Some sloth-texts: Flanders and Swann, in the old pronunciation slowth:

For days and days among the trees
I sleep and dream and doze,
Just gently swaying in the breeze
Suspended by my toes;

While eager beavers overhead
Rush through the undergrowth,
I watch the clouds beneath my feet …
How sweet to be a Sloth!

Ogden Nash on same:

Said the slothful tree toad to the three-toed sloth,
Is it true you are lazy enough for us both?
I don’t bother to scratch even when mosquitoed,
Said the three-toed sloth to the slothful tree toad.

I like Roethke’s take:

In moving-slow he has no Peer.
You ask him something in his ear;
He thinks about it for a Year;

And, then, before he says a Word
There, upside down (unlike a Bird)
He will assume that you have Heard —

My globetrotting brother has just returned from two weeks of solo adventuring and jungle-cruising in Brazil. His trip seems to have been highly educational, as I learn when we get caught up this afternoon via IM, of which an excerpt follows:

[14:30] Dave: but for now, here is a sloth

[14:31] Scott: thank you.

[14:31] Dave:

[14:31] Dave: those bastards are vicious

[14:31] Scott: amazin’.

[14:32] Scott: well, who wouldn’t be vicious if you were the only animal named after a deadly sin?

[14:32] Scott: Not counting the Madagascarian Gluttonies.

[14:32] Dave: obviously you haven’t heard of the Spotted Wrath.

[14:32] Scott: very rare!

[14:33] Scott: I believe we’ll be dining on spotted wrath under glass at the wedding this weekend

[14:34] Dave: Sloths only defecate once a week, always on the same tree.

[14:35] Scott: that’s fascinating. you don’t want to be under that tree on that day, sez I.

[14:36] Scott: wait … do you mean that each sloth uses their own tree each week? or is there some great communal tree that the sloths descend upon?

[14:36] Dave: interestingly, the sloth will crawl all the way to the bottom of the tree, at great risk, and shit directly on the ground.

[14:36] Dave: each sloth has its own respective shitting tree, i believe.

[14:36] Scott: I think I read that in a Hemingway novel

[14:36] Dave: i think it’s a metaphor…

[14:37] Scott: sounds like a compelling reason to stop South American deforestation!

[14:37] Scott: if the number of sloths ever exceeds the number of unshitted trees … all hell will break loose

[14:37] Dave: the sloth shit is the only thing keeping the forest properly fertilized

[14:39] Scott: you’d think natural selection would favor sloths who defecate from high above ground

[14:39] Scott: rather than crawling all the way down that tree

[14:39] Dave: maybe they just don’t like to shit in midair

Good lines for a Tuesday in April (though should really’ve posted it last Tuesday): Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan:

It was a Tuesday afternoon. It was springtime in the northern hemisphere of Earth.

Earth was green and watery. The air of Earth was good to breathe, as fattening as cream.

The purity of the rains that fell on Earth could be tasted. The taste of purity was daintily tart.

Earth was warm.

The surface of Earth heaved and seethed in fecund restlessness. Earth was most fertile where the most death was.

Twain, writing to William Dean Howells, on what he called the uninvited emendations introduced while prepping A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for publication, and the putting of the Clemensian kibosh thereon: “Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me, & I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.”

Continuing with our science theme: A stanza that has mysteriously stuck in my mind since elementary school, from Wallace Irwin’s 1904 poem “Science for the Young”:

Mamie often wondered why
Acids trouble alkali —
Mamie, in a manner placid,
Fed the cat boracic acid,
Whereupon the cat grew frantic,
Executing many an antic;
“Ah!” cried Mamie, overjoyed,
“Pussy is an alkaloid!”

Yuri, Shep, and Sergei, with oranges, in orbit aboard the ISS, December 2000. Pic via NASA. More.

A few weekends ago I randomly spend a morning checking out the website of the International Space Station, and I get caught up in the ship’s logs from Expedition One, which was up there from October 2000 until March 2001.

