Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Tag: literature
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My October and November Reading
In my last reading update, I mentioned that I had read the first book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. Since then, apart from reading for my dissertation, that’s pretty much all I’ve read. I just finished The Yellow Admiral, which means that I’ve read 18 of the 21 books (one left unfinished at the author’s death) in the…
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My Summer Reading
I haven’t kept up as regularly with these monthly updates as I had hoped, but I did keep reading through the summer. I stayed really plugged into my dissertation reading and research, which really cut down my leisure reading, but I still managed to get through several books that struck my fancy in some way…
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My June 2017 Reading
Books The good news? I read a lot for my dissertation in June 2017. Even better news? Much of it was pleasurable (at least for me)–a lot of “Objectivist” poetry, biographical material on Williams and Zukofsky, and histories of late 1920s-early 1930s little magazines. I won’t list any of it here, since I’m saving these…
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My May 2017 Reading
Books Pleased to report that I continued reading a lot for my dissertation (pleasurable reading, but of a different kind), and traveled to a work conference followed by a 2-week vacation starting at the end of the month. Both slowed my pleasure reading, as did the NBA playoffs, since I watched games in the evening…
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My April 2017 Reading
Books My leisure reading of books slowed down a bit in April, as I continued getting sucked into lots more longform than I had intended and, on a happier note, did a lot more reading for my dissertation (good news!!!). Here’s some of what I read last month for pleasure. Nonfiction I spent much of…
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My March 2017 Reading
Books If March had a theme for me, I suppose it would have been ‘Occupy’? I may be several years late to the movement, but most of what I read this month seemed to have been written by someone involved in the Occupy protests and movements of the past half-dozen years. It’s easy to love…
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My January and February 2017 Reading
Books My leisure ‘book’ reading continued to slow over the past couple months, and I haven’t had as much time for this blog, so I’m going to roll my January and February reading recap into a single post. Here’s what I read for pleasure (i.e. not for work or for my dissertation) in January and…
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My December 2016 Reading
Books As the year limped its way to a close, I tried to keep up my torrid reading pace. I slowed down considerably from my October/November frenzy, and spent a lot more of my free time reading and writing on dissertation related topics (hi, Objectivist poets!) but still managed to read a fair number of…
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My November 2016 Reading
Books My reading pace slowed a bit in November (the US elections and their sad aftermath have provided me with lots of avenues for distraction and worry), but I still managed to keep up my love affair with books, though I picked a fair amount of duds this month. The poetry and fiction were great,…
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My October 2016 Reading
Books I wrote last month that I was on a big reading kick, and that surge of devouring books has continued in full force this month. Outside of the reading I’ve been doing for my dissertation and my work, here’s a list of the books I read for pleasure/self-education in October 2016: No Good Men…
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![Reading Recommendations from Friends [September 2016]](https://steelwagstaff.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/7318346230_e81850a5a6_k-1.jpg)
Reading Recommendations from Friends [September 2016]
I’ve been on a reading kick lately and I decided to crowdsource some recommendations to some friends on social media earlier this week. The question I posed was simple: “Knowing me as you do, what would you recommend I read next? One rule: no fiction, unless it’s life changing or the best thing you’ve ever…
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Belle Waring
I can’t remember exactly when I first read Belle Waring’s poems. It probably would have been at least a decade ago, and I do remember that it was one of her poems about nursing, maybe even “It Was My First Nursing Job”. What I remember most was feeling that I had discovered a voice that…
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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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Whittenberger Summer Writing Project: 1998
One of the other things that I’ve recently decided to do (apart from weeding my library and pruning my record collection) is to finally dig into the huge pile of papers, photos, notes, letters, and memories I’ve stored in boxes and carried from apartment to apartment over the past decade or so. It’s just been…
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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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How to Write a Letter to the Editor
I know I keep writing about Oppen and his letters, but I just can’t help it. Today I was typing up my notes from his mid-60s letters, and remembered a pretty tremendous letter he wrote to Lita Hornick, then the managing editor of Kulchur, in response to Kulchur‘s decision to print “Soirées,” a Felix Pollak poem…
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At Long Last…
I have an approved dissertation proposal! What’s its title, you ask? Get ready, because it’s really sexy. “Thinking with the things as they exist”: Ecocriticism and Objectivist Poetics. Yeah. A thrilling tour through what I’m calling an “Objectivist” poetics (the writing of George Oppen, Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, Basil Bunting, William Carlos Williams,…
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On Seeing the One Thing Clearly
I’ve spent much of the past week trying with increasing desperation to write a dissertation proposal. It’s been the academic task that I’ve been ostensibly working on for nearly 18 months now, since I passed my prelims in early fall 2010. I don’t know what it has been so difficult for me to do, or…
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Bill Bryson
This is an odd choice, admittedly, for the Favorite Artists series I’ve started here on this blog. It’s not much of a series yet, to be honest, since I’ve only featured one other artist so far, documentary poet Mark Nowak. And Bill Bryson, while a cracking writer of popular non-fiction, isn’t exactly what many people…
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On Patience and Non-attachment
I have long believed, in theory, that patience and non-attachment were complimentary and essential virtues and that I would do well to cultivate both of them. In practice, both are difficult, elusive, and have not always felt desirable or worthy of recommendation to others, particularly to those who suffer injustice. I have been thinking about…