Remembered, surreal dreams become the prose equivalent of Salvador Dali paintings and films.
A detailed diary of Wictor’s (Ghosts and Ballyhoo: Memoirs of a Failed L.A. Music Journalist, 2013, etc.) surreal dreams and nightmares, which reflect his dysfunctional love life and personal demons as a struggling LA music journalist.
Wictor covered the music scene in 1990s Los Angeles amid a tumultuous personal life and health issues that left him feeling vulnerable, pained and angry. During this period, he suffered many lucid dreams—more like nightmares—that his remarkable memory allowed him to preserve in print. His subconscious is particularly active; he even claims to have experienced the rare phenomenon of lucid sleepwalking. But this, the third volume in his loosely linked Ghost Trilogy, is less scientific self-diagnosis than immersion into the weird narratives and tableaux he’s recovered, with minor introductory notes about the events—failed and toxic love affairs, an intimidating Bass Player assignment to interview formidable rock legend Gene Simmons—that inspired the “nightmare clusters.” With the grotesqueries of a Chuck Palahniuk plot, Wictor writes of committing murder (or being murdered himself; usually knives are involved); ill-fated reunions with shape-shifting ex-girlfriends; disasters such as floods, plane crashes and giant carnivorous bats; his articles appearing illegible and bastardized; and his behaving in an infantile or out-of-character manner to entertain some unseen audience. In spite of the dreamer’s clear distress at the time, some of the dreams are horrific, a few are poignant, others, laugh-out-loud hilarious. Themes of failure and humiliation, self-loathing and frustrated helplessness strike universal chords, though showbiz celebrity cameos (Bill Cosby, Jennifer Aniston, Emma Thompson, a miniaturized Sean Connery, Charlie Sheen in hell) are a bit further afield. Readers intrigued by bizarre, Inception-style voyeurism of a well-traveled writer/musician’s innermost recesses should dare venture into this Nightmare on Wictor Street.
Remembered, surreal dreams become the prose equivalent of Salvador Dali paintings and films.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-615-85181-5
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Thomas\Wictor
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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