The logs were not originally intended for public view — many entries contain redacted passages, and for the most part they’re just dry, militarily-terse accounts of the various acronym-heavy technical tasks and endless troubleshootings that occupy all hours of the day. But I’m impressed to see that the crew (one American and two Russians) nevertheless often takes a moment to log the movies they watch together during their down time, occasionally offering a bit of commentary on each one.

As I read, I kind of forget about the grandeur of space exploration and instead try to imagine what the hell it must be like to watch Apocalypse Now and The Big Lebowski and 2001 (not to mention “Lethal Weapon Week”) crowded around a circa-2000 government laptop in a cramped, smelly zero-gravity tin can in Low Earth Orbit. (Smacks more than a little of Mystery Science Theater 3000. We got Movie Sign?)

What follows, for your edification, is a compilation of the space station movie-night notes, excerpted from the logs, as set down by Cmdr. William (“Shep”) Shepherd:

19 NOV 2000
Cranked up the laptop and we watch disk 1 of “Sixth Sense”. We call it a night at about midnight …
Finished disk 2 of “Sixth Sense” –nobody liked it. Yuri said he picked it as he thought it was the sequel to “Fifth Element”. We let him off easy.

20 NOV 2000
We call it a day and lay into the new load of chow from Progress. CD movie is “LA Confidential”. We may have to watch this one several more times.

24 NOV 2000
Watched disk 1 of “Apocalypse Now”. Shep tried to explain why Robert Duvall is always wearing the black cavalry hat, but being a Navy guy, he’s not sure he understands it either.

25 NOV 2000
End of the workday. Disc 2 of Apocalypse Now. Found “Kurtz” .

28 NOV 2000
Watched the 2nd CD of “Pulp Fiction” and called it a night.

11 DEC 2000
Finished the day with some chow and disk 1 of “Private Ryan” (Yuri’s choice).

13 DEC 2000
Got to secure from the comm. gear about 2100 and watched the last disk of “Private Ryan”.

15 DEC 2000
Watched disk 2 of “Contact” and got on the laptops for email.

16 DEC 2000
Finish the day with dinner and the last disk of “Contact”.

19 DEC 2000
Ate some dinner and watched disk #2 of “Lethal Weapon 3″ (It’s Lethal Weapon Week) although the disk kept crashing about 10 minutes from the end.

20 DEC 2000
We secured for the evening and continued “Lethal Weapon Week” with first disk of LW #4.

22 DEC 2000
Took the rest of the day off, watched the first half of “Blues Brothers”, and got on the email.

23 DEC 2000
Reconfigured the Wiener for the DVD drive set up after dinner and tried one of the DVD movies. This is definitely the way to go. Video and sound quality much improved over the CD-ROM disks. Only down-side for us is the network has to come down when the Wiener gets configured for DVD, but we figure for Saturday night, it’s worth it.

28 DEC 2000
Ate dinner and watched the first ½ of “Air Force One”, then discussed some of the PAO events for tomorrow.

29 DEC 2000
Let the real “Space Odyssey 2001″ proceed.

31 DEC 2000
Watched “The World Is Not Enough” and worked on tonight’s log …

2 JAN 2001
Watched the last ½ of “2001″ and called it a day.

3 JAN 2001
Finished the day with the first disk of “2010″. We note that the movie opens with a recounting of “Ship’s Log” from the previous mission (2001).

5 JAN 2001
Finished the 2nd disk of “2010″. Something strange about watching a movie about a space expedition when you’re actually on a space expedition.

6 JAN 2001
Finished the day with more email and watched “The Rock”.

9 JAN 2001
We call it a day, get some chow, and watch the first part of “Catch 22″.

10 JAN 2001
Ate dinner and we finished watching “Catch 22″.

12 JAN 2001
We watched the last half of “In-Laws” with Peter Falk and got on the email.

13 JAN 2001
Ate dinner and watched the first disk of “Dr. Strangelove.”

16 JAN 2001
Got the word that Atlantis is delayed several weeks. Lab delay is critical as we are running out of movies that we have not watched. We will have to start the shipboard routine where we turn the sound down and everyone mouths the words, cause we know them so well.

