HARPSPEED

Rain and ache. Today in Southern Cali the storms are in, though it feels like we leapt from fog to fall, with only a few bruisy bright summer days in between.

I've got my love locked down.

Antony and the Johnson's re-make of Beyonce's first solo hit "Crazy in Love" playing on repeat.

Gray, green, black, silver, neon and night. Little lightspeed harp of the rain.

Increasingly seasonless. And old. Honey. The lines, the lines . . .

Thomas Bernhard's my new saint. Reading Extinction, a booklength monologue of an heir who must return to the estate, to a family he hates and who hates him in return with a silent, submariner's loathing. Something about it reminds me of Howard Sturgis' Belchamber, a gorgeous, sad novel about another heir for whom it all falls apart, though that novel is filled with the poetry of a sad gay queer who lingers over every detail as if it were a cologne commercial, all incense and extreme close-ups of hemlines and sneers. It makes me think of Wilde's descriptions in Dorian Gray, they're fast, cinematic, piercing. Bernhard has the movement akin to Banville, without the dense fits of passion. Bernhard's character is a thinker, and a vain egomaniac. Don't trust him.

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