Read the brief thematic essay on surrealism in the Heilbrunn Timeline. （http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/surr/hd_surr.htm ）
(Note that Freud used the word “unconscious”not “subconscious.”) This is a pretty sketchy summary of surrealist themes but it’s better than nothing. Make sure you look at the images.
• Read the first two chapters (only) of Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust. （http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0609041.txt ）This novel is set in Los Angeles in the 1930s and is a vivid depiction of Hollywood as a sun-drenched hell stuffed with desperate phonies and grotesques. Where the surrealists in Paris found dreamy poetry in the chance juxtapositions encountered on the street, in LA, West discovers the makings of a nightmare.
Reading response: Comment on this passage from West: “It is hard to laugh at the need for beauty and romance, no matter how tasteless, even horrible, the results of that need are. But it is easy to sigh. Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”