The Vanishing Signs: Essays

by Cam Scott

Overview

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 a labyrinth, series, list, and sect. Far from an academic typology, these discrete and overlapping studies are excerpted from the activity of a politically interested readership, for whom literature makes real demands of the one world that it describes. Includes writings on Dennis Cooper, Guy Hocquenghem, Dionne Brand, Gail Scott, Robert Glück, Kevin Killian, Renata Adler, Renee Gladman, Ted Rees, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, and Jordy Rosenberg.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781927886649
Publisher:	ARP Books
Publication date:	05/17/2022
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.13(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Cam Scott is a poet, critic, and non-musician from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Treaty One Territory. His poetry collection, ROMANS/SNOWMARE (ARP), is both a daybook of anti-capitalist ideation and a homoerotic reinvention of the prairie long poem as it resonates with a love of language and experiment. A chapbook, WRESTLERS, was published by Greying Ghost in 2017.

His most recent musical projects are "Swolowes" and "Cold-catcher," which span free improvisation and field recording as well as electro-acoustic genres. As a critic, his independent research is focused on the politics of twentieth-century literary avant-gardes and their executors. He divides his time between the prairies and Brooklyn, New York.

Table of Contents

Preface 7

Zac Descending: The Attractions of Dennis Cooper 9

Book-Sex and Multi-Specificity: Drive at the End of History 25

The Hospital of History: Reading Guy Hocquenghem's The Amphitheater of the Dead 31

"What characterizes a god?": On Robert Glück's Margery Kempe 41

Extreme Remedies 63

Bachelors Have Windows: On Believing Kevin Killian 75

Leaving Lovetown 85

Who is the Blue Clerk? 101

Mixed Connections: On Gail Scott's The Obituary 113

Station to Station: Remapping Renata Adler 131

Writing Drawing/Drawing Writing 141

Limited Omniscience and Militant Secrecy 169

Supply Chain Tanka: On Working, Walking, Writing 199

Thanksgiving 217

Sun on the Avant-Garde: Lyn Hejinian's Various Positions 225

In the Path of Totality 239

Writing Multitudes: The Political Desires of Jordy Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox 243

The Metaphysical Detectives: Guilt, Grace, and Gaze Throughout the World of Twin Peaks 255