Our Struggle
By Our Struggle
Our StruggleJun 29, 2021
Wagner By The Park (with special guest Greg Jackson )
It's a repulsively glorious fall day in Brooklyn. Seeking respite from his upstate rustication, Greg Jackson comes to the city to ask us, "Who are you guys?" In trying to answer him, we discuss Conrad, infantile ejaculation, polite literary readings, and nested storytelling. We take frequent breaks. Drew becomes rather maudlin. Lauren eats Port Salut and tries not to talk about auto-fiction. Greg gives us a reading of some of his greatest hits. His prose is metaphysically propulsive, humanely experimental. Do you like our blurb, Greg? We love you, bro.
About A Guy, With Some Guys (Featuring Willy Staley, Dean Kissick, and Sam Kriss)
We're so back, as they say, and we've recruited some struggle favorites to join us for a most unseemly return. We gather in Park Slope with 3 microphones, 4 dudes, and 1 Lauren. We talk about the text, for once. We talk about sojourns abroad and encounters with Kentuckian gastronomy. We perform close readings then forget our reading entirely. We sing at the end, too, which you'll hear if you make it all the way there.
P***Y For the Meter With Max Lawton
Drew finally lifts his editing embargo and the show recently described as "your boyfriend's favorite podcast" returns with a special guest-- the esteemed, humble, and oddly jacked translator Max Lawton. We talk about...what the hell did we talk about? Many arcane Russian writers we don't know about, non-binary bombs, a bizarre fascistic musical (also Russian), Philip Roth (I think), Stephen King, tuna melts. Tune in and remember with us.
White Chocolate Guys (ft. Sam Kriss)
In this episode with cult fave 6'4" writer SAM KRISS, all motifs are on the table - literally. Drew has been heroically managing dry January by replacing alcohol with weird food and on the Wednesday evening we gathered at the Park Slope Manse, he presented Sam and Lauren with the most deranged assortment of snacks imaginable. As we loudly munched our way through the spread (to the great delight of audiophile listeners, we're sure), the madness of the snacks began to infect us, resulting in folie a trois to remember.
cheat sheet:
2:00 - Drew itemizes our meal and Sam explains how it's possible to be British and Jewish at the same time.
46:00 - Sam delivers a startlingly lucid lecture on Kristeva's the sign and the symbol and explains how, hopefully, literature is headed back to the Middle Ages. This has to do with Knausgaard!
1:30:00 - We declare Sam to be the UK's new Blurber in Chief and Sam flawlessly impersonates American TikTok teens.
2:00:00 - Complete madness sets in at this point; not sure what we were talking about here.
Many thanks to Sam for joining us!
Listeners: Feedback about the audio quality is NOT welcome.
PLUGS:
No One’s Beautiful and We’re All Gonna Die W/Alex Dimitrov
Love is boring and breakups are banal. Flight attendants are gay and have extraordinarily high body counts. We’re calling for a New Sensualism! Have you read The Line of Beauty? Drew’s getting into astrology and martinis, Lauren’s still running the show. Alex Dimitrov is, in fact, a respected poet–published in The New Yorker, no less. He likes getting his haircut once a week, to feel in control. He likes keeping a diary, he likes the camaraderie of a handjob. Lauren’s been reading a lot about AIDS and Quebec. Drew’s been forcing people to take shots of Pepto Bismol. Dimitrov doesn’t like lunch, but he likes Hemingway. Lauren knows where to find the best steak tartare in New York. Drew still hasn’t found a father. Dimitrov is writing a novel but it’s not a queer novel. Karl Ove is falling in love. No one’s beautiful, we’re all going to die, and Our Struggle is back from an accidental hiatus. Eat this episode with cranberry sauce.
Well, There You Have It (ft. Andrew Martin)
We're back! Really! Having revived ourselves with grapefruit Spindrift and coffee following our lackluster 2nd anniversary show, we invited Andrew 'actually Armenian' Martin, author of the novel Early Work and the short story collection Cool for America, to join us at Lauren's Park Slope manse for a rollicking discussion of Book 2's famous face-slashing section! Andrew did not disappoint: with typical Armenian wit and candor, he helped us to pick apart the drunken series of events leading to Karl Ove's facial mutilation. Enjoy!
cheat sheet:
00:50 - Andrew gives us the DL on all the most important Armenian Americans; we start beef with Elif Batuman; the Queen is mourned, we ponder which British 80s singers are bereft, and which are overjoyed;
25:16 - Karl Ove sets eyes on Linda for the first time; it's the summer of 1999, Linda's wearing cool Matrix sunglasses (we're pretty sure) and we ponder what other y2k phenomena Karl Ove engaged with. Also: the 2022 film The Northman helps us to understand some peculiar actions reportedly undertaken by Karl Ove and Arve at the Biskops Arno seminar.
52:00 - Karl Ove tries to impress Linda by playing Wilco's Summerteeth and showing her a Roman cookbook, to no avail; this leads Lauren to prompt Drew and Andrew to share their picks on which album and cookbook they would choose to impress a woman in 2022.
1:19:06 - The rejection comes, somewhat robotically; Karl Ove takes a shard of glass to his face but it doesn't stop him from enjoying some pizza and catching a Garbage concert with Tonje the day after. Andrew and Drew reflect on acts of drunken destruction undertaken as young men.
Until next time!
Also....
Have brain damage? Consider donating to our patreon!
Vagaries and Vicissitudes: A 2nd Anniversary Call-in Special
As that haunting summer feeling takes hold, Lauren and Drew languidly reflect on another year of podcasting and readerly fellowship. Along the way they read some KOK and respond to calls from the usual band of dilettantes, devotees, and detractors. A goblin-schnozzed Czech puppet called Mickey makes a special appearance as well.
Colonel Mustard with the Gerbil (ft. Jon Lindsey)
Good news: it's our first in-person recording in half a year. Bad news (a la Teddy St. Aubyn): Audio interface ran out of battery so it cuts off sorry
Buy Jon's book: Body High
We'll get back to Karl Ove soon we promise.
Have brain damage? Consider donating to our Patreon: patreon.com/ourstruggle
Bildongsroman (ft. Gary Shteyngart)
We're back! We're talkin schlong! We're on Patreon, finally!
It's season 4....after taking a month and half off from the show to work on their tans, Lauren and Drew return, joined, this time, by the beloved novelist Gary Shteyngart, zooming in from his Rolex-stuffed country estate in the Hudson Valley. Knowing that many of our listeners are fans of Gary's work for its wit, humor and aching portrayals of soviet jewish anxiety (cosplaying a lit critic today lol), we decided to engage Gary exclusively on the subject of his penis. Gary, whose penis's travails began at the age of 7 when we underwent a botched circumcision inflicted by singing Hasids, was more than happy to discuss his New Yorker story about the trials and tribulations of his mangled member (his Bildongsroman, if you will). What followed was a congenial discussion of not only his fucked up penis but also his decadent forays into watches, ant larvae, and more; Phillip Roth's sex advice to a young starstruck Gary; and a truly overwhelming raft of dick jokes that all seemed to point in the same direction: a serious consideration of the limits of humor's liberating properties and the delicate process of transforming real ongoing pain into art (I told you I was cosplaying a lit critic today lol).
Thank you Gary! Hope to see you at the tinned fish restaurant soon.
To the rest of you - patreon.com/ourstruggle.
Reach out - teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
Smashing Life (ft. Peter C. Baker)
***TICKETS ARE NOW AVAILABLE FOR OUR 6/2 LIVE SHOW! EVENTBRITE LINK HERE***
-KGB is a very small venue and we've already sold 60% of the tickets so if you want to see our first and likely last ever live show, do buy your ticket ASAP!
