Reader's Guide
The reader is invited to travel through the historical Los Angeles metropolis along multiple paths and networks of textual, visual, and spatial narratives. Ghost Metropolis has a spatial-temporal-textual structure that is modeled on the metropolis itself. Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible, so it literally visualizes the past, as a three-dimensional form of mapping. Those three dimensions are 1) the linear chronological narrative, recounting actions by actors; 2) our visual encounter with the past in photographs, graphic arts, and motion pictures; and 3) the cartographic, which is a special, spatial medium that visualizes the topography of human action. Each of these dimensions is historical and chronological, but there is no single, privileged timeline or narrative.
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, along a relatively consistent time-depth: in more familiar terms, in the same chronological period. It can also be read via intersections and networks through and between the textual and visual narratives.
The forty textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into five thematic narrative paths:
1) Manna From Hell
Should we tell political, social, economic, cultural, private or public cultural stories with any greater priority or order? I have chosen to tell my stories without regard for conventional priorities. My parallel "paths" travel through the spacetime of global Los Angeles chronologically, but not always from the same beginning or destination.
Because all human action takes and makes place, the the past is the set of all places made by everyone who lived in or passed through the Los Angeles Basin. The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. Readers may follow my maps along both textual and visual paths.
Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives.
As a historian, cartographer, and photographer, I have attempted, for more than a decade, to compose an account of Los Angeles that makes its great trajectories visible to a very wide audience. I have researched the region's history and its social and political geography deeply and broadly, and have composed my accounts of of the metropolis in forty-two narrative essays, some of them previously published mostly not. I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together.
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.
Should we tell political, social, economic, cultural, private or public cultural stories with any greater priority or order? I have chosen to tell my stories without regard for conventional priorities. My parallel "paths" travel through the spacetime of global Los Angeles chronologically, but not always from the same beginning or destination.
Because all human action takes and makes place, the the past is the set of all places made by everyone who lived in or passed through the Los Angeles Basin. The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. Readers may follow my maps along both textual and visual paths.
Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives.
As a historian, cartographer, and photographer, I have attempted, for more than a decade, to compose an account of Los Angeles that makes its great trajectories visible to a very wide audience. I have researched the region's history and its social and political geography deeply and broadly, and have composed my accounts of of the metropolis in forty-two narrative essays, some of them previously published mostly not. I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together.
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.
