Our Struggle

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.

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

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 [email protected] or [email protected]. And please do call in! You have three days left!!!

~~~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: [email protected]; [email protected]

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.

Performed and Recorded by Andrew Ohringer in His Mother's Wood-Paneled Basement

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! [email protected]; [email protected]; and as always the Our Struggle hotline 443-584-6486 - call-in show records in August!

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: [email protected] ; [email protected]

Do you want to leave us a voicemail for our 1st anniversary show? Call 443-584-6486

Psst.........

ourstruggle.store

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: [email protected]; [email protected]

SEE YOU ON THE OTHER SIDE (SEASON TWO)

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 [email protected] or [email protected].  We love hearing from listeners!

OUTRO - BINGO DOG SONG BY FLICKBOX NURSERY RHYMES