-Friends of the show Christian Lorentzen and Dean Kissick are confirmed as guests. And there will probably be 1 to 2 additional mystery guests ;)
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WE'RE BACK! And this time joined by Peter C. Baker, another novelist dad who supplicated to us. Petey C. made an agenda for his OS appearance, to which we dutifully adhered, although we skipped the item about fatherhood, because -- BORING! Instead we spent probably an hour talking about his tenure at Wendy's, an American fast food franchise. Also can't remember if we let him mention this but Petey has a novel coming out 5/31 and it's called PLANES. The blurbs on the back of my galley copy are too long to read but I feel like they probably say the book is good, so you should buy it.
cheat sheet:
0:00 - Drew, clean-shaven and clear-headed, recounts in Knausgaardian fashion his weekend at home in Boston with mom.
11:29 - Petey tells us of his three summers as a Wendy's employee in central Pennsylvania, which led to his first byline - call it a "coming of flippable age story"
44:23 - Lauren, Petey and Drew have a real Gen-x style nerd-out session about indie bands - namely Destroyer and Belle and Sebastian, the latter of which Petey recently wrote about in the New Yorker magazine. We hear about an epic B&S concert Petey saw in Battery Park City in the summer of 2007, a time in which Petey was incidentally subletting Christian Lorentzen's room on the LES, dipping into Christian's Pynchons and "smashing life."
1:26:20 - We finally get to Petey's beef with us (agenda item #4): our oft-repeated claim that Knausgaard is "unmediated." We seriously explore this question for about 3 minutes before getting into Pete's back pain and Phillip Rawdog's Halcion psychosis.
Thanks to Petey! See you on the squash court soon homie. And see the rest of you - AT THE LIVE SHOW!!!!
Cafe Society (ft. Felix Biederman)
We're back! And joined by Felix Biederman, a promising young podcaster recently arrived in Los Angeles whom we condescended to let on the show. Although by no means a "bookhead" -- to appropriate his charming coinage -- Felix is a longtime fan of Karl Ove Knausgaard. The Norwegian author became a source of strength for Felix when he first encountered the Struggle books in 2017 amidst an increasingly cloying digital media landscape. With startling lucidity, Felix articulates how Knasugaard, with his undifferentiated and unselfserving stream of thoughts, served as a welcome anecdote to the insanely hypertargeted and overdetermined first person essay boom of the time (should she have pitched a piece about what it's like to be a quarter Portuguese woman in America? Lauren wonders). Then we get into the text: specifically pages 88-94 of book 2, which cover about five minutes of Knausgaard stalking around Stockholm with the stroller and having thoughts. We try to understand Knausgaard's aversion to being recognized as a "regular" as a coffee shop (and utter mortification at being presented with a free croissant) and Felix recounts his stint in cafe society (the LES Dunkin Donuts) as a young man. Also: we discover Knausgaard to have invented main character/NPC discourse, and consider the 2005 fashion trend of knee high black boots for women, which Knausgaard wishes "would last forever" (cruel hindsight: it didn't).
If you enjoyed this episode with Felix, make sure to check out his podcast, "Chapo Trap House"
As always we can be reached at teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
LIVE SHOW IS THURS JUN 2 @ KGB BAR. Tickets are not available yet but will be soon. We'll send out an email blast!
Mugs are available at ourstruggle.store. Discount code MISTAKE valid for one week!
Oh and congratulations to our baby Joshua Cohen (novelist) on his Pulitzer win, which we like to think we are in some part if not all responsible for.
BONUS EP: The Northman (ft. Alec Niedenthal)
A lot of people when they realize that Drew is not on this episode are going to say I betrayed him but what you need to know is that we're actually POLY now and I can podcast with any man I choose. Also Drew was supposed to show up to this recording and didn't.
WE HAD A LOT OF FUN WITHOUT DREW! My good friend Alec Niedenthal and I went to see The Northman at Nitehawk (prospect park location), sampled a viking burger (which we review in this episode), and podded about the experience back at my place over gluten free beer and mixed olives (garlic stuffed and kalamata). Weirdly enough we had a number of surprise guests show up to my living room: literary critic Christian Lorentzen; Alec's friend Seth from his MFA, who's promoting his self-published book 'Communal Feelings Spaces'; and the Northman himself! It was a wild time!!
This episode contains what some losers would call spoilers. Don't listen if you can't handle the details of a story that didn't even happen in real life!
Thank you for listening and shout out to my homie Alec!
Until next time-
Rhythm Time (ft. James Griffiths)
Finally! It's Rhythm Time! To discuss one of the most notorious and worst written passages of Book 2, we invited back our homie James Griffiths, the Welsh warrior and three-time struggle King, who told us that these pages made him "want to get a vasectomy."
Also in this episode: A "lover's quarrel" between Lauren and Drew (saga to be cont.); we uncover the true meaning of Nico's 'These Days'; James and Drew get vulnerable about their hair loss journeys; Lauren reports on her experience of a real-life Rhythm Time in south Brooklyn.
James has a new book out which Lauren will definitely read if he sends her a copy! It's called "Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language" and takes up the subject of vanishing marginal languages (we love them folks!) and it's been getting great reviews!
As always, we can be reached at teixeira.lauren@gmail; deohringer@gmail.com
Live show is June 2 at KGB Bar in New York! Mark your calendars! (Tickets are not available yet but they will be, at some point)
Oh and stay tuned for our Patreon lol
Oh and I still have mugs please buy one? ourstruggle.store
Until next time!
Everything is Great (ft. Sheila Heti)
We're still alive! And at the incessant nagging of the Our Struggle Office of Diversity and Inclusion, joined by Canadian woman writer Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood, and the newly out PURE COLOUR (note the canadian spelling). This was a great episode - we didn't talk about Knausgaard so much (although Sheila had a good story about hanging with the man at an Australian continental breakfast), or even Craft (although there was some craft chat), but you all know the drill by now -- the pleasure is in the digression etc. Thanks so much to our new friend Sheila for coming on the show! Look forward to hanging in Toronto soon with Margaret, Alice and the whole gang
cheat sheet:
0:00 - What have L&D been up to during the hiatus? Drew almost died of food poisoning in Israel and Lauren got in trouble with the P*rk Sl*pe F*od C*op
6:58 - Sheila comes on the line and tells us about getting locked out of her friend Margaux's studio, her 140-pound Rottweiler called Feldman, and her experimental theater adolescence
32:38 - Lauren and Sheila discuss a devastating book Sheila recently wrote about in NYRB, the Swedish author Lena Andersson's WILLFUL DISREGARD, which is full of wise aphorisms about love and human behavior. This leads to a discussion of aphoristic writing, about which Lauren has recently come to have a bee in her bonnet. How can we know aphorisms we write are not complete bullshit? Lauren wants to know, and Sheila and Drew reasonably point out that readers are not expecting authors to have access to a universal truth. But we get into a interesting convo about if it's possible to deceive yourself in writing and also get into the brilliant and (to Lauren) frustrating psychoanalytic writer Adam Phillips, whose book MISSING OUT Sheila recommends.
58:15 - A comment about a (fanciful) description of a certain literary critic friend of the pod's scrotum in PURE COLOUR leads into a passionate discussion of male circumcision, a topic about which Sheila has lately been having complicated feelings.
1:17:36 - Drew, Sheila and Lauren have a very Jewish discussion of their formative encounters with Woody Allen films and Sheila reveals that she was almost named Woody Allen Heti.
1:42:43 - [DISCOURSE ALERT] Sheila bravely reveal a PRO-ROONEY stance
Thanks so much again to Sheila !!
As always, you can keep Lauren from starving by buying a mug at ourstruggle.store.
And reach out to us: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
As they (are legally obligated) say in Montreal: A bientot!
Conception (ft. Andrew Lipstein)
Welcome back! This is a classic struggle, in which we were joined by our new friend, yet another Jewish writer named Andrew. You can buy his (Andrew Lipstein's) novel LAST RESORT out now. It's getting good reviews.
Lauren's half awake notes:
0:00 – marc maron-style appeal to buy mug
3:30 - geriatric pregnancy, half of face paralyzed, run into a pole
15:47 – knausgaard primal experience. Hitler section.
23:30 - Knaus feels childrearing not meaningful, longing to be somewhere else
34:47 – drew’s love life and Andrew meeting his wife . "knausgaard seems like a broken person" drew wants to know how to make baby
47:36 – first child
59:15 – is there meaning enough in the golden doodle
1:14:00 – martin amis writing for park slope food coop gazette?
