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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...

Jáchym Topol (b 1962), like most Czech authors of his generation, wrote poetry for years before turning to prose His first two collections of poems were both published in samizdat (ie, unofficially and illegally), in 1985 and 1988 The poems here come from V úterý bude válka (Tuesday Will Be War, 1992), his first ‘aboveground’ appearance in print and his last poetry outing prior to his prose debut, Výlet k nádražní hale (A Trip to the Train Station, 1993) Topol’s verse, with its lack of rhyme and meter, may remind English speakers of the Beats Topol himself, however, cites his chief poetic influences as Ivan Jirous, aka ‘Magor’, poet, essayist, and guru of the Czech underground in the 1970s and 1980s; Egon Bondy, a metaphysical philosopher and surrealist poet whose verses served as lyrics for the first album by the Plastic People of the Universe; and Jiří Kolář of Skupina 42 (Group 42), a 1940s association of Czech avant-garde poets and painters inspired by the city and the industrial periphery Thematically, the three selections here reflect several of Topol’s abiding interests and influences, visible in his novels as well: Native Americans, World War II atrocities, and the spy and adventure stories he devoured as a boy —AZ Weapons For as long as I remember I’ve longed for a weapon first it was a bow and arrows the cavaliers dropped like flies I rooted for the Navajos then Jack London in a knit cap with a jack-knife a poor little boy on a ship with wolves I didn’t get mixed up in a real war till later but just a paper war after that I started to carry a knife and arm myself with anonymous letters together with Petr P dodging spears in the woods on Radar Mountain and they didn’t get us 90 for a machete, 120 for tear gas and there’s danger everywhere, in everything I bought my wife the gas I want to get her a handgun she objects, she says: ‘where would we end up if everyone thought like that?’ and ‘you’d just be spreading more evil in the world’ We wait for the rapist on long nights planning how he’ll cross the

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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Interview

September 2014

Interview with Laure Prouvost

Alice Hattrick

Interview

September 2014

Laure Prouvost begins to tell us about something that happened this morning. She woke up with four vegetables on...

Art

Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

Art

Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

Interview

Issue No. 7

Interview with Keston Sutherland

Natalie Ferris

Interview

Issue No. 7

Said by the New Statesman to be ‘at the forefront of the experimental movement in contemporary British poetry’, Keston...

 

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