18 JAN 2001
We watched the last ½ of “As Good As It Gets” and called it a day.

19 JAN 2001
We all got some gym time, ate dinner and watched “Carlito’s Way” with Russian subtitles. You have to watch some cops and robbers to see how much Russian there is that they never taught you in class.

22 JAN 2001
We have dinner and watch the first part of “The Big Lebowski”.

24 JAN 2001
We eat dinner and watch the first part of “Used Cars”.

25 JAN 2001
We eat some dinner and watch the last of “Used Cars” (we are definitely down to the movies you can’t even find at Blockbuster).

26 JAN 2001
We eat dinner and watch “GI Jane”. Lots of SEAL questions, and Shep explains why this is not exactly like the real SEAL training.

30 JAN 2001
We watch the end of “End of Days” and regret that we did not roll it on New Year’s Eve.

31 JAN 2001
Finshed the day with some gym time, chow, and reel 1 of “Lion of the Desert”.

1 FEB 2001
We finish the day in the “sport-zal” and catch the early showing of “Tombstone” in the wardroom.

6 FEB 2001
We ate some dinner and watched the last part of “City of Angels”. Shep did his best to explain to Yuri and Sergei what the phrase “chick flick” means.

7 FEB 2001
We get some chow and rig for movies. We watch “Full Metal Jacket”. This has some of the finest “drill sergeant” scenes in moviedom.

8 FEB 2001
We finish the day with some exercise, chow, and the last of the movies we have not seen yet. Tonight’s selection– “History of Navy SEALS”. We think this is very appropriate, as we will probably soon have a use for the quote: “the only easy day was yesterday.”

19 FEB 2001
We are most certainly enjoying the DVD players-they are great! We are ready for movie night with the ground!

20 FEB 2001
We have some dinner and watch part of “Frequency” (strange movie, although not as strange as “Usual Suspects” which we saw last night).

21 FEB 2001
Movie tonight is the last ½ of “Frequency”-sort of a chick-flick, but it does get better at the end.

22 FEB 2001
Tonight’s movie-”The Green Mile”.

24 FEB 2001
We put some chow and the DVD player in the Soyuz and close the hatch about 0530. It takes 2 orbits to get the first set of hooks off and the docking tunnel pressure checked. We get the “Austin Powers” sequel in while all this is taking place. (Maybe a Soyuz first here).

1 MAR 2001
We eat some dinner and watch about 40 min of “Hurricane”.

2 MAR 2001
We finish the day with chow and “Hurricane”. The DVD players are awesome. Thanks again, guys!

(I note that they don’t try a DVD until late December, and they don’t get real DVD players sent up to them until February, so it sounds like they’re mostly watching movies that’ve been ripped to MPGs and burned onto a couple of CD-Rs each. Obviously NASA is above home-video FBI warnings and the MPAA.)

Ah yes, antiquing. Slouching around in dusty, musty, varnishy creep-shops packed to the rafters with revolting baubles, gaudy expensive junk, and cellar-scented corpse furniture. The vulturous proprietors can be entertainingly patronizing. They can tell just by looking at us that we don’t have the ingredients to make a real purchase, something worth a goddamn — a grandfather clock, a kingly dinette set, an Escalade-sized oil painting, an ornately carved and inlaid sideboard from darkest imperial China. It’s possible that no one ever really buys that big-spender stuff, that it is just rotated in and out of the store basements each season; but they permit this great pretense, this sense of casual-customer shame, that amidst all these looming four-figure spooky museum pieces, all we can buy is this measly postcard, that puny plate, this moddish flower vase, that ancient empty dynamite crate. Only rarely do we get something that can’t be carried away in a plastic bag. E.g., yesterday we buy a messily-restored wooden washstand. Previously from the same shop we’ve bought a strange chair. But ordinarily, it has become a sort of sad running joke that whatever kitschy gimcrack or cobwebby curio we can bring ourselves to buy, cashiers seem to always make a show of asking us, with a pitying smile, Did you find a TREASURE?

High comedy: Vollmann, interviewed in the fall 2000 Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: It’s clear that parts of Butterfly Stories have to be fictional, but still I wonder, did you have unprotected sex with that many prostitutes? Why take that risk?