1:36:00 - which male writer is going to stab his wife
MUGS:
CONTACT:
teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
Icky Modernism (ft. Matthew Gasda and Christian Lorentzen)
Thursday night, a living room in upper Manhattan. Two podcasters - a wayward English teacher (Andrew Ohringer) and a sardonic nanny (Lauren Teixeira) -- have invited their friend, a young playwright recently arrived from Flatbush (Matthew Gasda), onto their show to discuss his new underground hit play "Dimes Square," a razor-sharp send-up of contemporary New York bohemian life. The playwright is on this evening accompanied by two of his actors: his muse (Cassidy O'Grady) and a volatile moonlighting literary critic (Christian Lorentzen) who engages the English teacher's mysterious roommate (Mason). Fernet flows, ambient degeneracy simmers and soon enough the ramshackle sextet find themselves recreating rather than explicating "Dimes Square."
Love Qua Love (ft. Oded Even Or and Krithika Varagur)
In which we discuss Mating (Norman Rush's luminous 1991 novel), and mating.
Happy Valentine's Day
Clown Hour
Alright folks - we finally got equipment for IRL recording but the catch is, we did too much IRL hanging out this weekend so by the time we figured out the equipment we were out of things to say. I mean there's some good stuff in here but shouldn't be any kind of priority unless you're some kind of freak who's desperate to hear the EXQUISITE TIMBRE of our voices (Mason's on this too and he has the best vox of all). Just....focus on the sound, don't listen to what we're actually saying, it's very uncouth and gratuitous (thank god Mr. Goldstein passed before he hear such loose talk!)
we'll be back soon with some better content we promise
also our "send in the clowns" demo (very rough) is at the end
High Trauma Bottom (ft. Will Self)
WE'RE BACK! In the Our Struggle Pod season 3 premiere, L&D are joined by the author, critic, panelist, flaneur, enfant terrible and Ratatouille character inspiration, the giant (confirmed 6'5") of British letters, Mr Will Self. In this barn burner of an episode, Will talked to us about why he has no time for his fellow towering autofictionist Karl Ove Knausgaard (Will has recently come out with a memoir, titled, perversely, Will, rather than Self). But we also talked about a litany of other, related things: Henry James' mangled penis, namely; as well as trauma, and silent film, and social media, and a youthful frisson with Morrissey. We think you're going to like this one, listener!
cheat sheet:
14:56 - We begin discussing Will's recent Harper's cover essay Against Trauma, which argues that trauma is not an anthropological constant but rather a thoroughly modern phenomenon with a vintage as recent as the industrial revolution. Trauma is something we experience when our "technological bubble" bursts, as in a railway crash, or a pandemic in the first world. How might this argument help explain why Lauren feels so fucking traumatized by her phone (but not the time she was attacked on the subway) and Drew anxiety spirals whenever a girl doesn't text him back? And what has liberal humanism to do with all of this?
43:00 - Lauren and Drew seek feebly to defend Karl Ove against Will's penetrating intellect and girthy (ENORMOUS) vocabulary. "There's something monstrous about him, the lack of poetry," Will intones, and L&D struggle to disagree. Does the popularity of Knausgaard reflect the triumph, in the social media age, of Content over Style? Will makes a compelling case.
1:12:43 - We get in to some interesting points about narrativity and the self raised in Will's essay about memoir and autofiction (published here in the Guardian, although the uncut version he sent us, and which we quote from is a bit different FYI). Will, after Strawson, dismisses the contemporary shibboleth that the "self is a perpetually rewritten story," and yet his Harper's essay seems to rest on the premise that trauma is what results from narrative collapse. In response to this critique Will makes an interesting distinction between narrative and "strong narrative," the latter of which sees telling one's story as a sort of moral duty...
Thank you so much to Will for coming on the show!
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HOUSEKEEPING
STRUGGLE MUGS WENT INTO PRODUCTION LAST WEEK! If you want us to send you one as soon as they're ready, considering ordering one (or two) at our store here. I kept the price at 20 dollars because it turned out my production costs were lower than i thought and I felt bad that shipping is so much.
UK listeners: Hang tight! It seems we have found a bookstore across the pond to distribute for us. Watch this space...
As always you can get in touch with us: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
Until next time --
I've Lost a Lot of Girls to Christmas
Original tune by Drew Ohringer, with some Zombies at the end
Fanny and Alexander and Karl Ove (Xmas special)
THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, HELP US WORSHIP MAMMON! Link to store
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In this end of the year Christmas special, our two Hebraic hosts convene to discuss the Yuletide-set Part One of Ingmar Bergman's 1983 masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander. What resonances does this warm, nostalgic account of a Swedish boy's fantasy life have with our Jesus in the sea seeing Norwegian? How does the line between fantasy and reality, onstage and offstage blur for this theatrical bohemian family? What, in fact, were the Ekdahls feasting on at Christmas dinner? All of these questions and more are pondered in what the pulsating orb wearing horn rimmed glasses of record the New Yorker has recently designated our "highly digressive and meandering" style. The second half of this show, much like the latter half of Bergman's epic, is sure to perplex, bewilder and alienate: we abandon our nominal topic altogether and mutter for about an hour about mammals vs. birds, our holiday cooking plans, and Drew's upcoming track "I've Lost a Lot of Girls To Christmas" (featured at the end of this episode). Enjoy, and see you in 2022!
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If you have questions, comments or concerns, or if you are an audio dweeb in nyc who can help us, please reach out: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.
We are also looking for a UK distributor (possibly a bookstore??) that can help us get mugs to UK struggleheads, as the cost of shipping individual mugs to the UK is prohibitively expensive. Get in touch!
Free Associating at the Dog Park (ft. Kyle Chayka)
He was late; he always is.
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Kyle C. doesn't seem too put off my his riff about misogyny in the kitchen, at least.
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My Struggle, minimalist or maximalist? Is all autofiction minimalist? Is it funny to call her "Rachel Cuck"?
A lot of questions, not so many answers.
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Vanja puts on her golden shoes and goes to Stella's birthday party. Vanja shows off her shoes to the room of children. No one notices. They're busy riding the train to Moscow.
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Small bark in the dog park. I mean small talk. Is My Struggle really just Karl Ove making small talk with himself? Is learning to small talk just part of growing up?
There's a small golden doodle in the park.
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Never let her sit on a park bench, Drew says.
Claus Explains It All (ft. Claus Andersen)
WE'RE BACK! After a long illness, Drew returns to the zoom stage and helps Lauren to heartily welcome certified Knausgaard expert Professor Claus Andersen to the pod for an extremely, almost disconcertingly, on-topic episode.
itemization:
0:00 - molasses cookies; Boston trauma; struggle mug plug (preorder yours today! link to store)
31:40 - we welcome Claus; gnomes; Lauren's dumb q's about scandi colonial history; Sweden’s covid response
53:33 - why is norway such a literary powerhouse; Knausgaard family history; Knausgaard publication history; Knausgaard finances
1:28:40 - Geir Angell Øygarden homosocial relationship; portrayal of Linda; 'V' structure of Book 2
1:40:40 - form/formlessness of My Struggle
1:59:00 - more dumb q's about scandi stereotypes
2:14:20 - why knausgaard late to fapping
Thank you so much to Claus for sharing his knowledge with us and gamely answering our dumbest questions! We look forward to having him back on soon.
Wishing you a happy this holiday season ~ our struggle team
Beyond the Discourse of the Wind (ft. Mason)
A rainy Sunday night in ---. Two broadcasters, a man and a woman recently arrived from Central Park, convene in the cramped kitchen of the man's lodging with Malbec and Port Salut. There is much to speak of - the Kinks, a mangled papaya dog, an invective against tweets by Wallace Shawn (Swan?) - but as their trivial chatter progresses, a mystery emerges (as it ought in all literature): who is the third figure in the kitchen? The man and the woman keep making reference to a Byronic figure they call Mason, a brooding spectre whom they claim supplies them steadily with tea, glasses, bound volumes. This 'Mason,' who may or may not resemble D.H. Lawrence, who may or may not exist, lies at the heart of the story. The extent to which he will reveal himself (or be revealed by our protagonists) is the most thrilling part of the narrative, an adventure of epic sprawl playing out entirely within the confines of a tiny New York kitchen.
