Our Struggle

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.                                                                                

Happy Thanksgiving (and to our Romanian listeners: happy thursday!)

Last week we welcomed our friend, Hong Kong-based CNN correspondent James Griffiths, to the pod for what may be our smartest episode yet. Apparently the scintillating genius of our show is what spurred James to finally crack open My Struggle: A Death in the Family, so we interviewed him about his journey down the K-hole. Did the book live up to his expectations? And how did it stack up next to KOK's famous nyt magazine piece "My Saga," which James has also read?

Drew was halfway into a bottom-shelf bottle of Zinfandel called "The Federalist" (really) during this one so be warned the discussion strays often and egregiously from KOK. From what I remember some of the things we talked about were: French Canada; coups (both d'etat and other varieties); geriatric ballsacs; an encounter Drew had with Fareed Zakaria; European-style racism; Chinese phyllo-semitism; and potential sponsors of the pod (if you're the company that makes numbing dick wipes please reach out).

Thank you so much to James for bearing with us. I very much recommend checking out his book, "The Great Firewall of China," which would absolutely be top of my list of I was capable of reading books other than Knausgaard. He also has another book coming out next year, "Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language" which he promises me will explain why Welsh people don't use normal vowels.

As always, feel free to reach out to me at [email protected]. Would love to hear more from listeners about their journey taking the K-pill and possibly read excerpts of those testimonials on the pod!

Finally, if you are an older man who would like to share a picture of your wizened nutsack with Drew, you can find him at [email protected]

Future recipient of the Kamala Harris Grant for Literary Podcasts is back! In this episode we finally get into the belly of the mackerel with a scene-by-scene breakdown of the first 15 or so pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: A Death in the Family. This is a new thing we're trying because we realized we hadn't actually talked about MS yet. But please be assured the interviews with people who have not read Knausgaard will continue!

We've been getting a lot of nice listener feedback and would love to keep hearing from you! Comments? Concerns? Guest suggestions? Thoughts on which of the four open sandwiches of the apocalypse you would choose? Especially if you're one of our 7 Israeli listeners, please write in! You can email Lauren ([email protected]), DM us on Twitter, or respond to our newsletter, which you should subscribe to if you haven't yet - ourstruggle.substack.com. (Please no comments on the audio in this episode, I forgot to wear headphones and make Drew as well so that's why it sucks and I'm sorry)

cheat sheet:

0:00 - Drew and Lauren ponder Mein Kampf vs. Harry Potter and their place in the canon of popular YA lit

9:14 - Finally we get to the famous first lines of book one! We discuss how these first few pages are composed, jewel-like and therefore strangely unlike the rest of this odd ramshackle annex of a book.

20:16 - Beginning of an interesting discussion about childhood details about how small observations made in childhood last through the rest of your life. We talk about pieces of media seen as children that made a huge impression on us as children (Lauren - 1974 Murder on the Orient Express; Drew - Tubgirl)

37:15 - We draw out one of Knausgaard's semi-thesis statements, about the inverse relationship between perspective and meaning. How crucial is 'epistemological openness' to the Knausgaardian project?

56:20 - An absolutely gruesome recap of a typical evening meal in the Knausgaard household in the 1970s. This somehow leads into one of our most rigorous intellectual discussions yet, regarding exactly which foods do and do not constitute so-called 'heterosexual cuisine.'

Thank you for listening and sorry again about the audio!

MUSIC - GUIDED BY VOICES 'Game of Pricks'

EDITING - LAUREN, THE MAN OF THE SHOW

The struggle continues in the third episode of OS as we attempt to bridge the America/Canada cultural divide in a conversation as wide-ranging as the breadth of the interior between Vancouver and St. Johns! Our guest is our new friend John Cullen, a Canadian, comedian and co-host of the Blocked Party podcast, which is by some metrics actually a more famous podcast than Our Struggle. John has done his homework for this episode and raises the salient question: Is Karl Ove Knausgaard actually just a tedious asshole? We talk about that for a while but also get into some cool discussions about Newfy culture, employee discounts at sporting goods stores, and soliciting Knausgaard on Cameo. Thank you to John for guesting and no thank you to Drew as usual!

