Band of Thebes

Hugh Thomson Wins Wainwright Prize

Of the six finalists for a new prize honoring the year's best nature and travel books, three titles are about walking, including the winner, Hugh Thomson's The Green Road Into the Trees: An Exploration of England.

The shortlist:

Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey. "In summer 2010 Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born. 

Patrick Barkham, Badgerlands: The Twilight World of Britain's Most Enigmatic Animal. "The author of The Butterfly Isles turns his wry, affectionate attention to an even more beloved (and controversial) British animal – the badger."

Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain. "This book is about the encounter with Roman Britain. What does Roman Britain mean to us now? How were its physical remains rediscovered and made sense of? How has it been reimagined, in story and song and verse?"

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. "Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of songlines and their singers. "

Hugh Thomson, The Green Road Into the Trees: An Exploration of England. "From the very centre of England – literally, as his village is furthest from the sea – he travels to its outermost edges. By taking a 400 mile journey from coast to coast, through both the sacred and profane landscapes of ancient England, Hugh casts unexpected light – and humour – on the way we live now."

Esther Woolfson, Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. "A beautifully written and thought-provoking record of a year spent observing the natural world in a city, which looks afresh at our relationship to the animals and plants that live in close proximity to us." 

The Wild Trees

I knew I hitched up with the right person long before I asked my pard what he'd like named for him, imagining he would need time to decide between a galaxy or an exoplanet or a mountain range, and he immediately said a spring. He also likes trees, so yesterday for a pre-birthday lunch we hiked to this spot in the redwoods where 135 years ago Robert Louis Stevenson fell ill and was nursed back to health over three weeks by an old bear hunter named Jonathan Wright in his isolated cabin. Four years later he wrote Treasure Island and five years after that published Kidnapped, which Rupert Smith considers "a profoundly homosexual novel... fraught with erotic energy." The next year he penned The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Coastal redwoods are, on average, 500 to 700 years old though they can live to be 2,000. Read Richard Preston's The Wild Trees [Kindle] about the people who seek and find the supergiants, like Hyperion, the world's reigning champ at 379 feet.

Quick Stop in Colorado

 

After Charlotte, NC and NYC last week, yesterday I got to show my pard Rocky Mountain National Park. For the better shot, go here then click the upper right corner to see it full screen.

Radical Faeries Photo Essay in TIME

  

Claire Martin captures Radical Faeries in 20 photos published by Time magazine. Happily, the images are celebatory rather than mocking or exploitive. The couple at right are Spiral and Flame Tree.

Martin said, "What excited me most about discovering Faerieland was the possibility to photograph a story where the crux for change lies in the culture of the wider society, not within the fringe community itself. It was a joy to photograph a story about love, acceptance and creativity that also carries a strong message about the problems and prejudices in society and culture today."

Auf wiedersehen, J-Tree

 

Leaving Joshua Tree National Park.

 

 

Rocks

A lot of climbers today.

Joshua Tree National Park

For a few days after Palm Springs and L.A., where we finally saw Saving Mr. Banks, because movies about aging Engish women writers must be supported, and American Hustle, which is as brilliant as critics say (17 gave it a perfect 100 on Metacritic), though the Studio 54-ish scene is strangely degayed. Among the huge afros and open polyester shirts, it needed a some fabulous gays to cinch its 1978 groove.

Because People Have Been Asking

 

There's been a lot of this. And this. But today I'm away.

Montana & Wyoming

Paraphrasing LL Cool J: Don't call it a honeymoon. After ten years together, we got married in DC on Monday, happily -- with a splendid gathering including my sister as my best man and several favorite Thebes readers, which meant the world to us -- and flew early Tuesday morning to Wyoming for my pard's semi-annual board meetings. Wolves, elk, moose, hawks, black bears, a lone grizzly, a heavy snowstorm, and last night His Serene Highness the Prince of Monaco.

Ronald Blythe on 50s Gay Circle: Britten, Pears, Forster

The wonderful chronicler of country life Roland Blythe has released a new book The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh, 1955-1958 to coincide with Benjamin Britten's centenary. A fresh, struggling writer then in his early 30s, Blythe was surprised to be invited over for a drink with E.M. Forster in his 70s. He met Britten and his partner Peter Pears and began working at their new Aldeburgh Festival. His list of artistic "Selected Personalia" included in the book extends four pages: J.R. Ackerley, Elizabeth Bowen, Peter Hall, John Nash, Mervyn Peake, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among many others. The Times says his "delightful memoir" is "a small masterpiece about an extraordinary place."

Recipient of the RSL's Benson Medal, Blythe is best known for his Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, which became a super hit movie on British television, seen by more than 14 million viewers when the UK population was 55 million. Fifty years of his best work is collected in Aftermath: Selected Writings.

He is of the old world in not discussing or writing about private life, though he is not a prude about others' pleasures, praising the "explicit" stories of Colm Tóibín, his favorite contemporary novelist. He does tell interviewers he has never lived with anyone and has never been in love. Does his saying he slept with Patricia Highsmith make him more, or less, queer?

