The History of Forgetting

by Klein, Norman M.

• ISBN13: 9781859848203
• ISBN10: 1859848206
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-06-01
• Publisher: Verso Books

Summary

Analysis, photography, and fiction combine in a bracing portrait of LA. Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of its own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an "anti-tour" of LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has re-created the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION Histories of Forgetting	1	(26)
PART I BUILDING THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY: 1885-1997	27	(120)
ONE Booster Myths, Urban Erasure	27	(46)
TWO L.A. Noir and Forgetting	73	(21)
THREE Building Blade Runner	94	(9)
FOUR Movie Locations Unsprung Falling Down City of Lights	103	(11)
FIVE The Panic: Imagined Fears after April 1992	114	(9)
SIX Two Neighborhoods	123	(24)
PART II IMAGINARY VIETNAMESE IN LOS ANGELES Introduction	147	(72)
SEVEN Stories in An English I Don't Speak: A Novel	151	(68)
PART III DOCUFABLES	219	(28)
EIGHT Witnesses After the Fact	219	(7)
NINE Fictions Asi es la Vida The Phoenix Tree The Unreliable Narrator Noir as the Ruins of the Left	226	(21)
PART IV FORGETTING ON THE SCREEN	247	(48)
TEN The Most Photographed and Least Remembered City in the World	247	(16)
ELEVEN The Imaginary LAPD	263	(32)
PART V CONCLUSION	295	(6)
TWELVE Suburban Noir and Cyberspace	295	(6)
APPENDIX Where is Forgetting Located?	301	(17)
AFTERWORD Borges' Father	318	(2)
INDEX	320