Steel Wagstaff

Trying to do good things for good reasons

Tag: politics

  • Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine

    Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine

    I just finished Bread and Wine, the second book in Ignazio Silone’s The Abruzzio Trilogy (translated by Eric Mosbacher). The book is a moving, funny, and sometimes unbelievable look into provincial life in Italy under Mussolini. Set near the start of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, the novel largely focuses on a character named Pietro Spina, an exiled Communist…

  • Expressing Gratitude

    Expressing Gratitude

    In 1934, when George Oppen was 26 years old, he published Discrete Series, a volume of his poetry. It included a preface from Ezra Pound, then living in Rapallo, Italy, which ended with these lines: “I salute a serious craftsman, a sensibility which is not every man’s sensibility and which has not been got out of any…

  • Distressing Changes to Wisconsin’s Mining Laws Proposed

    From Monday through Thursday of this week, I toured the state as part of a “Place-Based Workshop” put on annually by The Center for Culture, History, and Environment (CHE) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I’ve been one of CHE’s Graduate Student Affiliates for a few years now, but this was the first CHE Place-Based Workshop that I’ve…