Today in History: August 3

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

What are Standards?
 
Forgotten vaudeville songs and show tunes rescued from the sheer music pile by great singers and the masters of jazz.
 
There is no superior. There is no high and low. The beautiful thing is, you don’t have to choose, you can love it all.
 
Those songs are there to help you when you need them most.
 
You can stumble into them anytime, like the noise and benediction of any basement dive.—Elvis Costello, Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink, p. 432

Tony Bennett is 90 today. If he has ever penned as poetic a definition of the compositions that comprise music’s Great Songbook, the Standards, as Elvis Costello has above, it does not much matter, as Bennett’s voice is one of the three or four one hears in the jukebox of one’s mind when any number of titles from that Songbook are mentioned.
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‘Like something almost being said’

Posted on 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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Today in History: August 2

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

PT-109, a Patrol Torpedo boat, was rammed by a Japanese destroyer, the Amagiri, on this date in 1943 in the Pacific Ocean near the Solomon Islands. PT-109 was sliced in two. Two members of its crew were killed and two others badly injured, but eleven survived, including its commander, Lieutenant, junior grade, John F. Kennedy. What followed made Kennedy a wartime hero.

The ship sank. The destroyer motored on to its home base, its crew either oblivious to what the ship had done or celebrating what they thought was a minor triumph in the long war.

The eleven survivors, including Kennedy, swam to a tiny, deserted island, Plum Pudding Island (now called Kennedy Island) some three miles away. That island had no water or coconuts, so they swam to another island. There they survived for several days on coconuts while hiding from passing Japanese ships.
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