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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...

With few exceptions, the queer spaces I have visited over the years vary wildly, but there is a slippery quality that unites my experiences in them: the warm bath of alterity The queer DJ and writer madison moore describes clubs as ‘portals’, for their ability to help us imagine a different way of doing things, to escape the capitalist and heteronormative logic of the ‘real world’ Through the gay bar as portal, we might enter places where we can be the majority not the minority, places where fantasy and debauchery are made possible, where identity and desire are heightened   Jeremy Atherton Lin’s GAY BAR: WHY WE WENT OUT (2021) is a declaration of the author’s love of gay bars It is, as far as I can tell, one of the only attempts at a cultural history of the gay bar, be it a cultural history that is sexier and messier, because Lin does not shy away from the visceral qualities of gay bars He does not evade the smells and the dirt and the fluids as a comparatively fusty historian might (see, say, Peter Ackroyd’s QUEER CITY, 2017) and instead embraces impropriety GAY BAR opens in a dark room, which Lin describes as ‘crowded like a bumper car rink’ It’s a space seething with desire, but one edged with violence too, as Lin’s body is tugged and grabbed by a circle of ‘benevolent bullies’ whose ‘bodies circumscribed a turf, as on a playground or prison yard’ In one memorable section, Lin describes an underground fisting club in 1970s San Francisco called the Catacombs, quoting the theorist Gayle Rubin’s memory of it: ‘Just walking into that room could put a person in a leathery mood’   GAY BAR is a kind of queer bildungsroman, in which Lin comes of age in the bars he writes about The book’s structure revolves around venues Lin has known in London, LA and San Francisco, using them as anchors through which to explore the history of queer life in the area, as well as vanished gay spaces that once existed in the neighbourhoods Scenes

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...

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poetry

November 2013

Shine On You Crazy Diamond

George Szirtes

poetry

November 2013

And so they shone, every one of them, each crazy, everyone a diamond shining the way things shine, each...

fiction

January 2015

Shishosetsu...

Minae Mizumura

TR. Juliet Winters Carpenter

fiction

January 2015

This is an excerpt from the novel published in Japanese as Shishosetsu from left to right (私小説 from left...

Art

Issue No. 4

The Land Art of Julie Brook

Robert Assaye

Art

Issue No. 4

Julie Brook works with the land. Over the past twenty years she has lived and worked in a succession...

 

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