7 April

Pinwheels In The Wind. Lying In The Wind.

by Jon Katz
In The Wind
In The Wind

The wind surprised us today, blowing hard and cold all morning. The hay blew out of the feeder, it was so strong. In the afternoon, the sun came out and the wind continued to blow, and the light was beautiful so Red and I went out on the lawn and I lay down and got my 100mm macro lens and just lay on the grass and let the warming wind blow over me. Red doesn’t like the wind, it unnerves him, so he hid his head on my shoulder and we just lay there for awhile. It was beautiful.

The wind swept over me and it felt as if I were floating in space. Looking through the viewfinder, I just saw this whirl of color, hypnotic in its brightness and beauty.

7 April

Barns In Spring: Into The Wind

by Jon Katz
Barn In Spring
Barn In Spring

The day began cold and windy and ended warmer, sunny and windy. I asked Maria if she would mind driving me around a bit to catch the photographer’s light I love, around 6 p.m., although it changes every day. She never minds, she is always happy to drive me around and she sketches while I jump in and out of the car. How can I convey how much I love to do this, how lucky I am to have someone who is happy to encourage me in this work: I was rewarded by the light hitting these two old barns in front of a greening hillside.

7 April

Come Meet The Hubbard Hall Writers: May 31. Creative Sparks.

by Jon Katz
Meet The Hubbard Hall Writers
Meet The Hubbard Hall Writers

The Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop came to the farm this afternoon to plan the first public reading of our works at Hubbard Hall on Friday, May 21st. There will be a reception at 6 p.m. – you can see their photos, videos, poems, and then at 7 p.m. a reading of our works.  You can order tickets from Hubbard Hall, the Cambridge, N.Y. arts center. That night, I will read from my next book “Second Chance Dog: A Love Story,” and the writers will show their blogs on video screens and read from their works. The Writer’s Workshop began last year and was supposed to last a few weeks, we are going to keep going indefinitely. It’s too creative a group to disband. This is a remarkable group of writers, bloggers, animators, poets and thinkers, one of the most talented and enthusiastic and supportive group of creative people I have meet.

The writing workshops I have heard about are rarely fun. We are having a blast, and moving forward with our work.

I asked each of the writers to start a  blog, and boy, did they ever. Diane Fiore (from left) began writing about her extraordinary relationship with her father, who she did not got along with until he got Alzheimer’s. They had ten wonderful years together. Her’s is a love story told on her blog every day. Her mother has Alzheimer’s now and Diane has moved into her home with her husband to help care for her. Home is where the heart is. People all over the country are finding her poignant writing about her family helpful and riveting. John Greenwood started his career as a milkman and now runs Stewart’s milking operations. His blog, Raining Iquanas is colorful, honest and amazingly creative, a spectacular explosion of writing, video, photography, a powerful new kind of memoir from a creative warrior.

Kim Gifford is a brilliant artist, photographer, writer and teacher. On her blog, she celebrates her quite wonderful art and her all encompassing love of pugs and her search for a meaningful life. Jen Baker-Porazinski is a compassionate and dedicated family physician struggling to keep her humanistic view of medicine in the midst of a complex and sometimes dehumanizing health care system. She writes about her determination to help people heal with great clarity and passion and her perspective as a doctor is very powerful. The writing workshop has helped give Jen a voice about her life in medicine.

Rebecca Fedler is a young poet who grew up on a Washington County farm (she works on the farm and also is a waitress and bartender.) Her blog is new, her poems are powerful, wrenching and honest. I call Rachel Barlow the sustainable Erma Bombeck. She writes about motherhood, family life, and life itself with great humor and insight and especially her two sons, Thing 1 and Thing 2.  Like so many fine writers, she is open and eloquent about her own struggles with depression on her increasingly popular website. Rachel is a talented animator as well as a writer.  She will shortly publish some of her original stories as e-books from her website. She and her family are committed to environmental consciousness and living.

I hope you will check out and follow the work of these very gifted and determined people, and if you can, please come and meet all of us (Red, too, he is the workshop dog) at Hubbard Hall on May 31. There is a suggested donation of $20 a person to benefit the Hubbard Hall Scholarship Fund. You can order tickets on the Hubbard Hall website. This is a celebration of the creative spark, in fact that’s what we are calling the evening “Creative Sparks.”

7 April

Old Fartism: Arteries Of The Mind

by Jon Katz
Arteries Of The Mind
Arteries Of The Mind

In America, nobody pays much attention to the elderly. Pharmaceutical companies and surgeons love them, they are a gazillion dollar industry when they start to fail, but otherwise have little buying power to interest the dons of the Corporate Nation. One of the diseases of aging that I fear is Old Fartism, little discussed, a chronic, debilitating disease for which there are no pills, joint replacements, diapers or nursing homes.

Old Fartism is a grumpy disease, a mental disease, mostly, which seems to afflict people from middle-age on. It’s symptoms are gradual, I would describe them as a hardening of the cultural and social arteries. It begins when people start saying “when I was a kid,” or any sentence beginning with “kids today…” The end of that sentence never seems to be that kids today are smarter and more creative than kids have ever been.

Old Fartism advances the notion that things were always better “in the old days…” Without TV, computers, cell-hones (Old Farts HATE texting, it rocks them to the core.) The fabled old days were always simpler, better, safer and more satisfying than the new days or the current days. But who raised the children who are inventing the new days? Did they come out of the clouds?

One of Old Fartism’s symptoms is cultural amnesia, in which the Old Days hover like a sort of Emerald City, an Oz. It filters out the old days, to eradicate disease, the suffocating lives of many women, the bloodiest wars in human history, polio, measles and once fatal diseases like appendicitis and flu. Old Fartism is intensely nostalgic, if that’s the right word. In the old days, wise and firm parents brooked no nonsense (there are no bullies in those old days, no draft, no cultural isolation for black or  gay people or creative people, no Internet or gaming or blogs) and their kids all grew up to be disciplined and wise? Really, their old days were different from mine. I was holed up in a musty bedroom in Providence with a transistor radio my father took away from me and smashed because he suspected it was playing Rock N’ Roll. The angry old men were just as angry then, but nobody seemed to challenge them much.

Old Fartism is not crazy about change. They love paper books (me too) and remember when phone companies came to your house and fixed things and politicians tried to work things out. They remember nice doctors, too, who actually took time to talk to you. It isn’t that Old Farts are always wrong – they are often right – but Old Fartism isn’t subtle about mixing the good and the bad of the past. Life tends to be black-and-white, life not about changing but about standing still.

Old Fartism hardens the arteries in the way medical technology companies have not figured out how to market. Perhaps they will and people can get attitude replacements (think of the lawsuits down the road.) I think a lot about the mindset of aging, and I kind of like where I am. I am being careful about Old Fartism. At lunch the other day I started bitching about how different publishing used to be. I stopped and started planning my Podcast.

7 April

Farm As Ballet. Symmetry.

by Jon Katz
Symmetry
Symmetry

I love farms and barns, they are magical to me. Farms are ballets, there is a symmetry and choreography to them, the barns surrounding the farmhouse, sometimes across the road, sometimes in a circle, sometimes, like ships of the line, in a straight row. They are most beautiful in the afternoon light, when the soft light, the photographer’s light, warms up the barns and frames the old white houses.

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