The Guardian has a halfhour podcast of Blythe reading and sharing memories. It's gently amusing to see Blythe and podcast in the same sentence: At 90, he has never bothered to learn to drive a car or use a computer.

For pure Britten, go right to the source with his early diaries compiled in Journeying Boy. Neil Bartlett chose it for Thebes' queer lit poll, saying the book "...gives us the unedited raw material out of which this extraordinary young queer man struggled to compose himself in 1930's England. Confused, enthusiastic, despairing, giddy, sure, horny, guilty, overwhelmed, overworked... but with a steely thread of talent drawing him towards his own future. Terrific."

(photo via)

Macfarlane, Franzen, Barnes, Ghosh, Keneally on Warwick Longlist

  

There's no better way to celebrate the solstice than to unwind after your long hike / druid dance / wicca gathering with a great naturalist. Among the finest is Robert Macfarlane, whose new book about walking ancient footpaths, The Old Ways, has just been longlisted for the Warwick Prize. Macfarlane's last book The Wild Places was also nominated for the prize, which is among the most eclectic literary awards: Every two years they give £25,000 to one great book published in the past twenty-four months regardless of genre -- fiction, nonfiction, and poetry compete on equal footing. In 2003, Macfarlane's debut was Mountains of the Mind, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He's kind of a big deal. He chairs the 2013 Man Booker jury.

The complete Warwick Prize longlist:

Jim Al-Khalili, Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, nonfiction.

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending, novel.

Amy Espeseth, Sufficient Grace, novel.

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, nonfiction.

Jonathan Franzen, Freedom, novel.

Amitav Ghosh, River of Smoke, novel.

Robert Gray, Cumulus, poetry.

Thomas Keneally, The Daughters of Mars, historical novel.

Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door, stories.

Nidaa Khoury, Book of Sins, poetry.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, nonfiction.

Alice Oswald, Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad, poem.

Gay Duo's Last Look at their Garden: To Eat, A Country Life

After 42 years in love, 33 of them at their ravishing 27-acre North Hill Garden in Vermont, and a lifetime total of two quarrels, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd were working on their fourth book together, when Wayne died of a heart attack at 68 in 2010. Alone, Joe didn't step foot in the garden, skipped every meal, collapsed, and ended up in the hospital for a week. Little by little, he returned to life and eventually finished their wonderful new book, To Eat: A Country Life [Kindle], on sale yesterday.

I read it on an airplane. Having given away my upgrade seat in business class to my partner, I took his aisle seat in coach, until a pushy mother kicked me to her *middle seat* elsewhere -- and I didn't mind. That's how enjoyable the book is. Each of the 35 short chapters begins with an enchanting line drawing by Bobbi Angell depicting the food under discussion: apples, chard, potatoes, winter herbs, wild salads, Egyptian onions, etc. and continues with just the right blend of historical, personal, and cultivating details. Four chapters describe their farm animals, including a herd bull who was the son of the queen's herd bull at Balmoral and a pig named Rolo who died of bleeding ulcers. They asked the vet why:

"Loneliness, he thought, simply too many hours spent waiting for our two brief visits each day. Pigs are social animals and they need company; humans will do, if not other pigs. But they must not be left in solitude. We have since then always kept two pigs even though we could never consume in a year the quantities of pork two pigs render. It pleases us that they have happy communal lives and we have fine pork to give to our friends." 

In the eyes of the devoted authors, the fruit and vegetables are portrayed with just as much personality as the livestock. Spinach can be "cranky," leeks are part of a "gifted and clever family" of kitchen alliums. Very rarely, the writing slips into a sun-dappled sentimentality, as when they recall in order the hallmark weather of the year's four seasons, and certainly the book is an unabashed ode to "the deepest reward of a country life... the rhythms, values, habits, and flavors of another time." Some readers may come to want a few more failures in the narrative, because those ulcers, and blight, and raccoons who stole the corn harvest are sometimes more interesting than yet another happy memory of a favorite food plant. But no one could complain about a book whose discussion of beets opens into a wider conversation about their tradition of eating Christmas dinners away, in Paris, or Amsterdam, or California.

About half the chapters end with a recipe or two, some from Beatrice Tosti di Valminuta of Il Bagatto in the East Village. Many more recipes can be found in Eck and Winterrowd's excellent Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill.

For more about them and their flowers, read their longer books Our Life in Gardens or A Year at North Hill : Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden.

20 Year Old Gay Climber Tops Everest, His Sixth of Seven Summits

Way back in 2008, when he was 15, Cason Crane summited Kilimanjaro with his mother, Isabella (above). After graduating cum laude from Choate, he took a year off to create Rainbow Summits, an initiative to raise money and awareness for the Trevor Project by climbing the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent.

Last week on May 21 he conquered Everest (right). Cason, the sole Yank, summited with dudes from Austria, Sweden, Iceland, and Australia, on a team led by New Zealanders Dean Staples, making his ninth summit, and three-timer Lydia Bradey who in 1988 became the first woman to ascend without an oxygen tank.

