Our Struggle

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 [email protected]; [email protected]

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; [email protected]

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!

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: [email protected]; [email protected]

As they (are legally obligated) say in Montreal: A bientot!

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:

[email protected]; [email protected]

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."

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."

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

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: [email protected]; [email protected]

Until next time --