Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Category: What I’m Reading
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Cesare Pavese
I just finished Geoffrey Brock’s translation of Cesare Pavese’s poetry: Disaffection: Complete Poems 1930-1950. It was outstanding. I think I had been vaguely aware of Pavese as a 20th century giant of Italian literature, but I had never read anything by or about him, apart from some long forgotten praise by Phil Levine, who was…
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Favorite Passages from Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid
In the past several years, I’ve become a full-fledged soccer fan. I’ve always followed (and played) sports, switching over the years from an interest in baseball to football to basketball and most recently, to soccer. It’s now the sport that I follow most closely, play most regularly for recreation, and read and think about most…
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A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been attracted to wisdom literature. In my early teens, that attraction was felt most strongly toward Thoreau, Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and the other Stoics, Joseph Smith’s King Benjamin (from the book of Mosiah in the Book of Mormon) & Enoch (from the Book of Moses in…
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10 Years Later: Quotations for a Friend
When I was a freshman in college, my best friend was Mark Eliason. He and I went almost everywhere together, and so nearly imitated one another’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and stock phrases that we’d regularly have other people ask us if we were brothers. We usually lied and said yes. After our freshman year, each…
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More on Beck. Plus: Homeless Guys. And the Library.
One thing I didn’t mention in my last post about Beck was that when I was young, one of the reasons that I especially liked Beck was that he seemed to be friends with a lot of homeless guys, or at least guys that looked the way that most of the homeless guys that I…