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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...

I’m not up on the Internet, but I hear that is a democratic possibility People can connect with each other I think people are ready for something, but there is no leadership to offer it to them People are ready to say, ‘Yes, we are part of a world’— Studs Terkel   Studs was an inspiring historian The child of Russian immigrants living in Chicago, he spent his life talking to people — famous people from Dr King to C P Ellis and pretty much everyone in between — but mainly to normal people, working people (and, all too often, unemployed people) The classic oral historian, he was an obsessive archivist who told us about economics and politics as felt in our everyday lives He catalogued the daily routines of communities; the small niggles of wage labour that collected over a lifetime grind us into the floor, as well as the little acts of humanity that we build our relationships on Studs mapped personal stories of working-class solidarity, and, all told together, he mapped the political changes of almost half a century Culture drove Studs He started his career as a screenwriter and actor, starring in his own sitcom Studs’ Place, until his outspoken political allegiances got him blacklisted by that indignant little senator, Joe McCarthy In 1952 he got an hour-a-week spot on 987 WFMT Chicago, a small local arts station, and soon was broadcasting five days a week He continued to do so for the next forty-five years The majority of those broadcasts were interviews and, combined with a number of books of collected memories, they formed his life’s work In them he talked to the people mass-culture sees only as ‘audience’, and asked them what constituted their own culture of daily life   Studs died at the dawn of a global financial crisis (his epitaph: ‘Curiosity didn’t kill this cat’) he might half recognise from his youth; capital, unregulated, crashing like a wall of water through people’s daily experience, tearing apart the fragile homes we’ve made for ourselves But the way the working class constitutes itself within capital

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 2014

Two Poems from Grun-tu-molani

Vidyan Ravinthiran

poetry

May 2014

The Sky there was a uniform inactive grey, except when stared at through a chainlink fence; those who could...

Interview

October 2012

Interview with Sjón

Mary Hannity

Interview

October 2012

In Iceland, they eat puffin. The best-tasting puffin is soaked overnight in milk. ‘Then give the milk to the...

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April 2017

Everywhere and Nowhere

Vahni Capildeo

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April 2017

Part of my reluctance to write on citizenship is that as a poet, a worker in delicate, would-be-truthful language,...

 

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