Our Struggle

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.

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.

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.

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: Subscribe to Sam's substack Help us enliven our snack budget with mischief

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. 

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! 

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. 

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

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

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.

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-

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!

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: ourstruggle.store CONTACT: teixeira.lauren@gmail.com; deohringer@gmail.com

In which we discuss Mating (Norman Rush's luminous 1991 novel), and mating. Happy Valentine's Day PS. Please buy our mug

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

THIS HOLIDAY SEASON, HELP US WORSHIP MAMMON! Link to store ---- 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! ---- 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!

He was late; he always is. - Kyle C. doesn't seem too put off my his riff about misogyny in the kitchen, at least. - 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. - 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. - 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. - Never let her sit on a park bench, Drew says.

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

October 31, 2021 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." -- psst.... https://bookshop.org/shop/ourstruggle

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.