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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



Articles Available Online


Talk Into My Bullet Hole

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July 2015

Rose McLaren

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July 2015

‘Someday people are going to read about you in a story or a poem. Will you describe yourself for those people?’ ‘Oh, I don’t...

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May 2014

Art Does Not Know a Beyond: On Karl Ove Knausgaard

Rose McLaren

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May 2014

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the...

I am admittedly an outsider to Hong Kong, but as Liu Yichang’s 1962 novel The Drunkard proves, the outsider is a classic Hong Kong type After years of wandering through a China ravaged by war, Liu’s unnamed narrator has finally run aground in the city He is an intellectual with strong opinions about Vittorio De Sica, and a conviction that Beckett represents the future of literature He is thus a person for whom the furiously acquisitive colonial port of the 1960s — which he bitterly describes as ‘the citadel of crass materialism’ — has no use He is utterly dismissive of the Hong Kong cultural scene; he caustically imagines a delegation of Hong Kong writers, who qualify for the delegation by dint of owning a Parker 61 pen, heading to the Philippines to babble about Tang poetry, profess ignorance of ‘newer’ writers like James Joyce and pick up women Since he doesn’t fit in with that set, he is forced to earn his living by writing martial arts fiction and pornography for the Hong Kong tabloids   With no family, no office to report to, and no society to which he belongs, the narrator drifts in a cloud of drink through the city Sometimes old acquaintances appear before him like shades in Dante’s hell: a former classmate working as a handyman; a producer who shamelessly steals a film script from him; an ex-journalist who lets bygones be bygones with the Japanese and goes into business with them, making plastic dolls He moves house three times He wakes up next to an ageing woman of ill-repute he picked up at a bar, blotches of lipstick on her mouth ‘like tinned cherries that have lost their color’, writes the next instalment of pulp fiction, hands it in, and heads back to the bar He gets attacked by two-bit thugs and put in the hospital, and as soon as he’s able, he heads back to the bar Nothing pins him down, nothing moves him forward The neon collisions of Hong Kong — Cantonese and cosmopolitan, traditional and modern, all priced to move

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren

Contributor

August 2014

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.

The Prosaic Sublime of Béla Tarr

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Issue No. 6

Rose McLaren

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Issue No. 6

I have to recognise it’s cosmical; the shit is cosmical. It’s not just social, it’s not just ontological, it’s really huge. And that’s why we...
Stalker, Writer or Professor? Geoff Dyer's Zona and Genre

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February 2012

Rose McLaren

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February 2012

‘So what kind of a writer am I, reduced to writing a summary of a film?’ wonders Geoff Dyer half way through Zona. Such...

READ NEXT

fiction

May 2016

Panty

Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay

TR. Arunava Sinha

fiction

May 2016

She was walking. Along an almost silent lane in the city.   Work – she had abandoned her work...

fiction

January 2016

Good People

Nir Baram

TR. Jeffrey Green

fiction

January 2016

Good People opens in Berlin in 1938. Thomas Heiselberg has grand plans to make the company he works for the...

Interview

September 2015

Interview with Patrick deWitt

Anthony Cummins

Interview

September 2015

Patrick deWitt’s new novel, Undermajordomo Minor, tells the story of Lucy, a bungling young man hired to assist a...

 

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