-J. Wood
Live from Family Brooklyn (ft. Willy Staley)
The autumn has been long; and the weather, a mood. The leaves are perfectly gold here on the Gold Coast (that swathe of Brooklyn lining the East River - Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens -- where the bourgeois-bohemian class reproduces) and soon I, William Staley (more commonly and phallicly known as Willy), will bundle my 8-month-old son into garb of a Gnome, and take him out into the fall crispness to experience his first Hallowe'en.
But before I could go prepare to take candy from babies (it's a choking hazard) I had to endure a recording - something it seems more and more of my literary Brooklyn peers are subjected to these days. A man and woman appeared on my Zoom screen. They wanted to talk to me about A Man in Love, that is, the second book in the My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Shadowily (they were both backlit, in their respective lairs: the man, a Morningside heights railroad apartment; the woman, a half-finished suburban basement), they interrogated me about fatherhood, about my son's primordial essence. about carnivals. I answered gamely, and two and half hours later we still hadn't covered more than twenty pages of this book, this Struggle, but it was time for my son's nap and I begged to be allowed to end the call, to ply my son with his yarn tomato and squishy soccer ball in a bid to make him slumber, in preparation for this moment - his Halloween parade, his gnomic journey, his induction into the world of golden leaves and food co-ops.
I rest for now. But something is tickling at the back of my brain. It's a line from the first page of this accursed donkey of a Norwegian's novel, which goes:
"I have never understood the point of holidays, have never felt the need for them and have always just wanted to do more work."
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psst....
bookshop.org/shop/ourstruggle
All the things she struggled
Le Quotidian Pain (ft. Dasha Nekrasova)
She showed up smoking marlboro lights and talking about a ribbon store nearby. This was on west 38 street, where I’d rented, for 250 dollars, a studio for the recording sesh. My voice was ragged, frayed, like late period Dylan, on account of a cold I acquired in Greenpoint, at a play, and three classes a day on the Metamorphosis: I encouraged my students to notice patterns, the transformations within transformations, the repetition of the word deliverance--they drew dung-beetle dicks on the whiteboard, and, lost myself in the mutiny, I told them Gregor Samsa’s sister was Greta Thunberg. Lauren and I had been waiting for her on a bench by a clothing store, which induced Lauren to tell me about Reformation, she called it slutty Anne Boleyn, but before the bench we’d gone to CVS to buy lauren an android charger and a big bag of ricolas for my ruined larynx. Oh and before the CVS we’d gotten coffee and croissants and salad from the Quotidian Pain. There were drilling, burrowing sounds coming from somewhere adjacent to quotidian pain, and so I couldn’t talk at all, couldn’t even try to talk over them, so I tried to read about Karl Ove, I mean read his book, the coat sliding off a hanger, his dad’s fingerprints, dead, on a teapot, and she said she’d done the reading, our guest---Dasha--she said she was a speed reader; but, after I’d sent her the PDF and the page numbers--labeled DASHA START HERE on page 417, in my stunted hieroglyphic--and after I’d reminded her of where to meet, at Gotham Studios on w 38st, she’d said that today’s section--the final part of book 1--was a “a bit of a bore.” But then she was in the thrum of glamor, premieres and screenings and writers rooms, and so perhaps she couldn’t attend to the subtleties or whatever of the text, which was fine with me, since it was coup just to get her here, just to watch her walk up to us on west 38 st and to listen to her tell us about ribbons and the nearest brasserie, what was the difference anyway between a bistro and a brasserie, and I knew the episode would be a tedious success when, once we got recording, on the 10th floor, she launched into her day: rotten bananas, red smoothies, Equinox. There was perhaps even a kind of sleepy glamour to her mundanity, and her itemization (such as it was) almost redeemed my sandblasted tonsils and the wallet I’d lost, for a spell, at Metrograph, which I would tell her about, later, at Match 86, after a cucumber martini; redeemed Lauren’s spasming shoulder and migraines, too. Dasha redeemed most of literature herself-- “all books are basically good,” she said. Then we took a cab in the rain to the bisto or was it a brasserie and we ate pate and tartare and escargot, doused in parsley sauce, and outside, after, we smoked American Spirit Yellows. I can hardly speak, there’s nothing more to say, though, I think.
Intimate Drizzle (ft. Emmie Francis and Luke Brown)
I have to go to Dayton Ohio in a second to visit my Aunt Bunny but long story short it was the afternoon of the Brooklyn Tote Bag Fest, Drew took shelter in the den of the Wizard of Remsen Street fka Christian Lorentzen and he podded from there while the Cousins beamed in from across the POnd. (I was back in the finished basement of the Old House.) Some more food motifs emerged: the steak tartare at Odeon and pasta puttanesca, namely. Emmie, a publishing big wig in London, wanted to know about Drew's balls. We talked about Luke's novel Theft, a kind of 19th century Brexit novel which Lauren read and to which she gives two thumbs up (alhtough why you would care about her book reviews is beyond me). Lauren tried with increasing desperation to impress the Brits with her knowledge of English esoterica. We talk about Karl Ove's desire to be as cool as English band guys. Then Luke gives us the DL on the different numbers of BBC Radios and Christian (reclining in bed for most of this) pops in to give a reading of his essay about BBC Radio. We are all enamored of the Shipping Forecast.
plugs: Lauren was on Silver Screen video and talked about Stellan Skarsgard and Winnie the Pooh, perhaps of interest to struggle listeners?
email us: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
see you on the other side
Fistula with Walnut Sauce (ft. Delicious Tacos)
After a run of guests who are total sweethearts in addition to being huge fans of the show & Knausgaard, Lauren and Drew, longing for some friction, welcome the notorious sex writer & Knausgaard skeptic Delicious Tacos to the pod. Turns out the pseudonymous de Sade actually bears a lot of similarities to Knaus (albeit much hornier) - but can L&D convince DT that KOK is actually pretty OK?
cheat sheet:
0:00 - Drew expatiates on the Jewish summer camp ritual of "Minty Balls"
9:20 - DT shows up and and we transition quite seamlessly from Minty Balls to Prostate Nodule. Prayers up for DT.
27:43 - Lauren tries to situate DT within the Every Man/Underground Man spectrum (or is it a dichotomy? who gives a shit) and we somehow end up talking about Evangelion and Sally Rooney
40:57 - Lauren critiques DT's (disturbingly?) ripped physique and Drew tries to liken DT's relentless winnowing of his own form to the relentless reduction and editing that powers his prose as evident in his tightly-structured novel FINALLY, SOME GOOD NEWS
1:18:42 - Lauren makes the mistake of inviting DT to join us for the first ever OUR STRUGGLE PERSONALS SECTION.
Thank you to Delicious Tacos! We had a great time & we sincerely hope the diagnosis is benign.
1ST ANNIVERSARY CALL-IN SHOW (PT. 2)
Drew is shirtless and eating 5% Fage. Lauren walks us through her coffee making process. We respond to a series of increasingly deranged missives and talk Marguerite Duras, Pirates of the Caribbean, Little Rascals, situationism, Morrissey in Sweden, spinach, fapping to Wallace Shawn. We promise to not do this again for another year.
1ST ANNIVERSARY CALL-IN SHOW (PT. 1)
Well we were GOING to do this all in one go but then Drew supposedly got recognized at local watering hole Clandestino by a listener who took him to the underworld (brooklyn) and I guess something unspeakable ensued because Drew showed up an hour late to our recording session and looked and sounded like absolute death. It actually made for some pretty good content though, Drew was delirious and rambling and spent the first half hour recapping his journey to Clandestino in Knausgaardian levels of excruciating detail including everything he ate and drank.
