Cover story
From dissembling writers to fishy mussels and superficial landscapes, surfaces disguise and surprise
March-April 2023
The theme that emerged for this issue is surfaces that cover up what’s underneath. It could be artificial intelligence pretending to be a writer or a real writer assuming a pseudonym. It could be mussels masquerading as fish, or people masquerading during carnival revels. It could be nature covering up the remnants of industry, or the raw materials of industry hiding under a natural cover. Modern technology may have created ever more potential for generating deceptive veneers, but humans, and nature, have already been doing that for ages.
The Sneak Peek
This issue’s sneak peek is a bit different – a sneak peak into the editorial process, and perhaps its future.
For our next issue of Spacing magazine, we put out a call for contributions in late February. I also followed the lead of some other magazines and put it on Twitter (before that service got completely Musked). The call was especially for our summer issue theme “City on Fire,” thinking about all the ways fire, broadly defined, affects the city and its public spaces.
Within a couple of days, I got a rather odd pitch – it was a little mini-essay on fire and public spaces in Toronto. Quite coherent, but not original. I was puzzled and just sat on it. The next day, I got a very similar pitch – and I realized I was looking at pitches generated by ChatGPT, which had only just arrived on the scene a few weeks previously! I then got a third pitch that focused on fire and the arts in Toronto – a little more specific, but the same style.
I’m pretty sure these were generated by real people – possibly people hoping for an easy payday (though that would be pretty minimal given what we pay), possibly not from Canada. They must have fed our call for contributions into the AI brain to see what came out.
Once I saw the pattern, it was pretty clear. They were very much like high school essays – introduction, some headings with straightforward points, unoriginal but coherent, wrapped up by an “In conclusion” paragraph.
At first I thought maybe I won’t be making public calls for contributions again, but later I got several good or at least interesting pitches from real people who weren’t on our contributors mailing list, some of which will make it into the issue. I feel like now that I’ve seen them, I can easily weed out any AI pitches. But who knows, as AI develops, perhaps they will become more sophisticated? It will be an interesting challenge as the technology moves forward.
The Tidbit
There’s a type of mussel that has evolved a fishing lure! It’s created an appendage that looks like a little fish. The goal is to attract predator fish who want to eat the lure – only to blast those fish with their mussel larvae. The larvae stick to the gills, feed off nutrients from the host fish, and eventually drop off somewhere else to spread the trickster mussels to some new part of the riverbed.
What’s Up
I’ve been fascinated by issues of capital and wealth for many years, even before reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (my fascination is what kept me going to finish it!). One thing I’ve thought about is the idea of sovereign wealth funds – a pool of wealth that is owned by everyone in a nation. Usually they’re the result of oil money (e.g. Norway). But, in the face of our affordable housing crisis, what if the Canadian government began buying a pool of existing affordable housing to keep it affordable, holding it for non-profits or municipalities to manage? It wouldn’t generate income (rent would be low and used to maintain the properties), but it would still be wealth held in common. I proposed this idea, and a way to fund it that helps balance out generational wealth inequality, in a Spacing online post.
Quotable
"Right now, I must move off down the street. I must explore yet another April among the uncertain ration of Aprils that each one of us receives. I'm going for a walk."
– Harry Bruce, The Short Happy Walks of Max MacPherson
These are the words that wrap up a delightful old (1968) book that collects newspaper columns written in the 1940s and 60s by Harry Bruce about walks around Toronto, in the chatty and rambling (in every sense) persona of a “Max MacPherson.” It’s interesting to see how some parts of Toronto have kept much the same aura even as they change physically – for example the mink mile stretch of Bloor from Yonge to Avenue Road, a haven of wealthy shopping then as now. Some areas he describes I remember as not much changed when I got to know them 25 years ago, but are greatly changed now, while others I barely recognized and are interesting vistas into a Toronto I never knew.
The pandemic led to a lot of walking around my neighbourhood, which I got to know much better, but a lot less walking around the rest of my city. Especially now working from home, I haven’t really got that wandering habit back again. And the city is much vaster now than it was for Bruce, but that means all the more areas to explore. April may be almost past, but it’s time I started exploring again.
Pic Pick
For the next issue of Spacing, I’m writing about Toronto Nature Stewards and other grassroots groups who take care of the Don Valley. Andrew Simpson, one of the TNS lead stewards, gave me a tour of the Middle Mill location where he volunteers. He pointed out that much of the valley is actually re-growing on industrial rubble. It’s a lot like the Leslie Street Spit, but while I knew about the Spit, I’d never noticed that aspect of the Don Valley, despite cycling through it many times. But look closely, and you’ll see not only the rubble of the past industry that once dominated the valley, but even remnants of machinery, bulldozed when industry left and gradually being reclaimed by nature.
The Catch-Up
The theme of covering and surfaces reminds me that, quite some time ago, I drew on my historical work to look at the long history of official opposition to people wearing masks. Back in sixteenth-century Rouen, the judicial authorities had sought to ban the wearing of masks at carnival, fearing that allowing people to hide their identity could lead to disorder.
At the time, my article was in response to moves to ban wearing masks at protests, and also to ban Islamic face coverings for women. But it’s interesting to look at the same questions after the introduction of mask mandates in response to the pandemic. Previously, authorities had sought to restrict masking, fearing it could lead to grassroots opposition to authority; but in the pandemic, authorities were imposing masks, which in turn led to grassroots opposition to authority – that sometimes echoed the same fears once expressed by authorities when it came to masks.
Read “Mask Panic, Past and Present” (2011), from the Toronto Review of Books.
The Shout-Out
A vision of mining that "balances economic prosperity with social and environmental posterity."
That great phrase wraps up my friend and King’s non-fiction MFA colleague Virginia Heffernan’s new book Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness. She tells the wild, adventurous story of the discovery of the Ring of Fire mineral deposits in Northern Ontario, hidden beneath a difficult bogland, and the endless and so far failed attempts to figure out how to extract them while respecting the rights of the local First Nations and the fragile environment where they reside. But Virginia ends with a vision of how a truly effective and respectful mining process could happen. A quick and delightful read!
