"Jour cotonneux"

I have quoted from this blog entry from mid-October, before, with a photograph of a kitchen whisk. This address presents a page of the most sustained textural sense known to me in works of this kind. That focus or disposition naturally extends to colour and contrast as textural variables in imagery, often macro-photographic. These variables are given the imaginative name, "les contours," and are consistently selected for their evocation of "silence." 

I read in French haltingly now, so long estranged from phrases overheard in the kitchen in childhood and sung in Christmas carols, before several years of academic study. To this day I naïvely associate the sounds of this language with agreable textures, almost of reticence, scintillatingly acute as its rhetoric becomes at any moment. These disabilities of mine inevitably attach me to the blog in yet another illegitimate way, of arousing expectations. But they are met.

This extraordinary blog conserves, by inhabiting, a perfectly marvelously distinctive place - a mode beyond style, an almost pristine antipode to vanity. As Advent looms, its many lurid windows to expose, we'll take some shelter here for certain. We'll listen through our language, and own its debt to France.

i-iii, Les contours du silence
iv, Thibault Oberlin


JS Bach
Capriccio, Arioso, BWV 992
Wilhelm Kempff
Deutsche Grammophon, 1993©