Daily Prompt | The Gad About Town

A Muse to a Talent to Amuse

Posted on August 3, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

From 1995 till 1997, I wrote a humor column titled “The Gad About Town,” for a great weekly newspaper in Sullivan County, New York. (It, the newspaper, still exists, and so do I apparently.)

“The Gad About Town” held the distinction of being the only column in the newspaper that did not generate even one response letter from our readers. Another editorial columnist, a sweet, genial, elderly man, wrote the most innocuous pieces each week, yet he received the most vituperative letters from readers who took exception with everything he wrote. I admired that this only amused him.
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‘Like something almost being said’

Posted on August 2, 2016 by Mark Aldrich

To a friend, Philip Larkin wrote about his latest volume of poems, High Windows, “The new printing of HW came out, with 3 mistakes corrected but a new one introduced: there is talk of another—printing, not mistake.” (The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, ed. by Archie Burnett, 2012)

High Windows contains many of Larkin’s most loved poems: “To the Sea,” “The Trees,” “Forget What Did,” “High Windows,” “This Be The Verse,” “Annus Mirabilis,” “Going, Going.” They are his most loved even though they are—or because they are—his bleakest. “This Be The Verse” opens with an attempt to shock: “They fuck you up, your mum and dad/They may not mean to, but they do … .”
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