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The Professor"s Bayonet

Jason Dew

Book reviews and social commentary

arts books

All Episodes

00:06:01

Episode 72 - Ishmael

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/07/01

The book, entitled Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, had once been required reading at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennsylvania. The story amounts to a revealing dialogue between man and beast, the latter at the helm of a one-student classroom. After giving his own origin story, Ishmael, the telepathic gorilla, turns his attention toward humankind’s origin story or, at least, one version – the sort of civilizational system that compels humankind to destroy the world in order to live in it. Humankind,

00:04:46

Episode 71 - A Perfect Day for a Bananafish

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/06/24

The short story begins in a Florida hotel room on a stiflingly hot day. A young woman – called “girl” throughout – is sitting in a chair. She is wearing nothing but a white silk dressing gown and reading an article entitled “Sex is Fun—or Hell.” The phone rings. It is a call from New York. The girl’s mother. Inquiring about the trip and, importantly, the girl’s husband. Is he acting funny? Did he try anything odd? Is he about to lose control? The last concern is cut off. The girl has had

00:05:19

Episode 70 - Young Goodman Brown

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/06/17

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 short story, “Young Goodman Brown,” is a staple when it comes to teaching symbolism. The title character leaves his wife, Faith, at home before entering a dark and gloomy New England forest. There, he first encounters a man with a walking stick on which is carved a serpent that appears to move. The man, dressed in “grave and decent attire,” seems to be expecting Young Goodman Brown, aware that he would be venturing into the woods at night. He informs him that he is

00:05:10

Episode 69 - Lifeboat Ethics

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/06/10

It is likely that other professors have asked this question, so I may not be entirely original with this particular lesson. I begin class by asking my students to make a choice. Someone has to die. And the choice is this: It could be one thousand individuals in some far-off land (their choice), one hundred Americans, ten folks from their neighborhood, or just one person from their immediate family. I give students about fifteen minutes to make their decision and provide their rationale after

00:04:29

Episode 68 - Death, Be Not Proud

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/06/03

English poet, John Donne, seemed to be a man of two minds. In his younger years, he composed works of literature that were decidedly on the blush-inducing side, earning him the moniker “Bawdy Jack Donne,” but later in life, in 1615, to be precise, he was ordained a priest in the Church of England at which point scholars agree that his poems took on deeper and notably darker tones. His poem, “Death, Be Not Proud” is likely the most popular example as it shows the poet’s open challenge to the event

00:04:59

Episode 67 - Machiavelli

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/05/27

Niccolo Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat, philosopher, and historian who lived during the Italian Renaissance. His best-known work, The Prince, was published in 1532, five years after his death, and remains a primer for those whose designs are for complete and total power. He writes, for example, that “it is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear

00:05:18

Episode 66 - Paradise Lost

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/05/20

I remain a fan of the 17th century English poet who, I have to mention here, penned his arguably greatest work, Paradise Lost, after he had lost sight in both eyes. You heard me correctly. Milton was blind when he dictated to his daughters the story of the fall of mankind. The poetry was composed entirely in his head; he simply spoke it out loud. Books have been written on Milton’s Paradise Lost, and it is not the place here to go into a deep dive into its many complex interpretations. I do,

00:04:15

Episode 65 - Lying In

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/05/13

Barbara G. Tucker is proof that exquisite storytelling can and does happen far from the massive New York City publishing houses with their army of gatekeepers and yes-men and women whose focus is less on craft and more on fickle trends in the market. Her brilliantly-written novel, Lying In, which was published by Colorful Crow Publishing in 2024, explores the hardscrabble life of Cotella, called “Telly” by most, who once aspired to be a nurse but was forced to change course due to a rare condition

00:05:11

Episode 64 - The Youth in Asia

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/05/06

Want a review on The Professor's Bayonet? Just click below:https://48bconsulting.com/book-reviews/Popular humorist David Sedaris gives readers plenty to think about in his 2000 essay entitled, “The Youth in Asia,” an obvious play on a common procedure done in veterinary offices throughout the world. In this essay, Sedaris recounts a series of pet dogs his family procured over the course of many years beginning with two collies named Rastus and Duchess. After Rastus had taken off and Duchess had

00:05:08

Episode 63 - Something Wicked This Way Comes

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/04/29

Central to Ray Bradbury’s 1962 novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, is a carousel that is able to add or subtract years from the life of each rider. It is merely one of the attractions in Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show, a carnival that had arrived at a sleepy Illinois town in the dead of night – 3 a.m., to be specific – but if figures predominantly in the nefarious scheme of the proprietors, Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark, who want nothing but to sow evil and discord into this bucolic

