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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...

It’s hot as fuck, said the friend who handed me Confessions of the Fox, a faux-memoir set in eighteenth-century London I was a little sceptical After all, this was Jordy Rosenberg’s first novel A queer theorist and historian of this period, he has re-written an eighteenth-century life from a trans perspective – a fool’s errand, murmured the cynic in me, to claim a world dominated by heteropatriarchy Yet I found that as well as being hot as fuck, it was also something of a masterpiece   The novel poses as a lost manuscript, authored by an outlaw named Jack Sheppard, and only recently discovered by an academic Sheppard was once a popular hero: a celebrity thief, famous for picking the pockets of the rich Born into poverty in 1702, Jack was sent to the workhouse at six to become a cane-chair maker, and by and by, became a brilliant carpenter But he remained trapped in a system of exploitative labour, indentured by merchants until he rebelled, becoming a thief and, when he got caught, a jail-breaker After a series of fantastic escapes from the law, he was publicly executed, aged 22 Even in his own lifetime, Jack was fast transfigured into fiction At his hanging, a pseudo-memoir was sold among the crowd Soon afterwards, his life was dramatised in plays and operas, with casts that included his great love, Edgeworth Bess, and his nemesis, Jonathan Wild – creating a rich body of literature to which Rosenberg refers as ‘Sheppardiana’   In Rosenberg’s version, the bones of the old story remain, but there’s a gender difference: Jack is not a cis-man In an early chapter, we meet Jack at the age of ten, then assigned female He hates the ‘girl textiles’ he’s forced to wear: organza and lace By night, he picks the locks of his leg-cuffs, ritualistically clanked shut by his master, and sneaks off to the taverns of Drury Lane, where he passes as a boy, and where he’s free It’s during these escapades that Jack meets Bess, a sex worker and an anarchist, who incites him to escape his master and

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 2015

Interview with Katrina Palmer

Jamie Sutcliffe

Interview

September 2015

G.W.F. Hegel isn’t looking too good. With an afternoon of student tutorials to attend at the School of Sculpture...

Prize Entry

April 2015

The Incidental

Luke Melia

Prize Entry

April 2015

The automatic rifle fire was followed by an unnerving whistle at Ti’s ear. He gripped the shopping bags, grabbed...

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Issue No. 7

Comment is Fraught: A Polemic

Mr Guardianista

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Issue No. 7

When not listening to the phone messages of recently deceased children or smearing those killed in stadium disasters, journalists...

 

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