nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/360

Which gives an insight into the power-mad man. He is generally all or some warping or new mutation of S with the most intense beneath. All through his being he feels his difference, but he thinks conventionally, believes conventionally. So he can express his H only by being superior to everyone else, by dominating everyone else, by being right about everything. His drive to power is the homeostasis of his soul (homeostasis being understood again as the most effective compromise of H vs. S). Which would explain why power-mad men court disaster. They have to. They can never retreat.
Which is why [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy went down although he was given every opportunity to compromise—indeed they finally had to squash him legislatively because they had become terrified of him—unlike other legislators he was not a social being—also true of all power-mad men. He was an animal. (Which is what man becomes when his H—which is his greatness is expressed completely in S). But that also accounts for why he had his strength, may have it again, and why so many people including myself had a sneaking attraction toward him, not because of his ideas, but because of his person. The same is true for Hitler and the Germans, and the plan of the Junker generals to assassinate Hitler. How horrible is H when it appears on the surface as total S.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/361

I am always inept at arguing when I feel myself in the presence of a powerful mind. The reason is not so much cowardice as the preservation of . (Why did I write S?—is it because I am so social that I don’t really believe in H?) To attempt to deliver an H argument before it has developed is to ask oneself to relinquish the idea for years. Indeed, to enter an argument which one loses decisively is to encourage because one wishes to encourage a sociostatic advance.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/362

More typing errors deliver more insights. I wrote q for g. But q has been a mystery to me up to now. Now I feel it is some mirror or rather, echo of g, just as k is. Possibilities: k and hard c come from cock, concrete, cover—substantiality, palpability—they are these aspects of g which is go, God, etc. q (that is qu——kwih) may have silent aspects of g. quiet, quite, quit, quiver, quaint (ancient). Wait and see.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/369

Modern art. Liberals, social democrats, analysands, etc. like abstract painting. It is a rationalization of the world. But non-objective painting they find a bit too “undisciplined” for their taste. Anarchists, cranks, rebels, wild-o’s, dig non-objective painting because non-objective painting is the first expression of the . Adele who has always been the rebel and anarchist who is secretly drawn to being the lady or the social-democratic equivalent of it possible for her, has this conflict in her painting. Abstract painting leaves her unsatisfied, but she is frightened of non-objective and cannot let go in it. Perhaps with my “new” influence, she may begin to.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/371

Cancer. I believe instinctively, intuitively, that cancer is the rage of the soul at not having lived properly, at not expressing the . Its relation to cigarette smoking seems to be that cigarettes are not so much cancer producing agents as cancer accompanying agents. In other words, the smoker is probably an man with rebellion very close to his surface. So he smokes, taking little sips of the tiny antiseptic penis with its red hot tip, and is both antiseptic-and-social and rebellious and orgiastic at the same time. He gets lung cancer if the H is never properly expressed. 
He is able to give up cigarettes if the H is waning, the S relaxing, and a state of comparative armistice arriving. So we gain weight when we give up smoking, we feel contented, we taste food—the S has prevailed. I wonder if one can give up cigarettes if the H triumphs over the S. Possibly. I have given up much of sweets and alcohol, I wish to eat less. But cigarettes—I’d have to have a very successful H analysis.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/373

Word echoes: If and Is. If—I fuck. To fuck is the state of the if. One enters new possibilities. If one could do this, then one could do that. But the fuck both actual and in fantasy expresses the desires of everyone, of common people to use the 19th century expression, to have another superior existence. That is the ‘if’. Is is being, it is ‘I’ wedded to the ‘s’ which is society. “Is” contains the heart of the problem of man’s existence. He exists both in himself and in society.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/374

I wrote the last note on a letter sent me by Lasky of Der Monat where I was invited to answer Berthold Brecht on “artistic freedom.” I wrote a letter to Lasky saying that I would but on my own anarchist fuck-both-your-camps basis, although of course I was very polite. It’s been at the back of my thoughts ever since. Now, I’m writing notes on that particular letter. Why do I choose it? I suspect that the particular piece of paper we choose to write notes on is very meaningful.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/377

Adele’s qualities. She hated the portrait of Elena, it hurt terribly. She felt it was the way I saw her, yet she accepted it, she loves the book. Part of it of course is her despised image of herself, but more important still is the terrific woman in her who accepts my work no matter how painful it is to her, who is even capable of wishing only the best for it. It is an extraordinary human quality and yet she has a low opinion of herself. Once she comes to have a better opinion—based on what she is and not on what she wished to be—she’s going to be remarkable.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/378

