A cat, a kite, and other bits and pieces

As Setu noted in his comment to the last post but one here, Fontaine Daniel was developed as a kind of 'model village' by the Toiles de Mayenne factory, with pattern book, pretty houses built by the owner for the workers rather like Port Sunlight or Saltaire in the UK.  I don't know how common this was in France, where industrialisation didn't follow the same kind of patterns, and I don't know much about the history of the place at all.. (Setu knows so much about so many things, and speaks and writes an astonishing array of languages.  Lovers of land art shouldn't miss his post on American artist Patrick Dougherty's amazing willow installations at the domaine de Trévarez,  )

Anyway. for one reason or another I didn't take many pictures until we reached the lake, so I can't show you much of the architecture, but it was attractive and the houses looked solid and practical and comfortable, which the projects of whimsical entrepreneurs with notions of combining the philanthropic and the picturesque weren't always.  I did snap one of the pretty neo-mediaeval church,

which has an Arts and Crafts look about it.

As we entered the village, this cat spied us.

in particular Molly.

Her look was none too friendly - Mol hadn't noticed her at all - and she followed us a little too eagerly.  She had the desperate look of a very young cat with kittens, and they often won't hesitate to have a go at a hapless deaf and short-sighted dog which wanders too close.

The day was hot by then, but then there was water, perhaps non potable for us,

but with a thoughtful bucket positioned below, which Mol appreciated.

***

A little late in saying, but there's my response to Plutarch's question about kites and swallows over at Compasses/Questions.  I've been fairly slack on the blogging front all round of late, I feel, and have left this response a long time, so thanks to those who still look in there and express interest; erratic and sporadic though I am with it, it's the only prompt type of thing I've been motivated to stay the distance with, and I appreciate the patience of prompter and readers alike.

When I finally settled on a response I found two came along at once.  So I gave Plutarch the choice of which one he preferred, and he chose the first, and we batted it back and forth quite a lot, so I made, and resisted, quite a few changes, and I always like it when we do that.  Like the poem in the last post, it's got quite a lot of end rhymes and its own sort of pattern to how they come, but doesn't fall to any established form.  I'm quite taken with this way of doing things at the moment.

The other one was really a bit of frivolity to loosen up a bit.  Joe liked it less because he has reservations about concrete poetry, which in fact I think I tend to share; it's not something I've tried before to the best of my recollection.  It can easily become a gimmick.  But it has quite a long and reputable history, though it wasn't even called concrete poetry for much of it, what with Herbert's Easter Wings and Hardy's Convergence of the Twain, way before EE Cummings et all.  I was going to mention Clavics, which I gave up on, having bought it as a present for a friend who is a Geoffrey Hill fan and beside whom I am a poetical and intellectual pygmy,  but I quickly realised on googling for a link that getting onto Geoffrey Hill was wandering into areas of Poetry as a Contact Sport wherein I would be rendered a mere squashed bug before one could say enjambment ...

Anyway, my bit of messing about with concrete hinges on the text centring function, and looks like this:

A

kite:

a red lozenge

high over house and hill 

criss-crossed with cane struts  

a ringed line running from

 end to end, its string

strung out straight

 tethers it taut 

to earth, 

its tail 

like

an

S

.

trimmed and

tasselled

.

a tentative

try-out

.

laughing at

lightning

.

looping the

loop

.

twitching

twittering

.

aflap and

aflutter

.

swooping with

swifts

.

swapping with

swallows

.

 imitating

Icarus

.

funny or fearful 

fight or flight?

~

Kites seem to be quite a fruitful source of  memory and imagination for people.  Feel free to share what they bring to mind for you, and indeed, to add a little alliterative dyad tassel to the kite's tail if you wish.

~~~

Then in addition, to try to show Plutarch my birds eye view of a kite, I discovered the new insert a drawing function in the Google document we use for the 'test bed', with this result

Then I tried to do a swallow.

Oh well.  Plutarch was very kind about my introduction of graphic elements but gently discouraged their inclusion in the sequence as possibly distracting.  But I have no such scruples here.

~~~  

Well, it seems to be feast or famine around here.  Having thrown all manner of nonsense in as garnish, I shall probably go missing again for a bit.  We've got E and B and their parents (Tom's eldest daughter and co) coming for a few days tomorrow, which is always a joy but keeps us busy and leaves us a mite fatigued afterwards. Mol's had ear trouble for the third time in 6 months, after a hopeful year free of it, poor mite, after the operation and the broken wag and all, she is a dog of sorrows and no mistake. I'm only being flippant because it makes me too miserable thinking about it otherwise. She's on the mend and the way up again now, loving and cheerful again, fortunately as she has her adoring public to meet.  

~~~

I saw what looked like a freshly minted swallowtail butterfly in the garden the other day, I dashed out with the camera but it was gone.  No way of knowing if it was one of the caterpillars, but I'd like to think so.

~~~

Must go, promises to keep and far to go etc...