nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/85

Interpretations of present events once from our knowledge of how similar courses ended in the past. For example, knowing a man was a drunk, and died as a drunk, we say that drink is bad—but the bold spirit who drinks knows in some part of himself that the end, his end, is not known, and so he ventures ahead leaning on the private, the unique interpretation that human life is enormously various, and the end of his adventure may be different from the all the ends which befell other men like himself who went off on similar adventures. What he believes is that tragic ends do not necessarily follow his actions. (Which is why the fall of such men is always tragic, for the heart of human endeavor is buried here.) What I have drawn above is the psychology of the saint, the artist, the criminal, the mad perhaps, the athlete, the warrior, the revolutionary, the entertainer, the libertine, the drug addict, the gambler, the alcoholic, the demagogue, and all the other varieties of the adventurer, the explorer. What characterizes them is that they have the boldness to believe that they are truly unique, and will not necessarily be punished like others because the world is not finite, the sun does not inevitably come up each morning, their actions cannot be interpreted in advance by the statistical end because truly, for them, there is confidence that the end is unknown.
Also true of the victim (who is the optimist), the victim who believes that he or she is unique and so will not be impoverished by the drunkard, raped by the sadist, murdered by the murderer. The victim is the passive complement to the adventurer. My mother as victim, my father as adventurer.’s mother, Fanny (1891-1985), the hard-working motor of the family, held down various jobs until she was in her 70s. His father, Isaac B. (“Barney”) (1892-1972), an accountant, was a secret and unrepentant gambler for all of his married life who was bailed out many times by family members. Mailer admired his rebellious secret life.
I, who have always been the adventurer (although enormously suppressed) have never been able to have love affairs with victims—they are too much like my mother. So I have searched out women who were adventurers—which is why virgins have never appealed to me. And all my affairs can be interpreted in this light. Those women who seemed adventurers but ended up in my mind as victims, I fled. Those women who were completely adventurers frightened me, as viz the Yipper.An unknown reference. Bea and I broke up because she became too much the independent adventurer and that was intolerable to both of us. Adele and I have the big one of our lives because Adele who is half-adventurer like me, has wedded her sense of adventure to mine, and consents to be the victim because she can thereby find the most adventure. So the longer we are together the deeper is our bond.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/91

Women who always hate to have their make-up messed wish to keep a part of themselves inviolate—they do not wish to have that dirtied. Thus, ultimately, they can never be reached, and one does well to stay away from them, unless one is also inviolate, private, and insulated, and so seeks such a non-mate.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/94

The spy (another adventurer).’s fascination with spies and counter-intelligence reached its apex in 1991 with the publication of Harlot’s Ghost (1991), a novelistic depiction of the history of the CIA from the end of WWII to the death of President Kennedy. He claimed, and believed, that some of his furtive extra-marital romantic entanglements in the 1980s while he was writing the novel gave him psychological purchase on the double life of spies. The spy loves each half of his double life, and obviously could not live nearly as well without each necessary half. My love of opposites leads me to suspect that the side among which he masquerades is usually more real to him, more loved, than the side he is nominally working for.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/95

Actors and spies. What is critical for the spy is to choose the right side, the victorious side, for otherwise he loses his life. For the actor, what is critical is the right part. But actors’ lines are printed on sides, and we say of a part that it has twenty-one sides. In both cases, the spy and the actor, what is searched for is psychological victory, and their choices and actions have absolutely nothing to do with conventional morality.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/99

Saints and psychopaths. I had better define psychopath. The criminal psychopath, the assassin, is merely a special case of the psychopath. What characterizes the psychopath is that the present moment, the present person or thing or action which accompanies him is more real than anything which has gone before or will come later. The violent act is not so much the unfeeling act as the present act—one suspends all sense of consequence, one suspends one’s view of society. So, there are psychopaths who will never kill a fly, but who must nonetheless wander through each experience without sense of the past or future, committed to the present experience, finding it more vivid than anything before or since.
In a peculiar way, a bureaucrat, and his extension, a totalitarian, is a petrified psychopath—he gives to the office, the machine, the party, the enormously vivid sense of the present reality. Instead of using the present experience as soul food—the psychopath is always ravenous—the bureaucrat serves the present experience into the mirror of his soul, the office, and obtains his reaction from the way it bounces back. The saint is the opposite end of the spectrum—the present is insignificant to him—he sees all people and all things as part of the past and much more as part of the future. 
This spectrum which I believe is the spectrum of the human soul, is present in all people in varying degree, surfaceness, and intensity. Most people have the saint-psychopath so deeply buried in themselves that they are for most of their lives or all of their lives simply social animals, and never adventurers.
Category:December 29, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/125

