One Needs Only A Cast-Iron Skillet To Survive

Another Sunday Review, another poem intro:

Jet
by Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.
Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,
bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish
and old space suits with skeletons inside.
On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life
out of the box, uncapping the bottle
to let the effervescence gush
through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances
in unison, and then the fireflies flash
dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation
for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex
someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night
as if remembering the bright unbroken planet
we once came from,
to which we will never
be permitted to return.
We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

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And now for this week's Sunday Review:

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-via The New York Times: If you were wondering why tomatoes have been more expensive than usual this summer, Dan Barber might have the explanation. Articles like this are always fascinating to me because they highlight just how little we know about science/the universe/life/our planet. They highlight, despite what we may say or do, just how little control we have.

-via The New York Times: Kurt Andersen takes a look at just how much the idea of "pop culture" has evolved since 1960, and how President Obama may have the biggest effect of all on it.

-via The New York Times: While I don't really consider myself much of a fan of 80's pop culture (see how I did that?), I can respect the impact of John Hughes and what his passing means to some and to the film world at large. A.O. Scott is one of my favorite film critics, and he gives Mr. Hughes his due in this piece.

-via The New York Times: This is a great piece by Jhumpa Lahiri about some realizations she came to about life and food while on vacation on Cape Cod. My favorite sentence in the piece (and probably of the day) is this:

One needs only a cast-iron skillet to survive.

-via The New York Times: The stories of atrocities taking place half a world away in either direction have almost become so commonplace that they fail to inspire any real dialogue or change. But that doesn't mean we should stop telling them. Jeffrey Gettleman is the author of this piece, and in it he brings to light a topic that I, for one, had heard nothing about up until now--the ever-increasing popularity of male-rape in the Congo. It's another tactic in a long line of atrocities used by revolutionary forces to embarrass and submit the population. Sometimes I wonder what's worse--to have these acts committed against you, or to live somewhere that doesn't attract the global attention needed to help stop the people responsible.

-via The New York Times: In this piece, George Vecsey hearkens back to the days of the Thurman Munson/Carlton Fisk rivalry, and explains why Jorge Posada and Jason Varitek are unlikely to ever get caught up in the same type of bad blood.

-via CNN: I saw this and immediately thought of my friend Ryan, who will one day win a Pulitzer for writing about pickles. You heard it here first.

-via CNN: Every day, the urge to jailbreak my iPhone grows inside of me. This article didn't help matters.

-via Gizmodo: If you're like me, and you loved Iron Man, be sure to watch this five minutes of footage from IM2 that leaked after its showing at Comic Con.

-via ESPN: As of late, any time an MLB-related scandal or story breaks, I find myself checking in first with Howard Bryant to get his take. This piece is about this week's David Ortiz/Josh Hamilton revelations, and as usual, they're fair and insightful. One day ESPN will make a next generation lineup for Sports Reporters. I can only hope Bryant gets one of the seats.

-via Lifehacker: This is Lifehacker's list of the five best video players. I'm a VLC guy, myself.

-via Boy Genius Report: I don't know about you, but I'm pretty excited about these iTunes 9 rumors, especially the long-awaited visual organization of iPhone/iPod Touch apps. September is shaping up to be a pretty big month for Apple fans.

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That's all she wrote, folks. This day has been/will be spent hanging out with Bukowski, putting ointment in his eye, reading Updike, working on my latest short story, watching some DVD's I've yet to touch since purchasing them what feels like years ago, and hopefully going to sleep with the Yankees in first by 6.5 games, fresh off a four game sweep of the Sox.

In other words, just your average Sunday.

More soon.

JS