Calendar Date: Kluckner reads “Toshiko“

Next Tuesday, 17th November at 7:30pm, our very own Michael Kluckner will be reading from his new graphic novel, Toshiko at the People’s Co-op Bookstore on Commercial.

The story is about the internment of Japanese in British Columbia during World War 2.

“On the surface, the story appears to be about race, but the plot actually turns more on matters of social class and individual morality and behaviour in what was a very different era. The other theme is “wartime” – how the extraordinary circumstances of the Second World War turned even little British Columbia, far from the fray, on its head.”

Image: Fleet In Fog

When “Fuck” Actually Meant Something

It is hard to imagine that hearing the word “fuck” used in a casual conversation would shock many people these days. We hear it so much — on TV, in films, on the bus, in the playground — that is has become little more than an annoyance of constant repetition.   However there was a time, in my remembrance, when the word carried real freight.

Fifty years ago today, on 13 November 1965, I was part of the audience for a BBC late-night satirical show called BBC-3. On the show was the renowned theatre critic and public intellectual Kenneth Tynan. In an answer to a question about sex in plays, he said: “I doubt if there are any rational people to whom the word ‘fuck’ would be particularly diabolical, revolting or totally forbidden.”

This was quickly recognized as the first deliberate use of the word on the BBC and the event became a weekend sensation for the more lurid media.  In 1988, Paul Johnson called the moment, Tynans’s “masterpiece of calculated self-publicity.”

Times have changed.