All this fits well into my scheme. I don’t care how I say what I must  say. If I do original work all well and good. But if I can say it (the matter of form I mean) by translating the work of others that also is valuable. What difference does it make?

Download Turkey’s Beak

‘Turkey’s Beak’ is my father’s (apparently) sui generis euphemism for a variety of profanities (‘What! That Turkey’s Beak!’) and commendations (‘You did? Well, aren’t you just a Turkey’s Beak!’).

You know the drill. This is my first unthematic mix. So liberating!

Also, Happy Thanksgiving! (It’s kind of catching on in France.) Tracklist in the comments. You can download some of my other mixes here and here.

I’ve also ‘remastered’ an old favorite, I Don’t Hate You—originally an epic, unrelenting über-mix that Maura Lynch took to print to declare ‘[she] love[s] this’—by separating it into individual tracks.

About twenty-four years ago, I knew a man in Hoboken, a German who used to visit us in the Dutch Seaman’s Home. As far as he could remember, he was always hungry in Europe. He found a place in Hoboken where bread was sold a few days old— all kinds of bread: French bread, German bread, Italian bread, Dutch bread, Greek bread, American bread and particularly Russian black bread. He bought big stacks of it for very little money, and let it get good and hard and then he crumbled it and spread it on the floor in his flat and walked on it as on a soft carpet. I lost sight of him, but found out many years later that one of the other fellows met him again around 86th street. He had become some kind of Jugend Bund leader and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays. He is still alive but quite old and is now a Communist. I could never figure him out, but now when I think of him, all that I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face.

Who modelled your head of terracotta?
Some American student friend.
Life-size, the lips half-pursed, raw-edged
With crusty tooling— a naturalistic attempt
At a likeness that just failed. You did not like it.
I did not like it. Unease magnetized it
For a perverse rite. What possessed us
To take it with us, in your red bucket bag?
November fen-damp haze, the river unfurling
Dark whorls, ferrying slender willow yellows.
The pollard willows wore comfortless antlers.
Switch-horns, leafless. Just past where the field
Broadens and the path strays up to the right
To lose the river and puzzle for Grantchester,
A chosen willow leaned towards the water.
Above head height, the socket of a healed bole-wound,
A twiggy crotch, nearly an owl’s porch,
Made a mythic shrine for your double.
It fitted it upright, firm. And a willow tree
Was a Herm, with your head, watching East
Through those tool-stabbed pupils. We left it
To live the world’s life and weather for ever.

You ransacked thesaurus in your poem about it,
Veiling its mirror, rhyming yourself into safety
From its orphaned fate.
But it would not leave you. Weeks later
We could not seem to hit on the tree. We did not
Look too hard— just in passing. Already
You did not want to fear, if it had gone,
What witchcraft might ponder it. You never
Said much more about it.

What happened?
Maybe nothing happened. Perhaps
It is still there, representing you
To the sunrise, and happy
In its cold pastoral, lips pursed slightly
As if my touch had only just left it.
Or did boys find it— and shatter it? Or
Did the tree too kneel finally?

Surely the river got it. Surely
The river is its chapel. And keeps it. Surely
Your deathless head, fired in a furnace,
Face to face at last, kisses the Father
Mudded at the bottom of the Cam,
Beyond recognition or rescue,
All our fears washed from it, and perfect,
Under the stained mournful flow, saluted
Only in summer briefly by the slender
Punt-loads of shadows flitting towards their honey
And the stopped clock.

Evil.
That was what you called the head. Evil.

This was an unproductive year. Must. Do. Better.

Ask a toad what beauty is—great beauty, the to kalon. He will tell you that it is his toad wife with two large, round eyes sticking out of her little, flat face, a yellow belly and a brown back. Ask a negro from Guinea. For him, beauty is oily black skin, two sunken eyes and a flattened nose. Ask the devil. He will tell you that beauty is a pair of horns, four claws and a tail.

Then go ask the philosophers. Their response will be gibberish, having to conform to the archetypal essence of beauty, to the to kalon.

I went to see a tragedy one day and sat next to a philosopher. ’How beautiful!’ he said.

‘What’s beautiful about it?’ I asked.

‘The author,’ he said, ‘has achieved his goal.’

The next day he took some medicine that made him feel better. I told him, ‘The medicine has achieved its goal. What beautiful medicine!’ He came to understand that we cannot call medicine beautiful, and that in order to do so, it must inspire in you a sense of admiration and pleasure. He allowed that the tragedy had inspired these two feelings, and that this was beauty, was to kalon.

We journeyed to England, and the same tragedy was playing there, in a perfect translation; it made the audience yawn. ‘Ah!,’ he said, ‘the to kalon is not the same for the English and the French.’ After long reflection, he concluded that beauty is often quite relative—that what is decent in Japan is indecent in Rome, that what is fashionable in Paris is unfashionable in Peking—and saved himself the trouble of composing a long treatise on beauty.