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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...

‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live’ is one of those lines that is quoted so often out of context it has lost its original meaning Another is ‘I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference’ In isolation, the Frost line sounds sincere; I’ve seen it printed on inspirational posters But when you read the whole poem, it’s clear that it’s ironic – a joke about self-deception With Didion’s line – the opening sentence of The White Album – you need the full paragraph to understand that it’s contemptuous The word ‘stories’ has a mushy, nostalgic feel, as in, ‘Tell me a story, Daddy’ What she means, though, is lies – or if not lies, manipulations: ‘We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience’ The phantasmagoria of ‘images’ is reality – the narrative of language is the lie   Miranda Popkey’s debut, Topics of Conversation, is almost a novelisation of the Didion quote, with all its intended implications of corruption and compromise: the dirty side of narrativisation It’s a novel told in ten conversations over seventeen years Each conversation is given its own chapter, labeled with the setting and the year it took place, and each represents a defining point in the storyline of the unnamed narrator’s adult life – in the formation of her identity, or at least her self-image The novel begins in the year 2000, in coastal Italy, where she has gone on vacation with a wealthy college friend, Camila, and Camila’s family Camila’s parents cover the narrator’s expenses in exchange for her acting as nanny to Camila’s rowdy twin brothers   Artemisia, the mother, is beautiful and glamorous, and the narrator admires her for this as well as for her self-understanding: ‘She knew herself so well and I, at twenty-one, had not yet settled on the governing narrative of my

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

April 2013

Towards White, 1975

Scott Morris

fiction

April 2013

In the morning, the square was white. Voula’s hair was white. A pigeon on a bronze horse shifted, sent...

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May 2012

Film: Palestine Festival of Literature

Omar Robert Hamilton

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May 2012

Resistance needs to be recorded. Resistance needs symbols: ideas that can travel faster than speech, last longer than memory....

Art

Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

Art

Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

 

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