Reader's Guide
Following Cervantes, Mercatur, and Melville, I've constructed a large-scale work of many different components, and many different genres. Most of the components of Ghost Metropolis are, like the short stories Cervantes folded into Don Quijote, free-standing. Ghost Metropolis is composed of forty-two (42) narrative essays and many visual narratives. Visual media numbering several hundred belong to the genres: photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos.
Readers may follow many different paths through this work. It can be read chronologically from 13,000 years ago until the present; it can be read by narrative pathways that follow the course of a general area of social and political life; it can be read between subject areas on teh same chronological period, in chronosections. The forty-two textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into five narrative paths: Manna From Hell; etc.
It can also be read via intersections and networks through and between the textual and visual narratives.
Narrative Essays
Textually, Ghost Metropolis takes the form of narrative storytelling largely on the model of Plutarch or Livy, but also on the model of Braudel. I have included forty-two (42) short "narrative essays," averaging 12 typewritten pages. Much shorter than a traditional book "chapter," these are "essays" in the tradition of Montaigne: literally essais, tries or attempts, to recount what took place and to explain, by mapping the networks of actions that constituted each event, the shape of the past.
Narrative Pathways
The Narrative Essays, in turn, are presented sequentially in different "Narrative Pathways." Cross-cutting groupings of narrative essays are re-presented in multiple pathways. In the narrative essay and narrative pathways I narrate and analyze deeds of the great and the powerless alike, to assess their contributions to the inscribed lifeways and regimes of power from their generation to our own, 21st-century generation.
Visual Genres
Photographs
Still images recorded to photosensitive films and digital devices.
Photographic Narratives
Semantic-photographic stories. -Curated sequences of static images.
Panoramas
Sweeping views of multiple directions from a single camera position,
forming a circle of varying wide-angle degrees, to a maxium of 360˚.
Montages/Photomontages
Assemblages of photographs and graphic arts, including cartography.
Maps
Pictorial cartography. A special case of annotated pictorial form, maps usually carry
semantic symbols that index or reference a depiction of some region of the Earth’s surface.
Ghost Maps
Visually layered visualization of geohistoric development.
Cartographic Narratives
Curated sequences of maps.
Video
All motion pictures. All photographic representations produced with equipment designed to capture motion in discrete frames and to edit those frames and re-present them at rates too frequent to be detected by the visual perception and cognition of the human mind.
Cinematic Narratives
-Curated sequences of film stills or clips taken
directly from cinematic sources. Does not include “production stills”
taken by still camera equipment during the making of movies. Cinematic
narratives are only taken from motion photography—in whatever format,
film to digital.
Audio
-All soundtracks lacking moving images. Includes but is not limited to the subgenres of music, radio, recorded voice of any kind, from oral histories to dramatic narratives, and the sound-tracks of movies and videos of any kind.
