Our Struggle

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