The epigraph by Julio Cortázar is taken from “Preamble to the Instructions on How to Wind a Watch,” published in his book, Cronopios and Famas (Pantheon Books, 1969). The epigraph by Muriel Échecs is taken from her lecture, “Beckett’s Clock: The Anxiety of Math in the Search for History,” given at Heidelberg University in what was then West Germany on April 19, 1981. The epigraph by Calvin Coolidge is taken from his speech entitled “The Press under a Free Government,” given before the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, DC, on January 17, 1925.
All photographs by author. Page 3: M—TE—, Texhoma, Oklahoma. Page 19: Missing a Board, Cairo, Illinois. Page 35: Primitive Road Caution, Tacna, Arizona. Page 45: Full Service, Tacna, Arizona. Page 59: Railyard in Rain, Springfield, Missouri. Page 81: Neighborhood by Night, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In “The Bell System” and “Ghosts of the Bell System,” Mary, Jane, and Pat are Mary Moore, Jane Barbe, and Pat Fleet, otherwise known as the voices behind the Bell Telephone System’s automated messages.
Many of the images in “Meteorology Index” were created in response to the symbols and abbreviations for hazardous materials according to the UK Chemicals (Hazard Information and Packaging for Supply) Regulations 2009.
The title “Ghost of Macondo” refers to the Macondo Prospect, the British Petroleum–owned site of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which, as of this writing, is still considered to be the largest oil spill in history. The oil field itself was named after the fictional town featured in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Harper & Row, 1970), a town that thrived first in anonymity and then celebrity until a banana plantation was established, leading to Macondo’s ruin and eventual abandonment.
“Extinction Days, 1873” refers to the nineteenth-century practice of producing fertilizer from the bones of bison. Current estimates place the number of bison in the United States at 500,000 (the majority of which live on ranches or farms) as compared to an estimated 60 million before 1800.
“Ghost of Polaroid” takes its inspiration from Wallace Stevens’s “Banal Sojourn,” published in his collection, Harmonium (Alfred A. Knopf, 1923).
The sycamore tree in “Ghost Union” owes a debt to Utah’s Mary Tree, which, according to Peggy Fletcher Stack’s “Remembering SLC’s ‘Mary Tree’,” was “likely the first and certainly the most well-publicized [Virgin] Mary sighting in Utah” (Salt Lake Tribune, December 3, 2010). The image of Mary appeared “on a flat knothole when a large branch was cut off by city workers,” and a set of stairs was constructed so that worshippers could “touch the image, which was said to ‘weep,’ or emit liquid.” The tree was twice vandalized: once in 2002, when “a vandal chiseled out a gaping hole where believers said the virgin once appeared,” and again in 2009, when “another attacker tried to light the stairs on fire.” A Plexiglas-encased photograph of the apparition now rests in place of the defaced image. Stack concludes her article noting that “the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City never investigated supernatural claims related to the tree, nor has it had any plans to do so.”
“Ghost Story, 1848” was suggested by the story of Phineas Gage, an employee of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad Company. On September 13, 1848, in Cavendish, Vermont, a 13.25-pound iron tamping rod was driven through Gage’s head by an accidental explosion. Despite the severity of his injury—and the damage it caused to his frontal lobe—he soon regained his full health, albeit with substantial changes to his behavior. In an 1868 address to the Massachusetts Medical Society, Gage’s doctor, John Martyn Harlow, described his patient—known before his accident as a responsible and hard-working individual—as having become a “fitful” and “irreverent” man, “indulging at times in the grossest profanity.” Harlow added that “the equilibrium or balance … between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities [had been] destroyed.” In the years following his accident, before turning to livery work, Gage famously became a one-man museum exhibit, touring New England with his iron rod.
“Eastern Standard Time, 1890” refers to William Kemmler (the first individual executed by electrocution), George Westinghouse (who fought unsuccessfully to keep his alternating current from being employed by the electric chair that killed Kemmler), and the Cuyahoga River (a tributary of Lake Erie so polluted that it reportedly caught fire thirteen times between 1868 and 1969, with the 1969 fire garnering so much attention it was credited with inspiring the creation of both the Clean Water Act and the Environmental Protection Agency).
“National Anthem” adapts certain phrases from the 1890 Milton Bradley board game Peter Coddle’s Trip to New York as displayed in Margaret K. Hofer’s The Games We Played: The Golden Age of Board & Table Games (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003).