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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...

1   I sat at the kitchen table while Valentine prepared cups of flowery, smoky loose leaf tea Antoine held his in both hands and smiled at me wolfishly He had a bald, muscular head, and a flushed red face He took a long sip of tea, set down the cup, and leant across the table towards me   ‘The first rule is, don’t bring girls here We will be able to hear you We will be able to hear everything’   The plywood second floor had been erected by the three architecture students themselves, hammered into stilts and bolted to the girders criss-crossing the roof of the warehouse Antoine rapped his knuckles on the kitchen table which, he told me, was made of the same plywood as our rooms upstairs   ‘We can hear everything,’ he said again, flashing me a knowing grimace   He held my gaze and continued to knock on the table The rhythm became more and more suggestive, as he wrapped out a deliberate doing-it beat, alternating between his knuckles and the back of his fist Then he stopped the banging and laughed loudly, throwing his head back ‘Arrête,’ said Valentine sharply, topping up my cup with more tea Leaning towards me conspiratorially, Pascal pointed a drum-stick at Antoine and whispered loudly in English, ‘I often break his rules’   The morning after my first night at the warehouse in Montreuil, I was reading at the kitchen table when I heard Pascal start laying into his drum kit in his room beside the kitchen His girlfriend emerged, rubbing her eyes She told me that Pascal practiced every morning before lectures She sat down next to me in her pyjama t-shirt, waiting for the kettle to boil We sat at the table as the drum kit sent spasms of energy through the legs of the second floor, straight up into Antoine’s room above us       2   The architecture students played in a brass band together, The Super Lapins, led by Antoine, who played the trumpet Valentine played the trombone It was Pascal, the drummer, who came to knock on the door of my plywood box-room, after his morning practice session

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

January 2014

Leg over Leg

Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq

TR. Humphrey Davies

fiction

January 2014

First published in 1855, Leg over Leg recounts the life, from birth to middle age, of ‘the Fāriyāq,’ alter ego of...

Essay

March 2019

Dreaming Reasonably: on Jenny George

Rachael Allen

Essay

March 2019

In Neil Marshall’s 2005 horror film The Descent, a group of women go spelunking and become trapped deep underground...

poetry

February 2016

[from] What It Means to Be Avant-Garde

Anna Moschovakis

poetry

February 2016

This is an excerpt from the middle of a longer poem. The full poem is in Moschovakis’s forthcoming book,...

 

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