I am getting whole bodies of inchoate thoughts about Time, Time which is the conceptual chain of society, just as Space is the domain of the soul and the saint, and Force the arm of the psychopath. But it seems to me, as the transcription of the Lipton notes from last night will show here and there, that past of the crisis of the novel is that it uses society’s concept of Time which means that the novel cannot liberate itself from Society and truly set out on what is its noble aim—to be the searcher for the meaning of human nature. When we condense Time, when we select—which is the word taught in all writing courses, we are using the trick by which society conceals the nature of man, we condense, we say of a man that he is a bad man, and fifty years of his life are put into a word. The movements of his soul with and against society are taken from us. 
Perhaps the secret to writing a great novel is to deliver oneself from Time, as I first dimly glimpsed it in my eight part novel—in other words we go beyond the limits of time by devoting a thousand pages let us say to all that goes on in a man in a day, an hour, or ideally, given sufficient genius, in an instant. That was what Joyce was working toward, and Proust, and in lesser degree Mann and Gide—and that is why we sense their greatness.Four of the great novelists into whose company in his thirties hoped to join. Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Kafka, Faulkner and Hemingway were also part of his desired peer group. See Advertisements for Myself, 477. But now to the notes of last night.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/127

People who make love without ever having a thought other than sensation (the psychoanalyst’s dream “genital character”) are not as healthy as they seem—they have a species of detachment; their minds cannot flourish with their bodies.
What we call the detached man is the man who fucks while he thinks of something else—neither the fucking nor the thinking is anything but second-rate, depressed, and uneasy.
But the man or woman who is unified sexually, creative sexually, thinks most brilliantly while they fuck most brilliantly even if all they are thinking about are the beautiful orgiastic permutations of fucking. Their body and their mind each fecundate (Bob’s [Lindner] word) the other, and they soar upward on to stimulation beyond stimulation. Most of the so-called healthy people are actually only half-healthy, they can enjoy themselves only by suspending their minds. Once they are through fucking, they return to society. I believe that the “genital character” cannot be found in any person today who is highly developed and “sensitive.”
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/129

Word echoes: We have had overlook and over-look, boring and boring (piercing). Now, fuck. Fuck means the act and it also means a nugatory word. We say of something that it is “No fucking good”—which also means that if there is no sexual experience or meaning within it, then it is truly no good at all. We say in a rage, “Get the fuck out of here”—It is our way of saying, “Get the sexual emotion, connotation, threat, out of my presence.”
“What the fuck do you know?” If you don’t know anything about fucking, we are saying, then indeed you know nothing at all.
And “The whole fucking world,” because indeed the echo of the whole world are the only soul acts allowed man—his separate private fuckings, his soul communions with himself and with others. 
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/130

On the understanding of genius. We think of a genius as always succeeding during those times when he is creative, but actually the genius succeeds and fails, often in successive moments in that his genius is to do something new, to go farther than anyone before, and often he fails that and is merely mellifluous or skillful at a very high level. So the difference between the genius and the mystic is clear—the mystic succeeds or fails with himself or a very small audience; the genius contains his sense of his own soul and his sense of society (his skill, his craft) both at very high levels, and the torment of the genius is that he is so fantastically and variously organized that he can contain two such terribly antithetical elements in his character and succeed in combining them in works.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/132

Seriously, truly, just simply, doesn’t the great dancer wish to dance in the nude, and don’t we wish to see him or her that way? Doesn’t the great actor or actress wish finally to act before an audience the fuck itself, and indeed the great actor or actress always gives a sense of the fuck? (Marlon Brando, Tallulah Bankhead, Laurette Taylor.)Three major actors who admired and saw act on Broadway: Brando (1924-2004) in A Streetcar Named Desire; Bankhead (1902-68) in The Little Foxes; and Taylor (1883-1946) in The Glass Menagerie. NM met Brando during the year, 1949-50, he spent in Hollywood trying to write screenplays. He reviewed one of Brando’s finest films, Last Tango in Paris, in the New York Review of Books (May 17, 1973), rpt. in Pieces and Pontifications. Doesn’t the great painter wish to convey the outside and then the inside of the act? Renaissance fabrics and textures and landscapes and nudes, and our modern non-objective art which is concerned with the variations of the soul in the act. Doesn’t the great novelist always seek for ways to communicate his amazing knowledge of the sexual act?
But, now look, society prevents all these expressions in everything but the most degraded form. We are only allowed strip-teasers for the dance, whores for the circus act, cheap drawings for the art, cheap pornography for the literature. Only in perversion is the sexual and creative soul of man allowed to express itself.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/135