We finally get to listener call-ins at 33:20 if you want to skip ahead (although if you do we'll be offended). We both do fit checks and provide our fall fashion forecast; answer a question about live shows; hear of an Amis sighting; are scolded by someone apparently calling in from the bottom of an abandoned coal mine in the northern England; and listen to a dispatch from friend of the pod Dean Kissick, calling in from sunny Italy!
We will get to the rest of your call-ins next week! This was very fun and we can't wait to respond to more listener missives. See you on the other side!
OUTRO: "Talking Karl Ove Blues," written and performed by listener Bob from the North Country
contact: @OurStrugglePod on twitter; teixeira dot lauren at gmail; deohringer at gmail
Free On The Inside (ft. Donald Morrison)
We're back! After their triumphant NYC debut, Lauren is back in DC, Drew's moved into Morningside Heights with his Jane Goodall-fancying roommate, and they're ready to chat Grandma's shit death house with their pal Donny Morrissey, an investigative journalist and fan of the show who was first K-pilled some years ago during a stint in county jail for heroin possession. This is a classic struggle session, with equal parts textual analysis and Martin anus riffing. You're going to want to shoot this one into your veins, listener!
NOTE FOR THE AUDIO FREAKS: There was a weird rustling sound on Donny's end to begin with but it's resolved by 38:40 so skip ahead to there if you really can't stand it (although you will miss a lot of good riffing).
0:00 - Lauren and Drew convene early to catch up and plug Our Struggle's 1ST ANNIVERSARY CALL IN SHOW, the deadline for which is August 21 (GOOGLE VOICE NUMBER: 443-584-6486). We've been getting a lot of delightful missives from listeners and would love to get more. So call in! Especially if you can help Lauren interpret her MRI report, a dramatic reading of which she gives at 8:15.
14:00 - Our boy Donny beams in from his Marc Maron-style LA garage and we quickly stumble upon an excerpt from Christopher Hitchens' memoir about being horny for Margaret Thatcher and definitely not horny at all for his good chum Martin Anus. After pondering how Martin A would fare on Twitter, Donny tells us about his K-pill experience in the clink (interestingly he couldn't Pynchonpill himself, even locked up for 23 hours a day) and Drew whips out the James Wood blurb on prison literature. Does the cleaning grandma's alcoholic shit death house section of Book 1 have a certain prison lit quality, in which every minor detail takes on great world building significance?
1:20:39 - Lauren, Drew and Donny sat sail upon a sea of cleaning products, or is it a ocean of meaningless? At any rate we try to draw out what we feel is one of the most important paradigms in Book 1, about the erosion of meaning over time. We read from some of the most iconic passages in the book, about childhood, construction cranes, crabs. A lot of roasting of Yngve in this passage for everything from his outfits to his sleepwalking to his lutefisk eating -- the latter of which inspires us to interrogate our own relationships to fish.
2:10:10 - After what is surely an unhealthy amount of on-topic discussion, our three close readers lapse back into digression and chat neck pain, the notorious JC episode, Donny's hot take re: jail vs. prison. We spend at least a quarter of an hour discussing height percentiles with the help of tall.life, ultimately arriving at the conclusion that Lauren is taller than Drew.
Thank you for listening! As always, write in to us at teixeira.lauren@gmail.com or deohringer@gmail.com. And please do call in! You have three days left!!!
Remsen Street Rawdog (ft. Christian Lorentzen)
You are listening to an excerpt of what was in fact a deep, deep--geologically deep--hang: Drew and Krithika bonded over incest and heroin in the work of Edward St. Aubyn, Lauren smoked Lorentzen’s Camel Blues, and the critic himself typed away and commented on the mingling of smoke and afternoon sunlight in his study. In a state of classic Our Struggle delirium, Drew and Lauren finally vowed to face that evening’s bar hang without chemical aid--raw-dogging life, as the kids say. In that vulnerable, intimate and perhaps diseased spirit, we humbly present our first-ever in-the-flesh episode, REMSEN STREET RAWDOG with Christian Lorentzen and Krithika Varagur
Islets in the Flood (ft. Rosie Gray)
~~~LAUREN'S HOUSEKEEPING SECTION~~~
Deadline for our 1st anniversary call-in show is AUGUST 14th. Call us or email us with your questions, comments, concerns, parody songs:
Voicemail: 443-584-6486
Email: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
T-SHIRTS: Help Lauren go (deeper) into the black by buying a t-shirt! All shirts come with a handwritten, personalized, DNA-laden post-it. Buy one today! ourstruggle.store
~~~DREW'S VOLUMINOUS NOTES SECTION~~~
Updike’s spunkcrusted house is yet another paternal demesne Martin Anus, our anxious Bloomian fils, must scrub and bleach and empty. This Augean task (following Wood following Bellow) mandated, then, that Martin purchase Denis de Rougemont’s Love In The Western World, which comes adorned with a rather ejaculatory blurb from Updike himself. Martin finds the book immediately intoxicating--after all it’s from a time before jargon had colonized scholarship, when criticism was an enchanting expedition. It explores troubadours and heretical Catholic sects, there’s something about love itself being a cult of suffering and death, but Martin doesn’t trouble himself over abstractions and theories.
He reads with appetite, as though the book were a novel unfurling grandly before him. De Rougemont performs a wide-eyed reading through of the myth of Tristan and Isolde; so Martin goes to Dunkin Donuts and listens to Wagner in the drive-thru. Oh, right, the Tristan chord; slightly more intriguing in Radiohead’s iteration, perhaps. He loses interest, switches to Uncle Neil, beautiful bright eunuch sludge sounds: once there was a friend of mine who died a thousand deaths. He’s supposed to be thinking about that flat Nord again, though--it’s Sunday: time, as Lauren says, to get on the horn. Rosie Gray’s coming on, another supplicant, buzzing with ideas about My Struggle ˆvia Grey Gardens. Cathars and askesis are so much chatter right now. Myth, enchantment, wonder, spells--his iced coffee gives him this little litany.
Rosie and Lauren, it turns out, are ready for wonderment and mythos. They rhapsodize on Karl Ove’s diluvian fantasies and guillotine imaginings as they work their way towards the squalid paternal domain. Grandma’s delirious, the sofa’s caked with shit, this is almost a horror movie. Rosie delivers her thoughts on the rich decrepitude of Little Edie and Big Edie and helpfully reminds Martin Anus of Martin Amis’s hideous and excruciating orthodontia (as featured in Experience, the only book, we learn, that has induced tears in M. Anus). They realize that Karl Ove probably can’t tolerate the existence of Belgium. Lauren makes some perceptive connections between literary flaneurs and detective fiction. And Martin Anus tries to show that this episode’s passage traces a shift, in Karl Ove’s mind---a shift, perhaps, that’s also embodied in the novel form itself--from the mythically grand to the mundanely specific.
Boys Keep Struggling
Performed and Recorded by Andrew Ohringer in His Mother's Wood-Paneled Basement
Vanguard of the Supplicants (ft. Torrey Peters)
We were a little perplexed when Torrey Peters came groveling before us to come on the show. She’d written a best-selling novel with big topical themes--and other odd things like scenes, characters, plot. Why did she want to talk to two people who’ve devoted their own discourse to a seemingly shapeless, semi-essayistic inventory of one Norwegian’s life?
Torrey quickly provided her Scandinavian lit bona fides--which is to say she gave us detailed accounts of her homosocial and romantic adventures with various laconic Nords. We hear about dreary ferry rides, a house of forlorn beauty she would never get to see, Per Peterson’s candlelit dinner routine. These details allowed Lauren to make the first-ever comparison between My Struggle and Brideshead Revisited....
We tried to learn a little bit about the uses and operations of so-called conventional writing. Were we wrong to call easily translatable prose bland and insipid? (Actually, it was our pickly-prickly guest J Cohen who advanced that argument, and Torrey has some grounded, considered rebuttals for him here.)
