Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/574

What a title. I bet I could locate (give) every theme, idea, thought and spiral and circle of this journal in Antacid Analgesic. How significant that I never read Joyce. I know when I’ll read him. (That is I never read more than a hundred pages of Ulysses,^[1] and two or three pages of Finnegan’s Wake). But if I write a great Antacid Analgesic, then I will read Joyce and be able to understand him as few or perhaps no rationalist has before me.

note

↑ At Harvard, Mailer read up through “Calypso,” the fourth chapter of James Joyce’s 1922 novel, which ends with Leopold Bloom relieving himself in the privy, and wrote a paper on the scene for one of his writing courses.

[1] At Harvard, Mailer read up through “Calypso,” the fourth chapter of James Joyce’s 1922 novel, which ends with Leopold Bloom relieving himself in the privy, and wrote a paper on the scene for one of his writing courses.

[1]