Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of Books, has published a remembrance of her friend, the writer Jenny Diski, whose “cancer diary” first appeared in instalments in the LRB (“So—we’d better get cooking the meth,” Diski told her partner, Ian Patterson, known to her readers as the Poet, after her diagnosis). The two friends were alike “in the things we found funny and the value we attached to that; and in the words we used and how our sentences ran.” Diski, Wilmers writes, “said she didn’t do narrative, and that also seems true: she didn’t have the patience or what her dodgy father had called the ‘stickability’. (I was going to say that maybe he wasn’t that bad after all, but then I remembered that he made a living that way – by charming old ladies.)” The piece is a fitting tribute to the inimitable Diski—and don’t miss the last paragraph.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and his family have decided not to move into their newly purchased Brooklyn brownstone, as too much publicity about the house has made them feel unsafe. “The world is real,” Coates writes in The Atlantic. “And you can’t really be a black writer in this country, take certain positions, and not think about your personal safety. That’s just the history.”
The works of Philip K. Dick, which have already inspired many movie adaptations including Blade Runner, Total Recall, and A Scanner Darkly, are to be the basis for a new television series starring Bryan Cranston, who will also be one of its executive producers.
And the New York Post’s Page Six, that venerable gossip institution, will now have its own TV show, on Fox.
On Page Turner, there’s a piece about the fascinating Betty Hester, a file clerk referred to by Iris Murdoch as “my crazy Atlanta fan,” who corresponded with Murdoch and, for years, with Flannery O’Connor—“I would like to know who this is who understands my stories,” O’Connor wrote in the first of their many exchanges.
This Saturday in Cabinet‘s gallery space on Nevins Street in Brooklyn, the artist David Scher will be making a book from scratch in twenty-four hours (it goes to the printer on Sunday morning at 10), and for six of those hours, you are invited to watch.