Our Struggle

I have to go to Dayton Ohio in a second to visit my Aunt Bunny but long story short it was the afternoon of the Brooklyn Tote Bag Fest, Drew took shelter in the den of the Wizard of Remsen Street fka Christian Lorentzen and he podded from there while the Cousins beamed in from across the POnd. (I was back in the finished basement of the Old House.) Some more food motifs emerged: the steak tartare at Odeon and pasta puttanesca, namely. Emmie, a publishing big wig in London, wanted to know about Drew's balls. We talked about Luke's novel Theft, a kind of 19th century Brexit novel which Lauren read and to which she gives two thumbs up (alhtough why you would care about her book reviews is beyond me). Lauren tried with increasing desperation to impress the Brits with her knowledge of English esoterica. We talk about Karl Ove's desire to be as cool as English band guys. Then Luke gives us the DL on the different numbers of BBC Radios and Christian (reclining in bed for most of this) pops in to give a reading of his essay about BBC Radio. We are all enamored of the Shipping Forecast.

plugs: Lauren was on Silver Screen video and talked about Stellan Skarsgard and Winnie the Pooh, perhaps of interest to struggle listeners?

email us: [email protected]; [email protected]

see you on the other side

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!!!

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!

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

WE ARE BACK! After a dire situation earlier this month, Our Struggle returns, as lo-fi and perfunctory as ever! It's just us boys again this ep but be assured we have some VERY prestigious and intellectual guests on the horizon, so if you're one of those dweebs who listens to our show for so-called "literary criticism" and "thoughtful discussion of the work of Karl Ove Knausgaard" just hold on a little longer. 

MAJOR shout out to "The financial times of Norway" DAGENS NAERINGSLIV AKA DN which recently published a write-up of Our Struggle that really captured the essence of our podcast. We love our new Norwegian listeners and hope to be flown out to your beautiful country someday for a North Sea oil wealth-funded panel.

HOUSEKEEPING: I forgot to mention this on the pod but we are collecting voicemails at our google voice number for our eventual (1st anniversary?) call-in show: 443-584-6486

cheat sheet:

0:00 - Lauren and Drew velkommen our new Norwegian listeners and discuss their newfound Norwegian notoriety.

8:20 - A digression about Elvis Costello turns into a full-blown music segment in which we listen to Costello, Belle & Sebastian and Jonathan Richman and reflect on the richness of the Scottish indie pop tradition.

19:08 - We struggle through the first five or so pages of part two of book one. Karl Ove is writing in his studio in Stockholm and sees Jesus in the parquet, takes a cigarette break and observes the morning rush; does he feel a part of the city or detached from it? 

57:00 - Lauren and Drew lose their minds imagining Karl Ove engaging with nostalgia bait memes

1:08:40 - Huge thank you to 6'4" Norwegian alpha male friend of the pod Robert Rust for linguistic coaching!

Thank you for listening! As always, feel free to write in with your thoughts, questions and Norwegian memes to Lauren ([email protected]) and/or Drew ([email protected]). We love hearing from you!

After a run of well-received episodes with prestigious guests and a Bookforum mention we are ready for our slow decline! It's just us boys on this pod, testing out our new mics and recording software, beginning to drift imperceptibly away from our lo-fi roots & thus our scruffy charm and ultimately, our integrity. But for now we're talking about trauma! As listeners who follow us on so-called Twitter probably know, Lauren was attacked on the Metro by a mentally ill man a couple weeks ago and wrote a very famous 4000 word essay about  it in the style of Knausgaard, kind of. ALSO: We finally return to the Book and finish Part One, a miracle praise Adonai.

HOUSEKEEPING: We have a google voice number now for you to leave messages for our eventual call-in episode.  It is 443-584-6486

cheat sheet:

0:00 - Lauren is eating a gluten free snickerdoodle; Drew reflects on his appreciation of the Steppe and its peoples.

9:30 - The trauma unpacking begins; Lauren ever so briefly lets down her defenses, reveals a crack in her facade or a chink in her armor, or is it a soft underbelly? At any rate vulnerability is definitely momentarily glimpsed. Drew interviews Lauren about her anti-trauma-essay and Lauren uses the phrase "brain colonized by X" about 8,000,000 times.

40:00 - Drew reflects on his recent trauma of being initiated into the "dripping wound" that is Twitter. We try to probe what exactly makes Twitter so alienating and upsetting - why is it not a utopian collaborative literary exercise? Something to do maybe with commodification or narcissism, two intimately linked phenomena of course....

57:00 - We have our first struggle session in a long time (bless me Father for I have sinned); Karl Ove takes Hanne to the DSA meeting; springtime arrives but not in an annoying way; Karl Ove attends his father's weird divorced Midsommar-like party/ritual and Part One ends. What a ride!

Thanks so much for listening! As always feel free to reach out with your questions, comments, and expressions of concern/solidarity at [email protected] or [email protected]. And do stay tuned for a special guest next week......

