the actress

amie barrodale, mj lenderman, and your bibliomancy forecast for the week of sept. 15

the ace of wands, and a line from Amie Barrodale’s Trip:

"If I had it to do again, I'd demand oral. From the very first night, I'd say, 'You're going to do this for me!" Anthony nodded assertively. "You don't have to get on your knees, but this is a part of our life together. This is something I require. My college friends are all CEOs, CFOs. Me, I'm ..." He gestured down at his feet. "Lost at sea in a stolen boat.”

the aleatory

Once, I went out dancing with a friend and some friends of hers I didn’t know—although it turned out that one of them was also from Pittsburgh, and as we discovered within about five seconds, we knew a few people in common and I had actually seen her before.

Specifically, I had seen her bombing onstage, doing a five-minute standup comedy set at what was otherwise a poetry reading where I went to support a friend.

Whoever put her on the bill with these poets had done a great violence to her. And also, the shit was not funny. Maybe in the right context it would be, but idk man poets are often fairly funny themselves.

Anyway, as soon as we realized this connection, she was like, “Oh wow, that night was bad. That was soooo terrible.”

And I, like a complete fucking idiot, said, “No! Not at all.”

If I had thought for a moment longer—or if I had progressed at all toward the coherence of being able to say what I thought—I would have been like yeah girl it was rough but good for you, you were a soldier and I have nothing but respect for it. (100% true.) Alas. I was at an all-time low of thought-speech coherency at the time, and I was in nervous meeting new people mode, and my habits of insincere smoothness took over.

The second time she insisted on bringing up the subject, I was so anxious to put the whole thing behind us that I said, in fact, her performance had been good.

Ordinarily, both people in a situation like this would call a silent truce and move on. Which is fair—it is an intimacy to tell someone that they bombed and you thought they were 0% funny, which could actually be a cute friendship moment later on. Or so it would be betwen normal fucking people, but this girl returned many, many times throughout the night to the topic, insisting again and in increasingly self-immolating ways to how terrible she had been.

It put me in a weird spot because I couldn’t drop the act without admitting that I had been insincerely nice to her before, but every time she turned the conversation back to it, I found it more and more irritatingly aggressive of her. It started to seem punishing and weird. What is it about actors?

But I am presently in the process of going back into the ledger books and balancing accounts, so let’s clear this one: Girl, you did totally suck. And anyone who has the capacity to bomb onstage is a soldier of heaven. And also, what is your fucking problem? Congrats on the new TV show.

the forecast

Be impeccable with your word. Get up and leave the party whenever you feel like it. Anyone who doesn’t like it is just envious.

writing prompt

Write a story about the thing in real life which you wake up at 3am and wish you hadn’t done so pathetically.

a chune

“Manning Fireworks” by MJ Lenderman

I give MJ Lenderman a great deal of credit for filling his band with guys who look like guys from my high school German class. We are so hungry for something that hasn’t been hollowed out. That’s my assessment anyway. Fight back from the extraction of life and mystery today.

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credits: small spells tarot deck by rachel howe
Trip by Amie Barrodale
"Manning Fireworks” by MJ Lenderman

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dear diary, I usually reserve this part of my newsletter for some kind of covert truth about my actual life, but this week, I am going to very strongly urge you to read the book Trip by Amie Barrodale. Usually I try not to say anything about the books—“saying something” about a book has to be one of the least dignified activities of our day. (And anyway, I strongly suspect that most of the time, a “critical” assessment is really just a rationalization of the immediate emotional reaction, but we can’t say that.) But I’m making an exception here because this is an exceptional book. You know how blurbs always say something like “this book reinvents the form,” but then the book is literally just a teenage girl fucking a professor and/or convenience store clerk? This book does actually read like nothing else I know of, and it has a beating heart as well. It couldn’t be better. I recommend reading it in the same way that I recommend not beating yourself with a baseball bat. XS

P.S. and if you live in Los Angeles, you can see Barrodale in coversation with Ottessa Moshfegh at Skylight Books 9/17 7pm.