The Vanishing Signs

Essays
  • ISBN-13: 9781927886649
  • PRICE: $24.00
  • Paperback / EBook, 280 pages

What is a novel? What is a revolution? Is there anything new under the sun?

In these essays, poet and critic Cam Scott contemplates the novel in various guises—as culture and technology; as labyrinth, series, list, and sect. Far from academic essays, these discrete and overlapping studies take up the activity of a politically interested readership, for whom literature makes real demands of the one world that it describes. Situating gay men’s experimental writing of the AIDS crisis within the cultures of neoliberal deregulation, and drafting a radical latency of the pre-revolutionary city, these essays fasten their interest to spaces of unexpected stylistic and thematic encounter.

 

“I think this book is a big deal, like Axel’s Castle. Cam Scott reading extracts a possible future from the recent past. It’s strange that is should need an advocate. The essays address the ear as much as they do the intellect. They’re persuasive word by word, like an ear-worm that keeps the listener humming a new tune, composed by Scott as accompaniment to what he reads. If this was jazz we’d all pick up our instruments and play.” — Matthew Stadler

 

“Anyone who’s ever tried to write anything—or anything good—will know how hard it is to write a sentence striking enough to catch the eye but not so spiky that you poke it out; complex enough to reward the reader’s patience but not so knotty that you test it. Sentence after sentence, page after page, piece after piece, Cam Scott gets it right. This book is both powerfully elegant and thick with thought: a testament to the force and beauty of Marxist thinking, writing, fighting.” — Tobi Haslett

Cam Scott

Cam Scott is a poet, critic, and non-musician from Winnipeg, Canada, Treaty 1 territory. His books include WRESTLERS (Greying Ghost, 2017), ROMANS/SNOWMARE (ARP, 2019) and THE VANISHING SIGNS (ARP, 2022). He is artistic director of send + receive, a festival of sound art and experimental music, and sings in the punk band Age of Self.