80

Jokes. Charley Wiener just said to me in the elevator, “It’s a good day for the big race.” “What race?” I asked. “The human race,” he said. It’s true. The human race, the human contest is society, it is only a part of humanity. There is an explanation in this for our love of sports and contests.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/83

Eitel and Elena—last chapter. What comes out is that in the fight with the analyst what she was worried about was that Eitel was not going anywhere, and Eitel senses with the self-honesty which was the last virtue left him, that now there was nothing for him but to hold her back, that in her inarticulate way she was a radical, she went to the root of things—which was why he first had been drawn to her, why he needed her now (for without Elena he would lose his honesty) and it was also why he could never truly permit her to grow, for if she grew she could only grow away from him.
Category:December 29, 1954