Still, we wondered, what had Torrey learned from the Knausgaardian messiness? She showed us how his odd lack of emotional differentiation helped her render scenes of dissociation in Detransition, Baby. And why did she beg to come on our show after all? Torrey told us that her Knausgaardianism has estranged her from her own community--trans writers, it turns out, don’t really want to talk about My Struggle. Which is strange, since, as Torrey reveals, the series is a naively rigorous documentation of the male code; its essaysistic form allows us to see the anxiety and barely-concealed messiness of male performance. “There’s so much gender there,” Torrey says (ie, dudes want to perform verbal guitar solos on Hitlerian themes).
We also asked her to give the official trans community statement on tinned fish and the hot girls who consume it.
NOTE FROM LAUREN: BUY OUR T-SHIRT! CERTAIN SIZES HAVE ALREADY SOLD OUT. ourstruggle.store
PS. GET IN TOUCH! teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com; and as always the Our Struggle hotline 443-584-6486 - call-in show records in August!
Imaginary Boardwalks (ft. Joshua Cohen)
Our Struggle returns! It's 100 degrees outside so come out to the shore and take a trip under the boardwalk with us and our very special guest Joshua Cohen (author of The Netanyahus; buy it now)!
A Book of Questions about our season 2 premiere:
Why is Joshua Cohen compared only to the dead?
What is the sound of one ball-sack slapping against wet tile in a banya?
Why does Lauren think the past is quaint?
Is auto-fiction solipsistic and foreclosed?
How does JC avoid setting off the bullshit detectors of his household gods?
Where has all the passionate nihilism gone?
Why do semicolons induce impotence?
Why does The Netanyahus contain so many disquisitions?
What’s the problem with pastiche, bricolage and collage?
Why didn’t Lauren participate in boardwalk necking?
Why don’t critics discuss the ghostliness of writers’ anonymous work?
What does it feel like when James Wood reviews your book?
How can Drew regrow his foreskin and escape the limitations of his MFA?
Why does liberalism end in martyrdom?
Why does JC think Time’s Arrow is Martin Amis’s best book?
What was so hysterical about hysterical realism? What are the dangers of comic exaggeration?
Can words enact an incantatory violence?
Is My Struggle merely narcotic?
Do you want to get in touch? Email us: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com ; deohringer@gmail.com
Do you want to leave us a voicemail for our 1st anniversary show? Call 443-584-6486
Psst.........
ourstruggle.store
Longing, Death, Form (Season 1 Sparknotes: Themes and Motifs)
In the wake of their newfangled fame, Lauren and Drew look back at the themes and characters of Season 1 and attend to correspondence from fans and detractors.
Sample of Drew’s “intricate notes”:
-Cold open w/Drew’s senioritis suicide note
-game of pricks
--season 1 finale montage badinage
--things we can’t talk about; a final solution for goldendoodles; reddit pedants; lit critic lothario
--We respond to a subterranean missive from an anti- fan with extremist prose style
--Unmentionable word leads into discussion re non-rhotic safe space of dunkin donuts
--Lauren bans disquisitions then proceeds to deliver a disquisition on Shakespearean pedophile code Little Rascals (1994)
--Drew: Shakespearean endings make me feel eerie
--Closing: Lauren hopes for laced lidocaine, Buzzcocks “why can’t I touch it”
CALL THE OUR STRUGGLE HOTLINE: 443-584-6486
SEND OBSCURELY INCENSED MISSIVES: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com
SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE (SEASON TWO)
Sheepdog Brain (ft. Dean Kissick)
Surely one of our most Knausgaardian episodes yet - we spent four hours last Sunday afternoon - a rainy, unseasonably cold day in the mid-Atlantic - chatting with brilliant art critic and prolific croissant eater Dean Kissick. Manhattan traffic hummed outside of Dean's window, we took a yogurt break followed by a coffee break, there was a brief drama involving an overheated MacBook computer, and we of course witnessed Dean don and doff his Argyle sweater no less than three times (although we did not catch a glimpse of his supposed abs). This was the last episode recorded before we became boldface names in Vanity Fair so treasure it - we fully plan to go whole-hog on vacuous literary world prestige mongering in coming episodes!
TECHNICAL NOTE: You will notice a whirring sound around one hour ten but it gets fixed after a few minutes (Dean cools off his computer) so if you're one of those audio freaks who always complains about sound quality just push through, or alternatively, get a life
cheat sheet:
0:00 - A namecheck of the Dominique Ansel bakery (sponsor of the pod) somehow leads into a discussion of LinkedIn stalking and how LinkedIn is in fact the most Knausgaardian of the social networks.
19:15 - Dean, a hardcore strugglehead, recounts his initiation into the word of Knausgaard and explains how the books changed his life. We try to figure out what Knausgaard means by "form" (all literature "must submit to form"? but why does MS not seem to submit to anything) and meanwhile uncover a barnyard motif in this passage involving sheep, sheepdogs, ducks and more. Also: some inside baseball on the secret affinity between alt-lit and raw milk.
1:09:00 - We begin talking about what is probably the most important idea in the My Struggle series (or at least the first two books), a concept Knausgaard most often refers to as "longing" but is often associated or synonymous with "inexhaustibility," "boundlessness," "the unmentionable." What is the Longing? What does it have to do with death, with art, with basement jackoff parlors (of the sort so vividly detailed in this passage)?
1:24:00 - Touching off from Knausgaard's famous passage about the Constable sketch of the clouds, Dean brilliantly articulates Knausgaard's particular taste in art and explains why he thinks Knausgaard is one of the best art critics today. What does Knausgaard have that art criticism in general has lost? And what does his predilection for "naive" objective realist landscapes have to do with his own writing project?
2:06:00 - Dean takes us through what we believe to be the culmination of the passage, Knausgaard's meditation on discovery and exploration. The whole world has been "experienced" through representations, making it seem smaller, and thus enclosed, unenchanted, incestuous. How has the endless flood of images stunted art and literature? Is there anything left outside of the algorithm? Dean has some optimistic answers!
2:25:00 - We plan our upcoming live struggle session in Koreatown and Dean gives a glowing review of our upcoming t-shirts
Thank you for listening!! As always you can reach out to us (but please be more deferential now that we're Vanity Fair stars) at teixeira.lauren@gmail.com or deohringer@gmail.com. We love hearing from listeners!
OUTRO - BINGO DOG SONG BY FLICKBOX NURSERY RHYMES
Minutt for Minutt
WE ARE BACK! After a dire situation earlier this month, Our Struggle returns, as lo-fi and perfunctory as ever! It's just us boys again this ep but be assured we have some VERY prestigious and intellectual guests on the horizon, so if you're one of those dweebs who listens to our show for so-called "literary criticism" and "thoughtful discussion of the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard" just hold on a little longer.
MAJOR shout out to "The financial times of Norway" DAGENS NAERINGSLIV AKA DN which recently published a write-up of Our Struggle that really captured the essence of our podcast. We love our new Norwegian listeners and hope to be flown out to your beautiful country someday for a North Sea oil wealth-funded panel.
HOUSEKEEPING: I forgot to mention this on the pod but we are collecting voicemails at our google voice number for our eventual (1st anniversary?) call-in show: 443-584-6486
cheat sheet:
0:00 - Lauren and Drew velkommen our new Norwegian listeners and discuss their newfound Norwegian notoriety.
8:20 - A digression about Elvis Costello turns into a full-blown music segment in which we listen to Costello, Belle & Sebastian and Jonathan Richman and reflect on the richness of the Scottish indie pop tradition.
19:08 - We struggle through the first five or so pages of part two of book one. Karl Ove is writing in his studio in Stockholm and sees Jesus in the parquet, takes a cigarette break and observes the morning rush; does he feel a part of the city or detached from it?
57:00 - Lauren and Drew lose their minds imagining Karl Ove engaging with nostalgia bait memes
1:08:40 - Huge thank you to 6'4" Norwegian alpha male friend of the pod Robert Rust for linguistic coaching!
Thank you for listening! As always, feel free to write in with your thoughts, questions and Norwegian memes to Lauren (teixeira.lauren@gmail.com) and/or Drew (deohringer@gmail.com). We love hearing from you!
