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Rosanna Mclaughlin
Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Articles Available Online


The Pious and the Pommery

Essay

Issue No. 18

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

Issue No. 18

I.   Where is the champagne? On second thoughts this is not entirely the right question. The champagne is in the ice trough, on...

Essay

April 2019

Ariana and the Lesbian Narcissus

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Essay

April 2019

‘Avoid me not!’ ‘Avoid me not!’                                   Narcissus   Let me describe a GIF I’ve been watching. A lot....

The apology had been the most charged and contested gesture between us, the common element in arguments whose subjects ranged from the trivial (courtesies, chores, choice of entertainment) to the significant (knowledge, character, politics, futures), though, as in any relationship, over time these categories of trivial and significant had become impossible to distinguish from one another, so that as a consequence we lived in a double state of nearly unbearable meaningfulness and meaninglessness – or, rather, forever suspended on the precipice of either: pre-meaningful or pre-meaningless What was unbearable, of course, was the extremity of each condition, but also the not-knowing in advance which condition would be applied (by us, naturally, but as if by some ‘outside agent’) to any given situation At times, it proved difficult to disentangle the act of, say, washing a plate to a lower-than-expected standard from the vast network of feeling and history in which all prior actions were somehow implicated On other occasions, feelings or memories which we had previously considered our ‘deepest’ or most important became somehow neutralised, or evacuated of significance, a phenomenon which we (or at least I) experienced with a weird elation I barely understood: sometimes, in the middle of what seemed to be a critical or even terminal conflict, a sudden tear or opening would materialise in the argument and through it would flood an understanding of its total inconsequence; thus we could find ourselves laughing, sometimes to the point of near-hysteria, at my total resistance to the idea of having children, or her ongoing trauma resulting from a sexual assault during adolescence, or any of the dozen or so other enduring obstacles to our happiness we thought of as ‘major issues’ Regardless of the ‘condition’ we found ourselves in, however, the apology was always a dangerous and unstable element to introduce In the former condition (of excessive meaning), its basic insufficiency or unreliability as a speech act guaranteed the irresolution, and often the escalation, of most conflicts ‘Sorry,’ I would say, not meaning it, having crunched a prawn cracker ‘too loudly’, and inevitably my non-belief in the

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Contributor

July 2016

Rosanna Mclaughlin is an editor at The White Review.

Ten Years at Garage Moscow

Art Review

November 2018

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art Review

November 2018

When I arrive in Moscow, I am picked up from the airport by Roman, a patriotic taxi driver sent to collect me courtesy of...
Becoming Alice Neel

Art

August 2017

Rosanna Mclaughlin

Art

August 2017

From the first time I saw Alice Neel’s portraits, I wanted to see the world as she did. Neel was the Matisse of the...

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Interview

March 2017

Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún

Enea Zaramella

Rodrigo Hasbún

TR. Sophie Hughes

Interview

March 2017

Rodrigo Hasbún (born Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected...

Art

May 2012

Art's Fading Sway: Russian Ark by Aleksandr Sokurov

Scott Esposito

Art

May 2012

I have often fallen asleep in small theatres. It is an embarrassing thing to have happen during one-man shows,...

poetry

April 2017

Two Poems

Fady Joudah

poetry

April 2017

EUROPA AND THE BULL   The boat was loaded on a truck. The truck took me to the border....

 

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