The voice. More basic than any expression or sense of man, it is the link between the self and society. Before speech there was man but there was no society, certainly no abstract social contract. So much is buried in the voice. I have always had inhibitions about speaking to strangers for I felt deep in me that the moment I spoke I would be discovered, that my voice would reveal my Self. It is depressing to hear the adenoidal range of my voice on a tape recorder, but it is also reassuring. I am more social than I thought. My voice is like other voices. I wonder if it will begin to change soon. That would be one of the indices of my self-analysis progressing.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/379

A note on my Self-Analysis. I’m not doing it a la Horney. I do it in blocks. I do it by commenting on the world, by expressing myself, by Liptoning up, by fucking, by feeling. There is no formal analysis as such, yet I believe that if nothing else happens and this were all to stop tomorrow that my relation to my parents, and my way of seeing things could never be quite the same again. 
So, something is definitely happening. It suggests that I am doing my analysis in the way proper for me which is through creativity—taking into the self, synthesizing, and giving back. The analysand given to the conventional analyst is run through a stamping machine. The same technique like the bed of society (the bed of Bluebeard which stretched legs and chopped off feet) is applied to everyone. 
If there are differences among analysts, rebellions, they are immediately converted into mutinies, sects, cults, schools. But very few analysts are capable of employing different techniques, radically different techniques as a matter of course with every patient. Adele’s analyst strikes me as being rather remarkable under his German sociismus front. He had her sit up—which basically is the expression the analyst gives when he is uncertain what the hell to do with this patient. Another analyst would have seen Adele as little Spic with despised image—try to make her accept herself, get a nice husband at her level, etc. Booth recognized that Adele was tortured, unique, and many things potentially, but what he just could not say. So he had her sit up, had her analysis go on “supportively.” He did not want to make her go back to her beginning, but on the other hand he could not see her future. So he waited until I came along and then decided a headache was off his hands. But at the same time he did not try to ruin her, to direct her, deep in him he had a feeling for her.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/381

What-the-hell. What we are saying, “No matter what the hell which awaits us, let’s go on because we have to do this.” Shortened in life to “What the hell, let’s do it.” So true of Americans who have carried the English casualness into reckless casualness. That is why our heroes are always cool. The English gentleman is cool in stress, that is the great value to him—he sees death or a potential social disaster as the same thing. So English gentlemen were great on the battlefield; it was more a social situation to them than the end of their life. They had to be cool because to be cool is for the English the social imperative. But Americans are more primal; so for us to be cool in action is the basic thing. The Englishman sees death as a social situation. The American close to death and danger (dagger—danger) all his life for our greatness as a nation was the vividness of the in us, sees the social situation as death.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/382

Word echoes. Her and err. I’m beginning to feel the h. It has connotations of head, hair, has, his—in other words it puts a human connotation on an act, emotion, idea, etc. (For example—history. H . . . I story.)—the total human collectivity of my story.) To err is human, to forgive is divine. But man has always see her, ’er (One of these days I’ll have something to say about Cockneys.) as erring all over the place. Man puts onto the woman his own masculine strivings, desires, etc. When ’er errs, man is always delighted with a part of him because he wishes to despise the inconstant, the striving, the wandering since it is really his nature to do that were it not so antipathetic to society. H seems to give a general philosophical quality, erect to a philosophical generality, some concrete aspect of the spirit. Air and Hair of course seem to be the opposite. A very ambiguous letter.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/383

What I am doing with letters now is what I used to do with the Tarot cards. I believe I could give Tarot readings now if people were to choose letters of the alphabet. And indeed there are twenty-two cards in The Major Arcana. 1 to 21 and 0. The twenty-one consonants—this is sheer shit, just this bit—and 0 for the cipher, the fool who is mankind, I. But The Major Arcana to the side, I think I might have a go at letters. I’ll just ask people to choose a letter, tell it to me, or rather write it down, then choose another letter.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/384