Seersucker Semiotics (Trauma Processing Special)
After a run of well-received episodes with prestigious guests and a Bookforum mention we are ready for our slow decline! It's just us boys on this pod, testing out our new mics and recording software, beginning to drift imperceptibly away from our lo-fi roots & thus our scruffy charm and ultimately, our integrity. But for now we're talking about trauma! As listeners who follow us on so-called Twitter probably know, Lauren was attacked on the Metro by a mentally ill man a couple weeks ago and wrote a very famous 4000 word essay about it in the style of Knausgaard, kind of. ALSO: We finally return to the Book and finish Part One, a miracle praise Adonai.
HOUSEKEEPING: We have a google voice number now for you to leave messages for our eventual call-in episode. It is 443-584-6486
cheat sheet:
0:00 - Lauren is eating a gluten free snickerdoodle; Drew reflects on his appreciation of the Steppe and its peoples.
9:30 - The trauma unpacking begins; Lauren ever so briefly lets down her defenses, reveals a crack in her facade or a chink in her armor, or is it a soft underbelly? At any rate vulnerability is definitely momentarily glimpsed. Drew interviews Lauren about her anti-trauma-essay and Lauren uses the phrase "brain colonized by X" about 8,000,000 times.
40:00 - Drew reflects on his recent trauma of being initiated into the "dripping wound" that is Twitter. We try to probe what exactly makes Twitter so alienating and upsetting - why is it not a utopian collaborative literary exercise? Something to do maybe with commodification or narcissism, two intimately linked phenomena of course....
57:00 - We have our first struggle session in a long time (bless me Father for I have sinned); Karl Ove takes Hanne to the DSA meeting; springtime arrives but not in an annoying way; Karl Ove attends his father's weird divorced Midsommar-like party/ritual and Part One ends. What a ride!
Thanks so much for listening! As always feel free to reach out with your questions, comments, and expressions of concern/solidarity at teixeira.lauren@gmail.com or deohringer@gmail.com. And do stay tuned for a special guest next week......
OUTRO: The Stranglers- Golden Brown
Roast Chicken Feedback (ft. Leo Robson)
Critic Leo Robson is our erudite and eloquent guide as we lose ourselves in the estuaries and marshes of Henry James’s sinuous “blue river of truth.” We begin in the archives of Leo’s G-chat and Whatsapp messages, where he first heard--and ignored--whispers of KOK’s boundless literary project. His indifference breaks down, however, after he and friend of the pod Christian Lorentzen take a desultory post-stag-party walk through Barcelona. A lugubrious Leo, sick of John Berger’s Marxist reading of Picasso, opens his Blackberry to find that James Wood has written an essay on Perr Petersen, which makes him think of that other Norwegian, the one with the endless maybe-novel underway, which leads him back to Lauren and Drew, who discover their friendship is coterminous with My Struggle’s publication history: they met, devoted listeners will know, over a drunken discussion about The Queen is Dead in summer 2010, just after Volume 1 had appeared on American Shores. Where are they now, in their actual reading of My Struggle itself? Leo asks. “I don’t fucking know,” says Lauren.
Leo’s self-described “big data” survey of Knausgaardiana elicits comparisons between chronological expansions and contractions in My Struggle and Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood”--are these examples of “big data” narratives? Richard Brody will soon be coming on the pod soon to anatomize Linklater’s use of time.
Leo suggests that Harold Brodkey and Adam Mars-Jones might be seen as Knausgaard’s precursors in the aesthetic tradition of what Wood lyrically deemed “autopsied minutiae” and “psycho-pointillism” (Lauren jeers at the latter term). Drew takes this opportunity to proclaim Brodkey his “hero.” Drew and Leo discuss a near-mythical public conversation between James Wood and Brodkey, held in London in 1991. Link: https://sounds.bl.uk/Arts-literature-and-performance/ICA-talks/024M-C0095X0801XX-0100V0
We then embark on a disorderly Odyssey into Knausgaard’s reception in the anglosphere--and, somehow, into the history of realism and its discontents. For Schylla and Charybdis, we have David Shields and V.S. Pritchett (or something like that). Along the way, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Frederick Jameson help us pick apart the itemized thinginess ("choisisme") of Knausgaard’s project: are things differentiated? Are things merely commodified, or, in their very banality, redeemed? Robbe-Grillet and his New Novelists provide an obsessively textural counterpoint to Knausgaard’s seemingly blank litanies of objects and products.
Geoff Dyer takes a break from writing a blurb for Lauren’s eponymous Easter roast chicken to serve as another formal model for My Struggle and its reverberations. Like Brodkey and Mars-Jones, in his work, “nothing happens in a really a big way.” Here Drew invokes sensuous sun worshipper John Updike who, via a review of The Adventures of a Photographer in Los Platas by Adolfo Bioy Cesares, provides us with these weirdly apt sentences: “The novel arrests our attention and wins our respect by the things it disdains to do: it does not overdramatize or moralize, it denies events a deeper meaning. A clean if desolate flatness results”
Does KoK fit into David Shields’ anti-novelistic canon of Reality Hunger? Lauren and Leo get into some narratological weeds: is Karl Ove an ironized character, or a source of Shields-approved wisdom writing?
Things are rambling along nicely until Drew “artlessly opens a can of worms.” Defending the so-called novelistic tradition against Shields’ claims of lifeless conventionality and formal tidiness, he brandishes a long quotation from V.S. Pritchett’s essay on Dead Souls (first collected in In My Good Books, 1942) :
“The modern novel has reached such a pitch of competence and shape
Hot in Translation (ft. Benjamin Moser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
We did it folks. We somehow got a Pulitzer Prize winner to go on the pod. And can I just say? Not only is my close personal friend Ben (as I call him, because of how tight we are) a Pulitzer Prize winner, he is also a PERFECT 10 (google image search him). If you don't feel like googling him let me briefly list his credentials: he wrote the DEFINITIVE biography of my soul sister (and possible friend/lover of my grandfather?? we'll get into that one next time) Clarice Lispector and translated many of her works from Portuguese into English, spurring a resurgence of interest in Lispector in the English speaking world. He also recently published the DEFINITIVE biography of Susan Sontag for which - and I would like to emphasize this again - he was awarded none other than the Pulitzer Prize. Heard of it??
Drew and I spent two hours chatting with Ben, who was calling in from his home in the French countryside (!!), and let me say it was one of our funnest recording sessions yet. I think you will like this one, listener!
cheat sheet:
0:00 - Opening remarks: Drew is moving to New York City (lol); Ben was initially confused about Drew's gender; Lauren opens up about her passion for Adidas
29:20 - Ben outlines his theory of hot people in literature. How important is being hot when it comes to writing (and more importantly, getting published)? Can you tell if a hot person wrote a certain text in a blind test? How did being extremely hot benefit Lispector and Sontag? Also: Lauren and Ben bond over their shared appreciation of Knausgaard's hotness (this is the closest we get to discussing My Struggle in this episode sorry not sorry).
1:03:03 - We have a very interesting discussion about literary translation using Ben's experience translating Lispector and also one page of Lauren's grandfather's novel "Antonio" as examples. We tackle some thorny questions at the heart of translation/translation studies, most of which boil down to: is translation an art or a craft? Ben comes down on the latter side and pushes back against "tenure-track mystifications" of the work of the translation, which argues is actually pretty straightforward*. Also: some spicy takes on Sapir-Whorf.
1:37:10 - Ben encourages Drew to implement a rigorous traditional canon for his high school English class. What follows is an arch-reactionary discussion of the Canon and how good it is. Also Ben says he would cast me as the Wife of Bathe in The Canterbury Tales and I don't know whether to be offended or not because I can't remember anything that happened in there.
Thank you for listening! Ben is pretty easy to find on Google and on Instagram (where he's a Beowulf influencer) but I also highly recommend his substack which I am obsessed with. It is the only substack I actually read every issue of. Impossibly erudite but also funny and accessible.
As always you can reach out to me (teixeira.lauren@gmail.com) or Drew (deohringer@gmail.com) with your questions comments and concerns. Happy to hear from you!
