Random Notes from a Crank

I've read a lot of literature over the years. One lesson I've learned from various stories written by American authors from the 20th century is that if there's a married man and woman who have kids, it's not a good idea for the husband to take the babysitter home. I talking about you, John Cheever, Robert Coover, and John Updike. 

Another lesson I learned was "White folks crazy."

NPR had a story up recently about bias within a survey about young adult novels: "When A Popular List of 100 'Best-Ever' Teen Books Is the 'Whitest Ever.'" 

Sherman Alexie has some things to say in "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood." 

Recently I rediscovered a poem I really like, so I'm sharing it:

The Loon on Forrester's Pond
By Hayden Carruth

Summer wilderness, a blue light
twinkling in the trees and water, but even
wilderness is deprived now. "What's that?
What is that sound?" Then it came to me, 
this insane song, wavering music
like the cry of the genie inside the lamp,
it came from inside the long wilderness
of my life, a loon's song, and there he was
swimming on the pond, guarding
his mate's nest by the shore,
diving and staying under
unbelievable minutes and coming up
where no one was looking. My friend
told how once in his boyhood
he had seen a loon swimming beneath his boat,
a shape dark and powerful
down in that silent mysterious world, and how
it had ejected a plume of white excrement
curving behind. "It was beautiful,"
he said.

The loon
broke the stillness over the water
again and again,
broke the wilderness
with his song, truly
a vestige, the laugh that transcends
first all mirth
and then all sorrow
and finally all knowledge, dying
into the gentlest quavering timeless
woe. It seemed
the only real and only sanity to me.