I used to be outwardly a mild psychopath, inwardly enormously moral and severe on myself. Now, outwardly I’m moral (almost saintly I love my friends so much) and inwardly my mind races far, wild, and furiously like the psychopath stalking the present, letting nothing pass my ken. The tiniest most insignificant gesture or remark opens a world to me. (This could be a note for Marion Faye, too, who realizes that Lipton’s left him unaffected before because he was afraid of the intellectual consequence—he would have to set out to be a genius or a saint.) 
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/138

My ambition remains my contact with the world, and perhaps it is not all bad—I would certainly prefer to be a genius than a saint. That is why Bob is right about the petty Hitler in me. I have to do it all, all by myself—only with Adele and Bob and Dan (and Malaquais and Devlin if only they could come around), can I see a collaboration of love. With the others, I am competitive. Every bit of evidence I see, as in television, of hipsterism makes me worry, “My God, somebody may do it before I do it.” No fear of me becoming a saint.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/140

Sexual psychopathy would be normal sex if the chains of society were broken—that is why society attacks sex so violently. Divorce is the first statement of orgiastic verity—so the church fights it. All churches say, “Be content.” They are always opposed to change for they are the bastardization of the soul in society. Freud went very far, and indeed he started on cocaine I suspect, got his first intimations of the caverns below. He was a very great man, but no great man can do it all, and Freud stopped short for which one can hardly blame him. (Look, what happened to Wilhelm Reich.) Freud stopped with the idea that society is good rather than that society is necessary until man conquers nature, but the society must in its turn be conquered or man will be destroyed.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/141

What I learn about The Deer Park these days. I wrote it in such depression because the whole book is a lie. I put my ideas, my real ideas in the most degraded characters. I made Beda a monster, and Marion Faye. Ah. Look. Marion, practically reads as Norman if one spells it backwards. All the letters of Norman are present with the addition of I. I really was saying I, Norman, and I kept wondering where Marion came from. The Deer Park is an attempt to deal with and to conceal from myself that my great enemy, my all-out enemy is the Catholic Church who has stolen the sexual soul of man. And Eitel—I tell. Teppis—The eppis, the skin, the man who is all society. 
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/142

Most celebrities are people who have had talent or genius in some direction, and terrified of where it might lead them, for genius is always pitted against the world, they have cashed in their talent or genius for the rewards of the world. He “sold out” has deep meaning. It doesn’t mean he sold himself as a slave—although that too is true—it means he or she has sold their substance.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/144

Anyone reading these notes would exclaim at my paranoia which rides through these notes on a wave. Three cheers for my paranoia. It is the true measure in every man of great sensitivity—one’s sensitivity to the wrath and retribution of society if one attempts to change it because one knows it is false, and does not suit the need of one’s soul. Society’s great lie is that man is evil and society protects men from one another’s evil. All evil is created by society, and man is good.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/145

At the point where Eitel thinks, “Oh, how I’m degenerating,” there could come to him the thought of Marion Faye speaking over his shoulder, and saying, “No, my friend, you are beginning to grow, but you are much too terrified of that.” All of The Deer Park is the wrestle I made with myself to protect myself against quitting the values of the world in the false but nonetheless vivid way I held them. Thank God I lost. The Deer Park is a failure, but I have discovered myself.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/155

Bob Lindner. As he reads this note, he is going to think I am sniping at him again, and he doesn’t understand my feelings here. I am not sniping at him—if I were, I would not send him these notes, for my competitive feelings would say, “He may take them a step beyond you, and he’ll get the credit.” But Bob is one of the few people I don’t feel competitive toward. I feel we could have a Marx and Engels relation, and leave the matter of who’s Marx aside until we both have grown. 
But what I realized today in thinking about The Fifty-Minute Hour is that Bob’s problems in creativity are the same as mine—his work, like mine, is the defense against letting go. For instance, I have come to realize that Bob’s therapeutic methods and styles are comparatively as old-fashioned as his literary style. They are as heavy and inadequate to his sensitivity as is his prose. Bob, like me, is wild in his ideas, but conventional in his treatments of ideas. And what we both need is to loosen our treatment. So, after a bold beginning, with hypnosis, Bob has given it up, although a part of him is always drawn to new therapies, Rosen’s, Reich’s, etc. 
I wonder—this is wild,—if hypnosis is actually not better than free-association. Analysts never gave it a chance, they were terrified of the consequences, because hypnosis which is what I believe I get in some form under Lipton’s, opens man to his soul, immediately, powerfully, and perhaps irrevocably. Since few people have the situation or the resources to live with their soul, which means to war against society, hypnosis is indeed dangerous, but is it dangerous for the exceptional person? I suspect not. I suspect that techniques with drugs, hypnosis, group therapy, even orgiastic therapy, are inevitable for the future.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/157