Everest was to be Cason's crowning seventh summit, but last August his team got to 17,200' on Denali and weather shut them down. A 27-day excursion for naught. (Day 19: "Another weather day…in protest of the bad weather, I am not going to write a blog post. Take that, weather gods.") 

Cason will attempt Denali again this summer, between June 15 - July 15, and if he makes it to the top, he will become the first openly gay climber and the fifth youngest climber to do all Seven Summits. About 350 people have accomplished this, but only 120 have done the eight peaks that Cason will do, summiting twice in Australasia, to cover both Carstensz and Kosciusko.

He starts Princeton in the fall. Follow him on twitter or fb.

Gretel Ehrlich on Facing the Wave

If you were a novelist you could retire after creating a character like Gretel Ehrlich. She has twice been struck by lightning (see A Match to the Heart). She has spent months dogsleding across Greenland (see This Cold Heaven). Born in Montecito, growing up staring at the Channel Islands from her bed, she transplanted herself forty years ago to an isolated stretch of the country's least populous state, Wyoming, where, between bouts of award-winning writing and freelance sheepherding, she deepened her love of all things Japanese. The themes of her brave and beautiful new book, Facing the Wave [Kindle], about the resilience of the coastal people in the aftermath of the tsunami, amplify ideas dating back at least to her 1989 essay "The Bridge to Heaven" (in Islands, the Universe, Home) recounting her December pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Osorezan. After an arduous, many-day journey, the truck's final passage was blocked by a locked gate and she decided to walk the rest of way in a blizzard -- twenty-six miles roundtrip. 

Okay, you say, so she's a brilliant writer, and a hearty traveler, but what makes her worthy of a great character in literature? Her original vision. Sunday night at Washington's Politics & Prose, during her first reading from the new book, she discussed witnessing, at a tiny inland river temple, survivors bringing bodies of the dead in wheelbarrows, and her reaction was, This is so cool. Not for her any wallowing in sorrow or sticky pieties of optimism. She writes, "neurotic suffering is only the flapping of ego." She believes in action, in "movement: life’s extraordinary experiences entwined with the ordinary, and from that littered ground, the courage to leap."

Her own action is to start a partnership between American architects and Japanese builders to get some fast, responsible housing for the more than 300,000 people still displaced. So far, no website where you can donate but as soon as it's up, you'll find a link on this site.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune says, "In sum, Facing the Wave is a masterpiece of narrative reportage that balances Ehrlich’s own reaction with the voices of the victims."

If somehow you are unfamiliar with her previous fourteen books of essays, travel, poetry, fiction, and biography, start with the new book or her powerful collection The Solace of Open Spaces or This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

She's on tour this week: Aspen, Santa Barbara, SF, Corte Madera, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and Portland. On March 11 she will appear on the PBS NewsHour, followed by readings the next two nights in Albany and Manchester, VT. 

15 Reasons Why

Eugenio, a pilot from northern Italy now living in Alaska, took us up for 42 minutes. Album here.

Trio

Friends old and new coming out to welcome me back to Alaska this week.

Gay Gardens (and the Men Who Love Them)

Readers charmed by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd's 2009 memoir Our Life in Gardens [Kindle], about their thirty-two years at North Hill in Vermont, should look for Clyde 'Skip' Wachsberger's memoir Into the Garden with Charles [Kindle], covering twenty-eight years creating their sumptuous Adsworthy Garden in Orient, New York. They met through a personal ad when both men were over fifty and became inseparable. 

Chris Phillips highly recommends Skip's book, about which PW said:

"Wachsberger’s refreshing and heartfelt memoir invites the reader into a house, a garden, and two lives filled with affection and warmth. Sagging floorboards and rotting linoleum greet Wachsberger when, in 1983, he buys a 300-year-old house on Long Island. What will become a splendid garden is a “whole empty field around a clump of peonies.” The author, having “turned fifty without noticing how I had gotten there,” began “to grow around my loneliness the way a tree limb can grow through a chain-link fence, incorporating the sharp metal into its fiber without showing any outward signs of distress.” ... When Clyde met Charles, he found the “best friend who was also an affectionate lover, a friend who shared my deepest yearning to be someone special for someone special” he had been looking for. Together they form a union, produce a book (Of Leaf and Flower), and nurture a noteworthy garden. With a keen ear and eye for the anecdotal, Wachsberger sketches beautifully lucid picture in words, and his illustrative paintings add both beauty and emotional content to this candidly romantic memoir." 

Winterrowd died in September 2010,  Wachsberger died of prostate cancer in November 2011.

Morning Run

October Kayak

The sun was out, perfect for a quick trip, but the afternoon high was 38, meaning the not insignificant ice hadn't melted. With effort, I crashed through it to open water but could not explore the frozen coves. Last night I saw a documentary about naturist Aldo Leopold. If you've never read his Midwestern classic A Sand County Almanac, get it now. As one interviewee pointed out, the great trifecta is Thoreau, Muir, and Leopold.

Sea Lions

Disappointing day trip from Seward. Plenty of puffins and sea lions.