00:04:26

Episode 62 - My Mother is a Fish

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/04/22

William Faulkner’s 1930 novel,As I Lay Dying, is a masterpiece of Southern Gothic. Drawing upon dark and peculiarly Southern elements, the story of a family’s trek to inter the body of the family matriarch in her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi is told by fifteen different characters over the course of fifty-nine chapters. One of those chapters is famously short -- five words long, to be precise – and it is told by a character named Vardaman who is trying to make sense of his mother’s death

00:04:38

Episode 61 - Richard Cory

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/04/15

She was only thirteen-years-old. We did not know her personally. She had been a student in a private school in the northern suburbs of Atlanta. We only heard what happened because my children also attend private schools in those same suburbs, and with social media, kids talk. The news got around. During school hours, this child walked into a bathroom and killed herself. But the kids do not call it suicide. That word remains unspoken. Instead they say “committed.” The thirteen-year-old girl

00:04:36

Episode 60 - Hills Like White Elephants

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/04/08

First published in 1927, Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” takes place at a train station in Spain where a couple, an American man and a character simply described as a “girl,” are waiting for the express to Madrid. It is hot, and in typical Hemingway fashion, the characters begin their exchange by talking about what they would like to drink. Dos cervezas. Two beers. Big ones, at that. After being served, the girl makes a simple observation. The hills in the distance,

00:04:55

Episode 59 - Charles Bukowski

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/04/01

As an undergraduate at Lock Haven University, I would sometimes jog along the Susquehanna River while discussing Milton or Donne or the infamous Popish Plot with my roommate. Later, when I became a graduate student, those conversations moved inside, and I along with others pursuing advance degrees would sit with our wine around stacks of books each taking a turn at reading some passage, some poem out loud. I am first to admit that those were halcyon days. Our only worries involved writing papers

00:04:18

Episode 58 - Lives of Quiet Desperation

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/03/25

Henry David Thoreau wished to live deliberately, so on July 4, 1845, he walked into the woods by Walden Pond and lived a simple life for two years. Industrial society had gotten too much. Rapid developments in technology and the sciences along with a burgeoning awareness that something was not quite right – perhaps spiritually – prompted the unique-looking man to step away from it all. Thoreau had had enough. It was time to withdraw and regroup. Rediscover what is important. Take a breath and

00:04:09

Episode 57 - The Perils of Indifference

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/03/18

Psychologists have a term for it. Collective inattention. Imagine a group of, say, coworkers, chatting in a circle. One of the coworkers has a piece of broccoli in between his teeth. Everybody notices but nobody says anything. This is collective inattention. Or when a class is sitting in a classroom with one of the lights out. They all know it is dim. But nobody moves to turn on the light. Again, collective inattention: an unspoken decision to do nothing to correct a problem. Nobel Prize

00:04:13

Episode 56 - Three Questions

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/03/11

Abraham’s first reaction to the news that he and his wife Sarah would bear a son, Isaac, was to laugh. They both were up there in years, and the thought that he would be the father of a great nation was ludicrous. Abraham discounted both himself and Sarah. He passed judgment. He failed to see God’s plan. To the first question, How do I feel about myself?, Abraham might have said that he did not feel up to the challenge. He was too old. Life and the opportunities with it had passed him by. It

00:04:22

Episode 55 – The End of Tennessee

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/03/04

Few would deny that Hanson is an exceptional wordsmith. The prose in her memoir, The End of Tennessee, regularly slips into the poetic as she details her tragic coming-of-age that resulted in estrangement from both of her parents and even her siblings; however, what could have been a tale with redemptive notes amounts to an artful diatribe. That Hanson was dealt a poor hand early in her life is evident. Both of her parents are depicted as individuals with internal compasses running amok, reaching

00:04:33

Episode 54 – When the River Meets the Sea

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/02/25

My generation, Generation X, had Nirvana and Pearl Jam. We wore our flannel shirts and ripped jeans with the pride of teenagers wondering what the twenties will be like, and we were the first generation to use email in our interactions. But before all of this -- the rise of grunge music and the internet – we had the Muppets. A happy memory from my childhood includes waiting all week for the next episode and being completely tuned into it when it aired, and, yes, “aired” is another term from my

00:05:12

Episode 53 - When Breath Becomes Air

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/02/18

Paul Kalanithi could have been anything. He was a gifted individual who excelled in both the arts and the sciences, earning, among other degrees, a Master of Arts in literature from Stanford University. His lot, however, was to be a medical doctor because he eventually ended up at Yale School of Medicine. Kalanithi’s life could have continued to be storied as he was a rising star in the field of neurosurgery; however, in his early thirties, just as he was beginning to catch his stride in a

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