The corollary of this is the Stalinist who in the better forms is a man with a soul which feels acutely the outrages of society. But the good Stalinist like Charlie Devlin cannot make the full repudiation of the world, it is too terrifying, and so he takes the half-repudiation of Stalinism, with all its frightful restraints and smothering, because he is terrified that to relinquish the world completely is to mean madness. And this is society’s last weapon, the one which indeed is working on me now. For the first time in my life I have come to realize that I, too, could go mad or commit suicide. I do not really believe it, I spend most of my hours in ebullience and enormous inner excitement, but there are moments at night when I am simply, soulfully happy that Adele is there, and that she understands me, and I can turn to her, and say, “Baby, I’m scared.”
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/158

What courage Adele has. She is as scared as I am, but she has faith in me. She knows I have to go this way, that I have to push to the end, that it is the basic expression of my character, and I tried to hide it in [Sam] Croft, and in [Leroy] Hollingsworth and Lannie [Madison] and [William] McLeod, and in [Mickey] Lovett and Sergius, and finally in Marion Faye, and because I didn’t succeed in hiding it, and have now discovered myself, I have to go on and make the attempt to be a genius, although all the odds are against that for any one person no matter how brave, no matter how talented. At least I have the conviction of my talent, but Adele has not yet found the conviction of her talent—which I’ve come to believe she truly has—and so she has nothing to sustain her but her magnificent love for me.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/159

What terrifies me is exactly this: I am shoving off into a total reevaluation of everything, I am declaring to myself (because I believe it) that I must trust what my instincts tell me is good rather than what the world says is good. Our fear of the ridiculous is society’s polite way, its subtle way of telling us, that if we go beyond the ridiculous and cease to be afraid of it, the second price may be death. So, I feel as if I am about to embark on the second Freudian expedition into the unknown, and so far only one man, Freud, succeeded without paying for it in madness, death, or prison. But I feel optimistic. I feel that I can do it, and so I’m going to try. For the first time in my life I feel that I can be a great writer—I never really had that confidence before. I thought Naked was an imposture, and in a way it was—I was hiding behind it. But my real nature has been not to hide, but to go forward, and this I’m going to do.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/160

The fuck novel, Antacid Analgesique. The form could be the Fuck, The Orgy, and the Masturbation, the Two, the Three, and the One. The man and the woman produce the child (the orgy as the dramatization and communion of the man, woman, and child) and then the isolation of masturbation which is solitary communion. And out of solitary communion comes the Fuck and the trip around the circle begins again, Two, Three, One, Two, Three, One, etc.
Category:December 31, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/12

One should always try to think of the reasons behind laughter, because we always laugh at the things which truly frighten us the most. We laugh in order to conceal from ourselves the essential horror of the subject. So we laugh for example at a person who will act like a machine in response to a given stimulus—Blanche K. for example rising to the stimulus of Jack G.—but it is horrible that we are so bound, so mechanical, and the laughter is to keep ourselves from recognizing that.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/13

It seems to me that the few occasions on which I have felt close to fainting were moments when I was abruptly face to face with the reality of a situation, where I saw the horror of it. So, last night, talking to Romain about K, I was close to fainting because of the awful and meaningless gap between writing a book and what one must do to publish it afterward.
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/14

It is possible that many kinds of major sensual experiences are sublimated into particular sports. For example, last night, with her across my lap, her body exposed and my hands conquering over it, I realized suddenly how close a woman’s body is to a ski slope, and perhaps the fascination of skiing is due to a particular frustration of a particular kind of sexual experience—the great skier needs such triumph and does not have the psychic possibility of finding it in life. Hence he rides like a charioteer over a ski slope, a giant ascetic woman open to his fury. 
Category:December 8, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 8, 1954/15

All of my life with Adele is as if we were making love, and as delicately and as broadly as she tricks and cozens and teases and gratifies my expectations, so does she act the same when we’re out of bed. That’s why we’re bound so deeply, why it’s impossible for us to break up—deep in us it seems as ridiculous as interrupting the act of love.
Category:December 8, 1954