OUTRO: The Stranglers- Golden Brown

IT'S THE RETURN OF THE WELSH WARRIOR! The Duke of Cardiff himself, prestigious CNN journalist James Griffiths is back on the pod and folks?? We got a little off topic!! But who gives a shit, you don't pay for this (yet) and what is a Knausgaard podcast without copious digression (the imitative fallacy can fuck right off)!! 

Due what I am self diagnosing as fatigue from the J&J vaccine I am too tired to write a full fledged recap but some things we covered in this were: Drew's guide to seduction by email; being Eskimo brothers with Jonathan Safran Foer; Elif Batuman and ill-fated campus romances; the disappointing lack of defecation scenes in My Struggle; Morrissey's solo career; and of course Robert Caro's LBJ biography which James has been reading recently and in which he has found some interesting Knausgaard parallels.

OUTRO: First of the Gang to Die - Morrissey (cover by Andrew Ohringer)

If you have listened to even one episode of this show you know that we are obsessed with Karl Ove's meals, from the open sandwiches and rissoles of his youth to the smug quinoa salads he avoids as an adult in Stockholm. Well guess what? We somehow got prestigious food writer (and KOK superfan) Alicia Kennedy to agree to come on the pod to talk spreads in My Struggle. This was truly one of our funnest episodes yet - enjoy!

cheat sheet:

14:40 - We tackle one of the most perplexing paradoxes of My Struggle: Karl Ove repeatedly professing indifference to food ("I couldn't give a rat's ass about food") while at the same time giving us lengthy, detailed accounts of his meals, such as the gourmet lobster dinner (Jamie Oliver's recipe) he cooks for the New Year's Eve dinner party in Book 2. And how do his kitchen exploits track with his feelings about his respective ex-wives?

25:30 - In the beginning of book 2, Karl Ove famously lays into the Swedes for believing they can "eat their way into being a better person" with quinoa and bean salads. Alicia, who advocates for veganism and vegetarianism in her writing, tells us her thoughts on these tirades (spoiler: she is pro-Knausgaard). Also: some self-hating Millennial bashing. Why can't Millennials just make normal meals?? Why does everything have to be an elaborate Instagram-worthy concoction or a viral TikTok pasta??

50:00 - We talk about a passage in which Karl Ove professes nostalgia for whale steaks and lung mash and the complicated matter of balancing nostalgia against ethics in our own eating lives. Alicia also talks about how she prefers Karl Ove's food writing over that of professional food writers, as he writes about food in a way that's matter of fact and mundane rather than fetishistic.

Thank you to Alicia for joining us! You can find her excellent newsletter here. Also: the Jonathan Nunn piece she recommended.

As always feel free to write in to me at [email protected] or Drew at [email protected]. What are some great moments of food writing in literature? I couldn't think of any on the pod bc my brain has been at 60% lately although of course as soon as we ended the call I thought of Murakami and pasta....

Drew's cover of our theme song, Guided by Voices' "Game of Pricks", recorded from his desolate boarding school cloister in Pennsburg

Our Struggle returns, and this time with highly prestigious guest Christian Lorentzen! In addition to being our new token Gen X friend, Christian is a famous literary critic whose work appears regularly in Harper's, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and other high falutin venues. He has not only reviewed book 6 of My Struggle for TLS but SMOKED CIGARETTES WITH THE MAN HIMSELF during an interview for New York magazine. 

In this episode we discuss one of the most memorable passages of My Struggle book 1, the beer on the hill saga. If you would like to read along this passage starts at roughly page 62 in kindle and page 56 in analog.

cheat sheet:

1:00 - Christian recounts his meeting with KOK and confirms that the man is indeed six and a half feet tall. Also: some NYC literary world color including horny Jeffrey Eugenides

13:22 - We start discussing the amazingly mundane hero's journey that takes up about 20% of this book, of teen Karl Ove smuggling beer to a new year's eve party. How does this section fit into the paradigm Christian outlines for us about the transition in contemporary literature, over the past few decades, from romanticism with a leg in fantasy to romanticism of the banal? Also, some meta-critical discussion of how Knausgaard became an international literary sensation, in light of Christian's infamous 2019 meta critical essay in Harper's

45:30 - Touching off from Knausgaard's description of the "hostile" rooms in the family home, we get into an interesting discussion of what might be called Knausgaardian essentialism - his technique of trying to make something of nothing by probing the essences of both people as well as inanimate objects as mundane as gravel. 

1:08:00 - We discuss the parquet factory as a motif in this book and get nostalgic about light industry.

Thank you for listening! And if you would like more of Christian, you can find him on twitter @xlorentzen. He has a piece about Phillip Roth upcoming in the new Bookforum and you can find his piece about literature in the Trump era for Harper's here.

As always, would love to hear from listeners - you can DM us on Twitter @OurStrugglePod or reach us at [email protected] or [email protected] 

intro: Guided by Voices - Game of Pricks

outro: Guided by Voices- Game of Pricks covered by Andrew Ohringer 

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