Is W the world? It appears in world, wealth (the w of health), wide, wisdom, (the w of is—dom), whole (the whole is a hole but for w), weight, etc. (the social measurement of ate, the increase of weight) while—(the world’s idea of an isle) wait (the world w creates the antithesis of “ate”). Worry—(The w depression of ’urry), whir (w to her—again man’s idea of woman.) (I assume in all this that man more than woman is the language-maker.) Mass—the male ass. Shit—hit—it. Ass in the Army was one’s psyche. Shit was circumstance or society. Each provided for in mass ways. In mass life, truly one can only see oneself as an ass, and events, all events, as shit. Examples: Tough shit, when the shit hit the fan, chicken shit, bury me deep in shit, etc. Get your ass in gear, chew your ass, ass-hole buddy. (A buddy is a body, but the uh is closer to the I than the short ah. Or perhaps it’s further away.)
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/385

Son of a bitch. The son of a whore. But a whore excites us because she embodies the orgiastic principle, just as an enemy (son-of-a-bitch is invariably used for someone who threatens us no matter how contemptible he may seem) excites our , makes us feel alive, even if we are so -ed up that all we can feel is anxiety.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/386

Simply, directly, I excited Stan Rinehart’s anxiety. Dimly, he knew I was the enemy. I was bringing too much too close to him. He wanted me out of the house. No matter the cost. He had to do it because I was threatening him. In the privacy of his thoughts he probably thinks of me as “That son of a bitch Mailer.”
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/389

I’m getting a little tired now. Interesting how the word and consonant echoes seem to come through at the end of a productive day when my guard is relaxed—the vowels are still mysteries to me really—and of course in writing the notes on consonants I get very tired. I suspect because I have something here. Nothing less than a new dictionary. I wonder if dictionary compliers are not actually scholars who are very close to this sort of thing, and conceal it in the most respectable work.
Category:January 31, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/March 4, 1955/702

Laughton came to town over a week ago and I spent seven days in a row talking about Naked to him. Now’s not the time to go into all that, although it was very rich (I wrote rocy—rocky) and then left me with a bad depression which I’m just beginning to some out of. 
Today I felt a deep strong need to work at this Journal as if it is not enough for me to think or even to speak silently, but that instead I must write down what I think, and thereby find the release. This undoubtedly has something to do with the difficulty of self-analysis. One must emphasize it. It is not enough merely to consider oneself passively, to “think” about oneself. Instead one must have the muscular expression (I wrote ex ression—excretion). (Do intellectuals hate sports, sweet, etc. because muscular expressions are excretions to them or is this true only for me?)
Anyway—there must be a physical overt act be it speech or it writing (finger movement) before anxiety is released. I have done an enormous amount of thinking in the last few weeks, or rather in the two weeks or ten days since I’ve last worked on the Journal, but I’ve also been in the worst depression yet these last couple of days and I suspect that a good part of it was due to the fact that moving my fingers, “writing,” is an exceptionally important and anxiety-releasing muscular activity for me. More than that, writers finding themselves unable to work on the typewriter return to an earlier finger activity, to wit they hand-write.
Category:March 4, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/March 4, 1955/706

In the interim while I was not working on this journal I thought more things than I could possibly begin to sketch in many weeks on these pages. There is no use even trying to recapitulate them, but philosophically one vast problem I’ve gotten into is the business of what is ethical conduct. And I suspect that the answer is that one must always do what one feels like doing subject of course to keeping out of danger most of the time. (danger, ranger, manger, changer) 
But to act well toward one’s friends when one does not feel it is the height of arrogance among other things. For we are making the assumption that we know what is good for them, what they need. And it is a reflex of life that we learn from hostility being expressed toward us as much as learn from love being expressed toward us. Each has its value, each contains its potential benefit—to maintain cordial relations with friends when one does not feel cordial is merely to deaden the relationship and introduce large elements of mutual deception in it. 
As Bob Lindner said to me some time ago, a lot of people are going to be hating you soon. That may well be true, but what is far better that I like myself—that is my health—and since I have always been a rebel and have always found the meaning of my life and the most intense sense of my own existence at those moments when I rebel with some size and confidence, so I have been hampered and fucked up in the past by my overanxious desire to be loved. 
These days I give much less of a fuck whether most people like me or not, and the result is that to my amazement I am far more capable of handling myself. For example Laughton and I worked together very well for the whole week—it was a collaboration in the best sense and that was the first time in my life that I was able to work with a man whom I felt was an equal. 
Also a thousand other things that have been going better together with a price. My depressions when they come these days are pretty Christ-awful. They come invariably late at night and I sit alone in the living room that too-white too bare living room and feel empty and dull inside and I wonder if I am completely deteriorating, and if everything in the journal is an hysterical attempt to hide how desperate I am. But these days my depressions always but always come when I am low in energy, in . Last year I could be full of energy and still be very depressed.
Category:March 4, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/March 4, 1955/707