The article discussed is "My Saga," a travelogue KOK wrote for the New York Times magazine in 2015.

Lauren messed up and lost the last part of the recording where John plugs his new album. For those interested, the name of his album is LONG STORIES FOR NO REASON and you can find it on iTunes and Spotify. You can also follow John on Twitter @cullenthecomic. Do it!!

It's our sophomore slump! In the second episode of Our Struggle, we welcome guest Brendan O'Kane, a renown sinologist and literary translator who has not only not read Knausgaard but adamantly refuses to. Can we convince him that early modern Chinese literature and My Struggle have more in common than he'd think?

0:00 - More fish talk. Drew had a canned fish phase; we predict another salmon-heavy diplomatic standoff between China and Norway.

21:24 - After spending way too much time looking for the part in My Struggle where Knausgaard describes prematurely ejaculating, we let Brendan talk about The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei 金瓶梅), a famous 16th century work of pornography. We then discuss the strangely common phenomenon of busting to death in early modern Chinese literature. (We actually do find a way to connect this back to Knausgaard)

37:49 - Drew ponders the dense materialism of Knausgaard and how he manages to preserve the "thinginess" or heftiness of objects - letting them come across as objects with material properties rather than lazy mimetic stand-ins. A discussion touching on IKEA furniture and sumptuary regulations in the Ming dynasty follows.

1:11:49 - Finally we discuss genre fiction and propose that literary fiction has actually just become its own genre with its own tropes. Maybe it's better to just write Amish teen vampire romance novels. 

MUSIC - GUIDED BY VOICES "GAME OF PRICKS" 

EDITING BY LAUREN, THE MAN OF THE SHOW

NOTE TO LISTENERS: DREW'S AUDIO GETS BETTER IN THE SECOND HALF I PROMISE

Call this episode the opposite of Norwegian cuisine because boy is it SPICY! In the pilot episode of Our Struggle we put the following institutions on blast: quinoa, Sweden, the New Yorker, and august literary critic James Wood (for being a beautiful genius :) ). This is a jam-packed episode that is sure to make you laugh AND make you contemplate your mortality. - so will James Wood give it a positive review? (Please come on the pod Professor Wood.)

Please feel free to reach out with your thoughts on the show. You can email us at knauscastpod at gmail or tweet at us/DM us on Twitter at OurStrugglePod. We also have an obligatory newsletter: subscribe to it at ourstruggle.substack.com.

cheat sheet:

2:28 - Lauren and Drew introduce themselves and talk about their reasons for starting the pod. Do we, in this moment, need Karl Ove Knausgaard more than ever? Our answer is yes, if only because of the fate currently befalling the overly hydrated quinoa eating Swedes.

10:57 - Our friend Robert Rust, a real Norwegian, calls into the show to teach us how to say the great man's name in the AUTHENTIC style of the fjord peoples. My pronunciation is perfect and Drew's sucks

22:32 - We get pretty deep into Norwegian cuisine. If you're like Karl Ove and fish makes you nauseous - maybe skip this section!

36:10 - Finally we start building out a theoretical framework for KOK with the help of close personal friend of the show James Wood. We discuss Wood's 2012 NEW yORKER essay on Karl Ove. Why is death so crucial to storytelling? Are contemporary novelists willfully avoiding the ultimate fact (their own demise) in their writing? Why do Lauren and Drew keep connecting quinoa with mortality?

INTRO MUSIC: Guided by Voices - Game of Pricks

Production by Lauren Teixeira, the Man of the show

IN this preview our friend Rob (a real Norwegian) teaches us how to say the great man's name in the AUTHENTIC style of the fjord peoples