*Here is the Iris Murdoch quote from The Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts that I botched:
If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. The honesty and humility required of the student -- not to pretend to know what one does not know--is the pre
First of the gang to struggle
Performed and recorded by Andrew Ohringer in his mother's basement
Johnson's Johnson (ft. James Griffiths)
IT'S THE RETURN OF THE WELSH WARRIOR! The Duke of Cardiff himself, prestigious CNN journalist James Griffiths is back on the pod and folks?? We got a little off topic!! But who gives a shit, you don't pay for this (yet) and what is a Knausgaard podcast without copious digression (the imitative fallacy can fuck right off)!!
Due what I am self diagnosing as fatigue from the J&J vaccine I am too tired to write a full fledged recap but some things we covered in this were: Drew's guide to seduction by email; being Eskimo brothers with Jonathan Safran Foer; Elif Batuman and ill-fated campus romances; the disappointing lack of defecation scenes in My Struggle; Morrissey's solo career; and of course Robert Caro's LBJ biography which James has been reading recently and in which he has found some interesting Knausgaard parallels.
OUTRO: First of the Gang to Die - Morrissey (cover by Andrew Ohringer)
On Whale Steaks and Quinoa (ft. Alicia Kennedy)
If you have listened to even one episode of this show you know that we are obsessed with Karl Ove's meals, from the open sandwiches and rissoles of his youth to the smug quinoa salads he avoids as an adult in Stockholm. Well guess what? We somehow got prestigious food writer (and KOK superfan) Alicia Kennedy to agree to come on the pod to talk spreads in My Struggle. This was truly one of our funnest episodes yet - enjoy!
cheat sheet:
14:40 - We tackle one of the most perplexing paradoxes of My Struggle: Karl Ove repeatedly professing indifference to food ("I couldn't give a rat's ass about food") while at the same time giving us lengthy, detailed accounts of his meals, such as the gourmet lobster dinner (Jamie Oliver's recipe) he cooks for the New Year's Eve dinner party in Book 2. And how do his kitchen exploits track with his feelings about his respective ex-wives?
25:30 - In the beginning of book 2, Karl Ove famously lays into the Swedes for believing they can "eat their way into being a better person" with quinoa and bean salads. Alicia, who advocates for veganism and vegetarianism in her writing, tells us her thoughts on these tirades (spoiler: she is pro-Knausgaard). Also: some self-hating Millennial bashing. Why can't Millennials just make normal meals?? Why does everything have to be an elaborate Instagram-worthy concoction or a viral TikTok pasta??
50:00 - We talk about a passage in which Karl Ove professes nostalgia for whale steaks and lung mash and the complicated matter of balancing nostalgia against ethics in our own eating lives. Alicia also talks about how she prefers Karl Ove's food writing over that of professional food writers, as he writes about food in a way that's matter of fact and mundane rather than fetishistic.
Thank you to Alicia for joining us! You can find her excellent newsletter here. Also: the Jonathan Nunn piece she recommended.
As always feel free to write in to me at teixeira.lauren@gmail.com or Drew at deohringer@gmail.com. What are some great moments of food writing in literature? I couldn't think of any on the pod bc my brain has been at 60% lately although of course as soon as we ended the call I thought of Murakami and pasta....
The Power of Lo-OVE
Our Struggle returns, and this time it's "just us boys"! This is a vibes-packed episode that is sure to alienate any new so-called intellectual listeners we may have gained via our show with esteemed Gen X critic Christian L but who gives a shit, we're vibing out like it's the first weekend of 1985 and Dad has left us a basket of fresh shrimp and a 500 krone note while he's away at a seminar.
The passage we cover starts at 141 in Kindle, not sure what it is in paper sorry
cheat sheet:
12:54 - One of our most ghastly segments yet as Karl Ove consumes liver pate on toast while lying about eating shrimp in aspic at the NYE party. CW: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS OF SHRIMP IN ASPIC
37:15 - A truly inscrutable passage involving a visit to Grandma and Grandpa and a tablecloth
51:06 - Dad is away at a seminar, thus kicking off a remarkably and delightfully 80s teen movie segment of My Struggle (and one of Lauren and Drew's favorites)
SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS: I have created an Our Struggle playlist on Spotify to help you achieve maximum vibeage after the episode. Listen and let yourself be transported to a sunny Saturday morning in Kristiansand, Norway in 1985, you’re walking around town as faces flash by and the world is full of possibility…..
As always, we would love to hear from you! Feel free to reach out at teixeira.lauren@gmail.com or deohringer@gmail.com
Game of Pricks (struggle)
Drew's cover of our theme song, Guided by Voices' "Game of Pricks", recorded from his desolate boarding school cloister in Pennsburg
Parquet Elegy (ft. Christian Lorentzen)
Our Struggle returns, and this time with highly prestigious guest Christian Lorentzen! In addition to being our new token Gen X friend, Christian is a famous literary critic whose work appears regularly in Harper's, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and other high falutin venues. He has not only reviewed book 6 of My Struggle for TLS but SMOKED CIGARETTES WITH THE MAN HIMSELF during an interview for New York magazine.
In this episode we discuss one of the most memorable passages of My Struggle book 1, the beer on the hill saga. If you would like to read along this passage starts at roughly page 62 in kindle and page 56 in analog.
cheat sheet:
1:00 - Christian recounts his meeting with KOK and confirms that the man is indeed six and a half feet tall. Also: some NYC literary world color including horny Jeffrey Eugenides
13:22 - We start discussing the amazingly mundane hero's journey that takes up about 20% of this book, of teen Karl Ove smuggling beer to a new year's eve party. How does this section fit into the paradigm Christian outlines for us about the transition in contemporary literature, over the past few decades, from romanticism with a leg in fantasy to romanticism of the banal? Also, some meta-critical discussion of how Knausgaard became an international literary sensation, in light of Christian's infamous 2019 meta critical essay in Harper's
45:30 - Touching off from Knausgaard's description of the "hostile" rooms in the family home, we get into an interesting discussion of what might be called Knausgaardian essentialism - his technique of trying to make something of nothing by probing the essences of both people as well as inanimate objects as mundane as gravel.
1:08:00 - We discuss the parquet factory as a motif in this book and get nostalgic about light industry.
Thank you for listening! And if you would like more of Christian, you can find him on twitter @xlorentzen. He has a piece about Phillip Roth upcoming in the new Bookforum and you can find his piece about literature in the Trump era for Harper's here.
As always, would love to hear from listeners - you can DM us on Twitter @OurStrugglePod or reach us at teixeira.lauren@gmail.com or deohringer@gmail.com
intro: Guided by Voices - Game of Pricks
outro: Guided by Voices- Game of Pricks covered by Andrew Ohringer
In The Land Of The PSYOPs
After a nearly two month hiatus, Our Struggle returns! Lauren and Drew are back and spicier than ever, delivering for you our timely review of KOK's new essay collection "In the Land of the Cyclops" (which to be clear neither of us have read) before getting on with struggle session 1.2 covering Karl Ove's My Struggle book 1 reflections on his diaper-laden domestic life in the aforementioned land of the cyclops (Sweden).
cheat sheet:
0:00 - Drew connects with a guy on Instagram
8:00 - We review KOK's new essay collection based off of one excerpt of an NYT review that a listener sent to me. We also read some correspondence from a Norwegian listener about an anti-Knausgaard pamphlet entitled "The Knausgaard Code." Thank you so much for writing in, would love to keep hearing from listeners!
34:00 - Terri Gross drops in to interview Drew about his new novel, "The Gay Quebecois"
41:20 - Finally getting into the meat of the struggle session, we discuss KOK's attitude toward his children and his bold admission that they "do not provide enough meaning to fill a whole life." How does fatherhood and domestic life figure into the My Struggle project? Does Knausgaard really wish he could go back to the paradigm of the 19th-20th century male genius, free to pursue his artistic passions and unburdened by family responsibility? Also, we draw some very accurate and legitimate parallels between KOK and Louis C.K. and propose a CBS thursday night-style sitcom adaptation of My Struggle.