Also I have been going through terrifying inner experiences. Last Friday night when I took Lipton’s I was already in a state of super-excitation which means intense muscular tension for me. When the Lipton’s hit, and it hit with a great jolt, it was my first in a week, I felt as if every one of my nerves were jumping free. The amount of thought which was released was fantastic. I had nothing less than a vision of the universe which it would take me forever to explain. I also knew that I was smack on the edge of insanity, that I was wandering through all the mountain craters of schizophrenia. I knew I could come back, I was like an explorer who still had a life-line out of the caverns, but I understood also that it would not be all that difficult to cut the life line. 
Insanity comes from obeying a hunch—it is a premature freezing of perceptions—one takes off into cloud even before one has properly prepared the ground, and one gives all to an “unrealistic” appreciation of one’s genius. So I knew and this is my health that it is as important to return, to give, to study, to be deprived of cloud seven as it is to stay on it. One advances forward into the unknown by going forward and then retreating back. Only the hunch player decides to cast all off and try to go all the way. 
What I ended up with was a sort of existentialism I imagine although I know nothing of existentialism (Everybody accuses me these days of being an existentialist). Anyway, the communicable part of my vision was that everything is valid and that nothing is knowable—one simply cannot erect a value with the confidence that it is good for others—all one can do is know what is good, that is what is necessary for oneself, and one must act on that basis, for underlying the conception is the philosophical idea that for life to expand at its best, everybody must express themselves at their best, and the value of the rebel and the radical is that he seeks to expand that part of the expanding sphere (of totality) which is most retarded. 
Deep in the vision action seemed trivial which is why I knew the cold graveyard of schizophrenia. Out of the vision I had a happier tolerance. I could deal with people like Catholics and saidsists sadists because I was not worried about who would win the way I used to be. And indeed I learned the way to handle sadists—there are only two ways: One must wither be capable of generating more force, of terrifying them (I have a story I have to tell Bob when I see him) or else one must dazzle and confuse them. Lulu up against one of the great sadists, Herman Teppis, comes off with a part victory because she has given all her energy to confusing and startling him.
Category:March 4, 1955
Lipton’s Journal/March 4, 1955/708

Tonight people are coming over and we’ll have a Lipton’s party. I half don’t want it. Last weekend with its Lipton’s carried me flying half-way through the week and dumped me in depression these last two days. Now I’m finally coming out of it and it’d be interesting to see how I would act next week. But on with the fuckanalysis.
Category:March 4, 1955
Lonnie L. Wells, April 16, 1966

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York
::::::::::::::::::::April 16, 1966
Dear Lonnie Wells,Wells was a Mailer fan.
I’m afraid I can’t answer your question definitively. I don’t know of any other work of fiction where John KennedyIt appears that Mailer was the first to use J.F.K. in a novel. He used Kennedy again as a character in his 1991 CIA novel, Harlot's Ghost. appears as a character on or off the immediate scene of the novel. But of course, that is not at all the same thing as knowing that An American Dream is certainly the first book of that sort.The use of historical characters in novels did not originate with Mailer, of course, but the practice became more common after An American Dream. For example, E. L. Doctorow, who worked on Mailer’s novel as a young editor at Dial, depicted Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and several other historical figures in his 1975 nonfiction novel, Ragtime.
::::::::::::::::::::Yours sincerely,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman Mailer
===Notes===
Lonnie Wells, April 16, 1966

::::::::::::::::::::142 Columbia Heights
::::::::::::::::::::Brooklyn 1, New York
::::::::::::::::::::April 16, 1966
Dear Lonnie Wells,
I’m afraid I can’t answer your question definitively. I don’t know of any other work of fiction where John KennedyIt appears that Mailer was the first to use J.F.K. in a novel. He used Kennedy again as a character in his 1991 CIA novel, Harlot’s Ghost. appears as a character on or off the immediate scene of the novel. But of course, that is not at all the same thing as knowing that An American Dream is certainly the first book of that sort.The use of historical characters in novels did not originate with Mailer, of course, but the practice became more common after An American Dream. For example, E.L. Doctorow (1931-), who worked on Mailer’s novel as a young editor at Dial, depicted Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, J.P. Morgan and several other historical figures in his 1975 nonfiction novel, Ragtime.
::::::::::::::::::::Yours sincerely,
::::::::::::::::::::Norman Mailer
===Notes===