Fifteen years went by before I understood what he meant. In those fifteen years I saw how neoliberalism, adopted in Chile at the end of the seventies, gobbled up the small businesses that my father’s trade depended on.
When I realised that everything was disappearing before my eyes, I knew I had to write a novel about what it had meant to live that life. There was the precariousness, but there was also the happiness of travelling the highways, cursing those who hadn’t purchased anything from us or, if we managed to close a sale, enumerating the treasures we would buy with the tiny commission we had made.
The idea that people may collect books as beautiful objects rather than as containers of text has outraged people for centuries. Even back in the first century AD, Seneca railed against people without a scholarly education using books “not as the tools of learning, but as decorations for the dining-room.” But the Reverend Thomas Frognall Dibdin, one of the founders of the field of bibliography, would hear none of it. His passage on the aesthetics of books from his 1817 The Bibliographical Decameron is worth quoting here at length:
“The general appearance of one's library is by no means a matter of mere foppery, or indifference; it is a sort of cardinal point to which the tasteful collector does well to attend. You have a right to consider books, as to their outsides, with the eye of a painter; because this does not militate against the proper use of the contents. I know full well that there are some snappish critics who go about ‘damning with faint praise’... and without sneering teach the rest to sneer, against what is called fine binding and ‘dapper outsides’... As if any scholar, or man of taste, could not relish the beauties of the volume which he opens, because that same volume happened to be coated in bright calf, or olive-tinted morocco!?”
“I light the building with sun behind it, which illuminates the clouds,” Thom said when asked how to capture the dazzle of mirror glass. Retired and living with his wife, Aesook Jee, in the San Gabriel Valley community of Rowland Heights, 87-year-old Thom still approaches his craft with well-honed technique and poetry in equal measure. “You are photographing the reflection, not the building. The building is just a frame for the reflection of the sky.”
His composition depicts a futurist utopia, with hints of dystopia. Nearby buildings are shrouded in shade, and the freeway is eerily empty. Such is the L.A. of the 1970s, equal parts sci-fi optimism and vérité. It’s a period that architecture historians call Late Modernism, a time of sprawling urban growth set against social change.
When the copies of the class picture arrived at our house, I opened the envelope at our kitchen table and eagerly examined the outcome. Excited, as always, to see how my outfit had registered on camera, I scanned past the short kids sitting crisscross applesauce in the front row, the delicate littlest girls and the pipsqueaky boys. I noticed kids in prints of trains and butterflies next to kids wearing short skirts and brand-name sneakers. I saw our stern but caring teacher, Mrs. T. And then my eyes were drawn to a giant color block of blue in the center of the back row, a blonde head rising above everyone around me. I felt exposed, my stomach sinking. Was that me?
As I settled into my seat before takeoff, I felt, improbably, a sense of accomplishment. That I’d made it onto this (nearly empty) plane felt like a big deal. That I was permitted to travel abroad, a miracle. The road to J.F.K., to this flight, to my seat had already been long and steep.
It began in 2016, when, over Skype, the London-based composer-lyricist Michael Bruce and I wrote the first draft of our musical adaptation of the 2006 film “The Illusionist,” itself based on a short story by Steven Millhauser. It wound past second, third and fourth drafts, past two developmental workshops.
Shortly after Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics legend, died in 2018 at 95, biographer Abraham Riesman paid a visit to his only sibling, younger brother Larry Lieber. Though he had drawn comics for Stan on and off for 60 years, Lieber never felt emotionally close to him. He tried to explain his brother the best way he knew how: by comparing him to an iconic film character. “I feel like I’m talking about Charles Foster Kane,” he told Riesman. “Who was he? What was he? What was he like? It depends on who you talk to at what moment.”
Riesman, whose 2016 article dissecting the Lee Myth went viral, has now written a book-length biography to peel back all the layers on his complex subject. “True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee” is a well-researched, engrossing and compulsively readable book. It’s also brutal.
Soon after mere seconds after he became the body no more of the present continuous with the name his parents had given or our most recent