Considering technology in the realm of ideas

English professors launch their books together, one prose, one poetry

By Karen Herland

Despite frequent warnings that print is dead, two English professors are celebrating the publications of their most recent books at a joint launch on November 3.

Marcie Frank’s How to be an Intellectual in the Age of Television will be hot off the presses. It will share the spotlight with Jason Camlot’s latest collection of poetry, Attention All Typewriters.

Frank’s in-depth analysis of American author Gore Vidal’s career, in relation to both his private life and the changing face of public life in the last few decades, would seem to share little in common with Camlot’s collection.

“We share interests in media as an important category of literary analysis both in historical and contemporary contexts,” Frank said, via email.

In a separate email, Camlot added that their mutual interests include “how ideas (and feelings) are transformed, for better or worse, when mediated by communications technologies.”

Frank’s book explores the blurring of lines between public and private by analysing Vidal’s persona as private individual, author and (very) public intellectual.

“We share interests in media as an important category of literary analysis”

TV transmits publicly what was once private — this is evident on talk shows and in reality TV. Authors are more accessible through TV coverage, but “the fact that they are on TV doesn’t invalidate them as intellectuals.”

An ongoing theme in Frank’s work is the boundary between elite and popular culture, the cultural intellectual and the cultural icon.

“Riding the board of high culture, it surfs the waves of pop,” is how David Antin describes Camlot’s poetry on the back of the volume.

Camlot studied in the U.S. before returning to Montreal to teach here. “America” as concept, and contemporary US poetry are both themes and influences in this work, as is student life itself.

Camlot’s collection contains a fairly biting assessment of corporate culture in a section entitled Office Machines. In a recent interview, Camlot explained that the initial impetus for the pieces came from a stint as a lunch-time receptionist, for a university alumni office. Poems, typed to fit on the back of memo pad-pages had to incorporate whatever interruptions he experienced, and he could not get “caught” writing them.

The result is a whimsical, satirical series incorporating word play, puns and searing observations on office politics and policies.

Camlot said, via email, that there are always circumstances which frame and contain our work. “The rules I set for that particular cluster of poems represent one means of controlling creative circumstances within the larger frames over which we have no control.”

To learn more about both authors and their influences, visit The Green Room, 5386 St. Laurent Blvd. between 8 and 10 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 3. For information, call 486-1538.