In August 2021, Michael McTavish received an unexpected Facebook message: in some Toronto and Hamilton neighbourhoods, gardeners were reporting an unusual presence in the soil. McTavish is an expert in earthworms and conducts postdoctoral research at the University of Toronto. Soon, he found himself standing in one of those gardeners’ yard with an unusually energetic worm in his hand and a sinking feeling in his heart.
Though McTavish had previously seen this specimen only in videos and pictures, it was immediately clear what it was: a jumping worm, so named because of their startling tendency to thrash around, as if electrocuted, when disturbed. “They are just kind of upsetting,” says McTavish.
And jumping worms aren’t only upsetting for this creepy behaviour. Since one species was first recorded in North America, in the 1930s—one theory posits that they were introduced via some cherry trees Japan donated to Washington, DC, and Bethesda, Maryland, in the 1910s—these creatures have wriggled their way across at least thirty-eight states and now appeared to have moved to Canada too. The Toronto reports were among the first confirmed sightings of jumping worms in the country; they’d previously been found only once before, close to the American border in Windsor. Not long after McTavish received his message, the worms were detected in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick as well.
Crayfish, also known as west coast rock lobster, support one of South Africa’s most valuable fisheries, especially on the country’s west coast. In recent decades, however, crayfish populations have crashed. In 2021, harvestable stocks were at just 1.5 percent of their pristine levels. Overharvesting and illegal fishing are largely to blame for the fishery’s collapse, but mass strandings like this one haven’t helped.
Known locally as crayfish walkouts, the strandings are driven by harmful algal blooms. These sudden proliferations of algae, sometimes referred to as red tides, are common along South Africa’s west coast, especially in late summer. When the algae die, they sink to the seafloor where they are decomposed by bacteria. The process uses up most of the oxygen in the water, causing crayfish and other marine life to flee toward the coast where breaking waves reoxygenate the water. The animals do not actually walk out of the ocean, but when the tide recedes, they get stuck on land. Trapped, the crayfish are vulnerable to sun exposure, desiccation, and trampling.
When David Howes thinks of his home city of Montreal, he thinks of the harmonious tones of carillon bells and the smell of bagels being cooked over wood fires. But when he stopped in at his local tourism office to ask where they recommend that visitors go to smell, taste, and listen to the city, he just received blank stares.
“They only know about things to see, not about the city’s other sensory attractions, its soundmarks and smellmarks,” says Howes, the author of the forthcoming book The Sensory Studies Manifesto and director of Concordia University’s Centre for Sensory Studies, a hub for the growing field often referred to as “sensory urbanism.”
There’s something encouraging, and perhaps telling, about Ottessa Moshfegh’s success. Her abject, pervy, excremental fictions carry a whiff of deviance and nihilism into a squeaky clean mainstream that comforts some while alienating others. Although it was set before the horrors of web 2.0, her hugely popular novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation seemed to reflect something of the medicated, desolate, anaesthetised now. While our era’s ruling cultural-literary tone decrees “It’s the end of the world – no laughing”, Moshfegh’s stuff is comically weird, amoral and antisocial.
Lapvona is not her first novel to eschew the contemporary world – her debut, was set aboard a 19th-century pirate ship – yet its blurred medieval setting, like a recounted dream of a half-forgotten past, feels like a bold swerve. As I began reading I kept asking myself: “What’s she up to? What skin has she got in this game?” Three hundred pages later, I still didn’t fully have my answers, though by then I’d realised that the (pseudo) historical setting wrenches us out of history and into a timeless, interior landscape of drives, impulses and cravings. A crowd of first name-only characters trace the play of instinct and appetite amid a cheerfully undignified, infantile realm wherein morality either operates in some alien manner or isn’t there at all. Lapvona’s grotesque, shameless world shows us not how it used to be, but how it’s always been.
One can’t help being impressed by how many narrative balls Pfeijffer keeps in the air. The novel combines a comedy of manners with travel journalism, political and cultural commentary, and reflections on European identity. Oh, plus an art-heist mystery (centering on the final days and paintings of Caravaggio). And that love story.
Building 46 is much more than a compelling ghost story. It’s a coming-of-age story whose revelation of prejudice weaves together two very different cultures.
The most common entries for ‘x’ in alphabet books nowadays are probably ‘x-ray’ and ‘xylophone’—based on anecdotal evidence only, someone do this research please—but of course, it wasn’t always so. The x-ray was invented in 1895, and, as the editors over at The Public Domain Review explain, xylophones, “although around for millennia, the instrument didn’t gain popularity in the West (with the name of ‘xylophone’) until the early twentieth century.” So what demonstrated the letter ‘x’ in the alphabet books of yore?