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Rose McLaren

Rose McLaren is an artist in London.



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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...

Mary Gaitskill’s fiction is full of cats – stray kittens wandering in and out of people’s lives, little white cats seen briefly from the window of a passing car, cats remembered from childhood, cats that never really existed but who are summoned up in conversation as a way for characters to find something to say to one another Women and children are often compared to cats, in her stories Men are too, although if a man is closely associated with an animal in a Gaitskill story, that animal is more likely to be a dog or a horse (a notable exception is the overconfident academic in ‘Stuff’, who the narrator describes as having ‘gone to seed in the manner of an old cat who knows where to find the food dish’)   Cats are everywhere in Gaitskill’s work, once you start looking for them In ‘Because they wanted to’, the title story from the 1997 collection recently reissued by Penguin, a girl named Elise finds herself babysitting three small children whose mother might just have abandoned them The story is told almost entirely from Elise’s point of view: she is something of a lost cat herself, too dazed by her own precarious circumstances to be able to successfully evaluate the circumstances of others, or really even to notice them She sees the ad for a babysitter on a noticeboard at the STD clinic (it’s written on notepaper printed with pictures of cats), and takes on the job, despite having no experience with children and no guarantee that she’ll get paid Elise has run away from home, or at least wandered away from it, and the babysitting job seems at first like some sort of solution – a way of being less lost, of being part of someone else’s team It’s not really like that though The mother and her children are just as lost as she is; like Elise, they’ve run out of the glue that holds an ordinary life together   Struggling to find something to say to the children, who are scared and confused and already wondering when their mother will

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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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,...

fiction

Issue No. 1

From the Town

Desmond Hogan

fiction

Issue No. 1

In the grape hyacinth blue jersey – yellow strip at V-neck, blue tie, navy trousers of Kinsale Community School,...

fiction

January 2017

Oh You

Keller Easterling

fiction

January 2017

You won’t be able to do it. It is a call, and it is something you only know how...

 

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