VOLLMANN: Well, I wouldn’t mind finding some other way. When I was writing [You Bright and Risen Angels], Rainbow Stories and the other stories, that sort of thing wasn’t particularly interesting to me — getting involved with all the prostitutes that way. But I kept thinking when I first began writing that my female characters were very weak and unconvincing. What is the best way to really improve that? I thought, Well, the best way is to have relationships with a lot of different women. What’s the best way to do that? It’s to pick up whores.

INTERVIEWER: Has this worked?

VOLLMANN: I don’t know, but I feel that I have created some really good characters.

William T. Vollmann, in his afterword to last year’s new edition of Lowry’s Under the Volcano, describing the novel’s protagonist:

… his orphanhood and the failures of his various friendships have marred him still further; and alcoholism has eaten most of him up, leaving him a mishmash of lies, selfishness, and desperate sensations. The pain of alcohol withdrawal motivates him to have another drink, but the process of what my heroin-addicted acquaintances call “getting well” does not restore him to himself; it deposits him on the shore of a dreamy, lonely land called Forgetfulness. Time jitters by, or fails to pass; he wonders what just happened, and whether he said a passionate thing or merely thought it.

Not sure I buy this, appealing-ish though it is: Alberto Manguel, A Reading Diary:

The books that pile up by the side of my bed appear to read themselves out loud to me in my sleep. Before turning off the light, I leaf through one of them, I read a couple of paragraphs, put it aside, take up another. After a few days, I have the impression of knowing them all.

We hit our local walking-distance pub of choice, the Pheasant Plucker, to pseudo-celebrate some occasions. Bonafide warm spring weather arrives; Laura is finished with classes until the fall; I have finally paid off 100% of my American debt (credit cards, student loans, ex-girlfriend hit-men fees), and am officially no longer paying American taxes (thanks to an ass-kicking fire machine of an accountant, who groks the niceties of the US/Canada tax treaty). Callooh, callay. Of course, there are still Canadian debts and Canadian taxes, but tonight we ignore them. We sequester ourselves in a corner of the Pheasant and imbibe volumes of draught and eat hearty ugly pub vittles. The Thursday-nighters around us carouse and roar at the requisite televised hockey game. No word on whether any of Newton’s Laws are in evidence.

David Foster Wallace, in his story “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way”:

We could all remember the opening line of the first story she turned in for the very first workshop: “Nouns verbed by, adverbially adjectival.” Nuff said? Professor Ambrose summed it up well — though not without tact — when he told the workshop that Ms. Eberhardt’s stories tended “not to work for him” because of what he called a certain “Look-Mom-no-hands quality” that ran through her work.

Later:

“I feed back, Drew. I gave you feedback just yesterday. I said I liked the ambiguousness of that ‘FIRM DOCTORS TELEPHONE POLES’ title. Why you’re pissed is that I only said I thought a twenty-page poem that’s all punctuation wouldn’t be much fun for anybody to actually read.”

Borges, talking to the Paris Review, 1967:

You know, English is a beautiful language, but the older languages are even more beautiful: they had vowels. Vowels in modern English have lost their value, their color. My hope for English — for the English language — is America. Americans speak clearly. When I go to the movies now, I can’t see much, but in the American movies, I understand every word.

Lorrie Moore, mercilessly, in her short story “How to Become a Writer”:

Insist you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in the music of language, that you are interested in — in — syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup.

“Syllables?” you will hear someone ask, voice trailing off, as they glide slowly toward the reassuring white of the dip.

I’m not sure at what point during my reading of Memoirs of Hadrian it is that I finally notice that the bookmark I’ve been using, picked up from the bookmark pile more or less at random, bears a photo of a Roman aqueduct. It’s the Pont du Gard in France. Not a bad double synchronicity, for a novel of imperial Rome originally written in French, although the Pont du Gard was built before Hadrian’s time. (It’s estimated to’ve been begun in 19 BC, or as late as the mid-first-century AD. Hadrian lived from 76 to 138 AD.) Shown above is the photo, Dave McKean’s “Travels”; the bookmark it’s on is an old insert flier for his A Small Book of Black and White Lies.