verses mode

God, what the fuck am I doing? / Rock, Star, North / It is Saturday. I’m thirty. I’m inside when it’s sunny playing / Rock, Star, North / playing Grand Theft Auto V on the PlayStation 3 in / Rock, Star, North / in my flat in Garnethill and my friend just called to say / Rock, Star, North / to say he’s in the park and I should come they’ve got the slackline they’ve got / Rock, Star, North / they’ve got beers and Robbie’s coming with the barbecue and languistine and / Rock, Star, North / and it hasn’t been this hot since last July you realise Calum it’s been / Rock, Star, North / serious the park is hoaching get off your arse and join us man or / Rock, Star, North...

Extract from Rock, Star, North by Calum Rodger

One summer’s day in 2015, alighted at Los Santos International Airport and began walking. His objectives: eight mountain peaks in the surrounding countryside, unmarked on ’s minimap but visible in the Lonely Planet-style guide included with the game’s retail release. As he walked, fending off the occasional cougar, Rodger poured his mind out on paper. He pondered the names of the mountains, distinct among the game’s objects in that each is “like a poem ie they have no function”. He wrote loving asides to his character, “gentle-hearted Trevor, whose sociopathic / ramblings are as a sweet familiar balm / in this feigned and lonely wilderness!” He wrote about as a cultural enterprise, “a Hobbesian liberty of violence / grown in a chrysalis of ironic self-reference