I suspect a few people, subconsciously lumping together my walkabouts in town and my wanton tongue, only see me as all the more shiftless. “Wandering about again, shooting his coarse mouth off,” they may be thinking. Because what’s more offensive to genteel people than someone who doesn’t seem to do much and cusses? In other words, what I’m saying is that our culture is £#¢€ed up about work …
Bio:
Brian Gibson is a professor of literature and film at Université Sainte-Anne in Nova Scotia. In some of his previous QQ articles, he considered Terry Fox’s suffering and sacrifice, reflected on life in a history-promoting tourism town, and re-examined, during the pandemic, cinemas as those spaces where we once gathered in the dark, alone together. For this essay, he is deeply thankful to his best friend and colleague Chantal White.