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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...

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You has won praise on both sides of the Atlantic Edmund White describes ‘American literature [as] richer by one masterpiece’; Damon Galgut praises the beauty of Greenwell’s language, while James Wood writes, ‘In an age of the sentence fetish, Greenwell thinks and writes, as Woolf or Sebald do, in larger units of comprehension’   Greenwell’s writing celebrates queer spaces and behaviours His short story ‘Gospodar’, published in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review, describes a hook-up that turns violent – the threat of violence is ever-present in his work, and so too is shame The story’s protagonist struggles between a desire for sexual debasement and the requirement that his denigration be consensual Here, as in the novel, shame and desire are bedfellows   What Belongs to You was published following the passage of equal marriage legislation in the UK and US Greenwell has spoken eloquently about the significance of marriage being available as a way of life for all people, regardless of sexual orientation However, he, like many queer activists, has expressed concern about a creeping homonormativity, and the erasure of different, queer models of living It remains unclear what the novel’s narrator and Mitko, the Bulgarian hustler at its heart, truly want or need from each other Their relationship remains transactional However, there is also a sense that hooks-ups, cruising spots – queer spaces – provide moments of fleeting intimacy unavailable to those confined to the norms of straight society Just as the novel describes the lasting damage done to queer people by their difference, by the withholding of ‘a measure of the world’s beneficence’ that straight people take for granted, it appeals for tolerance, for grace, for those struggling in the face of systemic rejection The conflicting demands of a desire to simply be, uninhibited, and for acceptance manifests itself in a desire that is, in some sense, strange and unknown even to its subject His novel holds these conflicting forces in balance   Yet the novel remains defiantly queer, with a moral undertone that castigates the failings of those parts of the

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

June 2011

Arthur Miller

Michael Amherst

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June 2011

The last time I saw Vin and Jackie we were killing slugs. The three of us had been smoking...

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May 2016

Cinema on the Page

Jonathan Gibbs

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May 2016

Film is a bully. It wants to make its viewers feel, and it has the tools to do so....

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Issue No. 16

Editorial

The Editors

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Issue No. 16

The political and internet activist Eli Pariser coined the term ‘Filter Bubble’ in 2011 to describe how we have...

 

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