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 Finnegans 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

  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.