No Swearing Please.

I hope you don’t mind a little cursing, said Joel Thomas Hynes before ripping into a reading from his new novel Right Away Monday last night in the Vertigo Theatre. The audience sat rapt as Hynes took us into the lonely mind of a Newfoundland drunk making all the wrong choices, a profanity strewn rant as lyrical and precise as anything Shakespeare might have  wrote had William been born on an Eastern Canadian island and found inspiration channeling the best of James Kelman and Ernest Hemingway.

Clearly no one minded Hynes adopting some touch of the vernacular on stage backed up by an trio of musicians expertly weaving in and out of his tangled web. But earlier in the day when I dropped the f-word at a panel discussion before 100 or so people at Mount Royal College there was at least one muted reprimand. After the show a member of the audience approached fellow panelist Michael Winter to pass on a message to me: Swearing, the fellow said, is passé.

I’m not sure why exactly I threw that word into the wind. Robert Sawyer and I were having a pretty heated debate. The discussion was about whether or not we need the cultural gatekeepers who decide what books to publish, what shows to broadcast, what movies to finance and distribute. I argued that in the age of the web we can all decide for ourselves, everyone can have equal access to mass media, so the days of the gatekeepers are numbered and we’ll be better for it. Sawyer argued that there’s still a role for editors, publishers, and other arbiters of public taste. Michael Winter was the quieter of the 3 of us, though he did note that an experiment with publicizing his book on FaceBook had seemed to be a success, suggesting a middle path which combines cultural gatekeeping with a transperancy that sees authors reveal their process and open themselves up to direct unfiltered dialogue with their readers.

Anyway, somewhere in the midst of this discussion for some unknown reason I swore. I cussed. I cursed. No one seemed to really notice or mind at the time. Driving back downtown after the panel sci-fi writer Sawyer told us that, in fact, his readers only complain about profanity when he has a character say Jesus! or Christ! instead of, say, holy shit! If you want to shock, it seems you’re better off targeting always sensitive religious sensibilities.  So maybe our audience member was right: swearing is passé. But I dare ya to tell that to Joel Thomas Hynes.