Jenny Diski fanmail

It's graduation weekend, which means they've planted brand new, grown trees in front of the vacant lot that a year ago was a library and has been a demolition site with dinosaur machines chewing up concrete and spitting out rebar for most of the year; and sheathed the kiosques normally splattered with student notices for dicey activities in university-logo printed red plastic.

The latest London Review of Books has yet another installment in the Jenny Diski saga that I binge read the minute it enters the house (it takes a long detour via Paris). She is an amazing storyteller, and I am waiting to buy the book when it gets finished and read it all at once which, since she says she has terminal lung cancer, will likely be the last Diski--but in the meantime there is this incredible pleasure of reading her every two weeks in the LRB, which also has a wonderfiul Michael Hofmann review of the new Heaney Selected. Hofmann has just published a book of essays I haven't seen, but if they are a compilation of his reviews, I want that too.

Red sky to the west, blue above, stars coming out, airplanes circling, vague murmur of commuter traffic on highway 101 to the south.