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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...

FEBRUARY 2008   * I’m outraged, but I’ve learned a way of reasoning that quickly defuses my exasperation This morning, a sudden rage when I see that Noam Cohen of the New York Times is re-inventing the wheel with the news that Borges, in his stories set in a pre-technological past, predicted the arrival of the internet I would not have been annoyed by such a fossilised ‘discovery’ on the part of the New York Times if it weren’t for the fact that the author of the piece, with ridiculous self-importance, dismisses Borges as an ‘Old-World librarian’ and ‘a fusty sort’, when in actual fact the man who is out of date is Cohen himself, more behind with the latest news than the cyclist Godot when he arrived behind time at each stage of the Tour   Writing – Roberto Bolaño said – is a rational, visionary activity, an exercise in intelligence and adventure From among the multiple adventures, readers of the visionary Borges will never forget the spiral staircase, which plunges down and soars up off into the remote distance in his memorable tale ‘The Library of Babel’ When this story was first published in 1941, few could have imagined that this staircase would end up turning Borges into a demiurge, a strange visionary who described the Internet before it existed   We have known for years now that Borges, in an exercise of intelligence and intellectual adventure, anticipated the World Wide Web in ‘The Library of Babel’, and also in ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, another of his stories from that period: ‘Who, singular or plural, invented Tlön? The plural is, I suppose, inevitable, since the hypothesis of a single inventor — some infinite Leibniz working in obscurity and self-effacement — has been unanimously discarded It is conjectured that this ‘brave new world’ is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebrists, moralists, painters, geometers, guided and directed by some shadowy man of genius’   In his story, Borges tells us that in this secret society there is a great number of individuals skilled in the most varied disciplines,

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

May 2016

Two Poems

Sam Buchan-Watts

poetry

May 2016

The Dentist’s Chair       I dreamt of the dentist’s chair, that it wore a smart pair of...

Prize Entry

April 2017

Birch

Thomas Chadwick

Prize Entry

April 2017

1997   Business boomed. Optimism was shooting up everywhere and bursting into flower. Music was jocular. Sport was effusive....

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January 2014

Afterword: The Death of the Translator

George Szirtes

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January 2014

1. The translator meets himself emerging from his lover’s bedroom. So much for fidelity, he thinks. 2. Je est...

 

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