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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...

As they say of politics, I have found essay-writing to be the art of the possible Certain work can only be done in those spooky months when particular trajectories align: what was once opaque becomes transparent, and the story may be told in its complete complexity Try to write such an essay at the wrong moment and your movement will be impeded You will have the rudimentary shape you want, but all the curves and angles and lines will remain coarse – crude, compared to what you might have written had you waited   I only really came to understand these things when I began to imagine an essay that I knew I must write, but equally knew I would fail at For years I waited, and if I try to write it now, it is owing to an intuition that has arrived as a blessing of maturity I have become the writer who might accomplish this task On top of that, something has informed me that for a few ripe months the barriers are down, and I may cross in and out of this longed-for terrain unimpeded   I must get this essay right Each word that I put down becomes a part of my living memory – in a very real sense this is self-creation – and that first cut is always the deepest Yes, it is possible to work around the scar later on – to revise, reformulate, rediscover, redirect – but that first attempt is decisive Everything grows from those initial, indelible words   It was a midsummer’s evening, and through the window looking down on the bay the sky reddened, the sun sank beneath the earth That declining sun brought me fear I reasoned to myself that so long as I could see the light, I was safe from whatever had come unleashed in my mind But as that blackness climbed over the land, so too did some blackness encompass my head This is illogical, I know – magical thinking – but these were my terms that evening I was truly afraid of what the dark of night would bring

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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fiction

February 2013

The Currency of Paper

Alex Kovacs

fiction

February 2013

‘Labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being; that in his work,...

Art

September 2015

Sightlines: James Turrell

Gareth Evans

Art

September 2015

For, and in memory of, Jules Wright   Approach   It is a pleasure too rarely realised to venture...

Interview

February 2014

Interview with Lisa Dwan

Rosie Clarke

Interview

February 2014

In a city where even the night sky is a dull, starless grey, immersion in absolute darkness is a...

 

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