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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...

The title of my essay has been stolen from another essay written in 1919[1] In this older work, the reader is introduced to a man of ‘mid-life’ assuming the pseudonym, ‘Vincent,’ a sufferer of agoraphobia who has decided after ‘some time’ to ‘commit to writing’ some observations of his condition Over the next five pages, Vincent rewards the reader with a detailed and evocative account of the strange maladies he undergoes in his daily life as a victim of this spatial anxiety To begin with, we are told of the likely ‘cause’ of his condition, being the murder of a childhood friend, whose throat was cut ‘from ear to ear’ and then dragged at night to the ‘bank of [a] river’ Thereafter, Vincent suffers from a morbid fear of being alone In addition, he was also ‘afraid to go to the barn in the day time, and suffered when put to bed in the dark’ This childhood trauma sets in place a troubled relationship with the world, exacerbated by an already nervous and sickly temperament Soon after, the agoraphobia begins His first encounter comes at the top of a hill One evening, he tells us, he experiences the incipient symptoms that will mark his adult life more generally   In time, this rupture of his security increases to the world around him, to the extent that even ‘[u]gly architecture greatly intensifies the fear’ Certain props afford him comfort Darkness, snow, stormy days and any other means to veil the horror of the world from his eyes allow Vincent to find his way in the world, as he tells us rather glibly: ‘On such days I make it a point to be out and about the town’   But this anxious relationship to places is not limited to a localised event For Vincent, the agoraphobia is always present even when at home In one especially incisive passage, he remarks: ‘I enter a home and sit in an arm-chair chatting with my friend; I soon find myself gripping the arm of the chair with each hand My toes curl in my shoes, and there

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...

READ NEXT

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February 2015

A Closer Joan

Shawn Wen

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February 2015

Here are a few of the Joans I know. The girl who arrives at Port Authority Bus Terminal in...

poetry

May 2013

Flatlands

Saskia Hamilton

poetry

May 2013

Horses and geese in a sodden field. Solitaries with luggage on a wet platform. Postage-stamp house on a bit...

Art

Issue No. 3

Borism

Lee Rourke

Oliver Griffin

Art

Issue No. 3

ES9 is the latest body of work by Oliver Griffin in his archival series The Evaluation of Space. Taken...

 

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