Mailing List


Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

Pirajoux The middle of a hot endless summer, driving on the A39 through an as always empty central France, which exudes as always a certain Seventies timelessness The anxiety of being in a Ballard novel, the feeling of a certain narrative disconnectedness, that anything could happen or not, at the stroke of a pen And that whether something happens or not is somehow equally as disastrous an outcome But not knowing who or what the subject of this disaster would be, if anyone or anything This is what shrinks call free floating anxiety, I guess Poulet De Bresse Passing unseen towns, picnic areas, petrol stations and auto-grills, crawling along at 100 miles an hour, the faster you go the slower it all gets, chastened by the knowledge that a slight jerk to the right or left would speed everything up again and end your life in a chaos of twisted steel, spilled petrol and screaming children The promise of  an almost sci-fi shift in motion, a quantum leap, an ion drive surge tugs at the edges of this mundane driving reality Wildly fraying threads spastically unspooling at the edges of perception The death defying habits of the open road Hands alternately sweating, slipping on the wheel, followed by air-con clamminess, never finding the right balance of temperature to stop this yawing between discomforts; eyes lingering too long on the climate controls, fiddling with them, changing the flow, exasperated turning the A/C off and cracking the window open Sweating feet in Birkenstocks; damn their eyes a more prosaic way to die I couldn’t think of than this continual loss on concentration on the road due to adjusting dials and vents More dialling through French radio stations, one French song one American song, the bipolarity of taste and rhythm leaving you in the purgatory of always changing stations:Melodie, Nostalgie, Virgin, Classique, Energie Cuiseaux Pulling in to a Croq’Malin forecourt concession for lunch, leaving the car behind, clicking to itself in the heat Feet squelching towards the services, as we swamp the self service restaurant, devouring the ersatz gastronomy from whatever

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

READ NEXT

poetry

December 2016

Of all those pasts

Will Harris

poetry

December 2016

  In Derrida’s Memoires: For Paul de Man he quotes from ‘Mnemosyne’, a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin which he...

fiction

August 2013

How to Be an American

Will Heinrich

fiction

August 2013

Begin with a man on the beach. The sea is strangely iridescent, lighter in its lights and blacker in...

feature

May 2011

On the Relative Values of Humility and Arrogance; or the Confusing Complications of Negative Serendipity

Annabel Howard

feature

May 2011

On a distinctly drizzly Wednesday evening in February a friend of mine looked at me and said: ‘Only those who...

 

Get our newsletter

 

* indicates required