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. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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!  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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.  --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

***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 ;) ------------------------------------ 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!!!! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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- --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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<3 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! --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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." --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

In which we discuss Mating (Norman Rush's luminous 1991 novel), and mating. Happy Valentine's Day PS. Please buy our mug --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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 --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

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!  --- 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 -- --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message

Original tune by Drew Ohringer, with some Zombies at the end --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ourstrugglepod/message