PODCAST

The Professor"s Bayonet

Jason Dew

Book reviews and social commentary

arts books

All Episodes

00:04:58

Episode 52 - Travels With Charley

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/02/11

Decades after the publication of two of his most celebrated novels, The Grape of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, two years shy of his sixtieth birthday, embarked on a journey to rediscover America. With his black poodle, Charley, Steinbeck trekked across the country in a camper he dubbed Rocinante: a humorous nod to Don Quixote’s mount in the 1605 and 1615 book by Miguel de Cervantes. He packed plenty of paper, plenty of writing utensils, and plenty of booze only to run into the traffic

00:04:12

Episode 51 - The Lottery

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/02/04

The formal term for that undeniable and oftentimes frustrating tendency toward sin is concupiscence. Saint Augustine, in fact, in his Confessions uses the term to refer to sinful lust, and he would know. Before he came to Christ, Augustine lived the life of a prodigal jumping from sexual adventure to sexual adventure. His appetite was large, but soon enough, he learned that being steeped in so much sin was its own punishment. A depraved world begets a depraved mind and soul. Like chewing gum in

00:04:31

Episode 50 - Bartleby, the Scrivener

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/01/28

Written by Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame and published in two parts in 1853, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” is the sad story of a man, Bartleby, who finds work as a scribe with a Wall Street lawyer. Though the work consists of copying by hand reems of dull legalese, his efforts, at first, are productive. He is a model employee. Soon, however, quiet and aloof Bartleby begins to answer his employer’s assignments with the phrase, “I would prefer not to.” He continues to show up for work, but

00:04:53

Episode 49 - Ode on a Grecian Urn

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/01/21

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra called it her “salad days” -- those bygone days when the skies seemed to be bluer, the air fresher, and there was not even the suspicion that old age could ever happen to you. I recall a professor I had in graduate school reflecting on those lines. He took long pauses. The rest of the narrative arc in the play simply fell to the wayside. For a moment, it was as if he and Cleopatra were both rapt in an undeniable reality of being young – that it is fleeting and

00:04:36

Episode 48 - Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/01/14

Paula Delgado-Kling’s aptly named book, Leonor: The Story of a Lost Childhood, details in vivid and sticky language the plight of a poor Columbian girl whose destiny could never be anything else but what it was: a tangled, complicated, and, ultimately, violent relationship with the only authority that even pretended to care about her and others like her: the FARC or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Columbia. This nominally Marxist terrorist organization made an untold amount of money in the

00:04:53

Episode 47 - Let Evening Come

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2025/01/07

American poet, Jane Kenyon, was only forty-seven years old when she died in 1995. Her death, like all who die so young, was tragic, and it resonated throughout the literary community. A few years afterward, I became a teaching assistant for a professor in graduate school who knew her widower personally, fellow poet Donald Hall, and I had the pleasure of briefly meeting him at an event on campus. Hall even signed a copy of a collection of his poems I had. He wrote, “For Jason. With pleasure.

00:05:05

Episode 46 - Shooting an Elephant

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/12/31

Shooting an Elephant, George Orwell’s 1936 essay describing the shooting of a once-aggressive elephant in British-occupied Burma remains a proper indictment of colonialism. At its height, the sun truly did not set on the British empire with its tentacles reaching India and Africa, Australia and North America. Because of British imperialism, folks in Zimbabwe do not eat cookies; they eat biscuits. Because of British imperialism, Aborigines in Australia break for tea and those living in the Indian

00:03:53

Episode 45 - Aslan and Play in The Chronicles of Narnia

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/12/24

The 2005 film version of C.S. Lewis’s beloved classic, The Chronicles of Narnia, is a treat to watch. For the most part, it is true to the original text, doing honor to the former atheist turned devout Christian who penned it. The special effects brought to life Lewis’s tale in unique and engaging ways, and even now, dear listener, I occasionally Google the scene where Aslan roars just after his resurrection. It still gives me chills. Aslan, indeed, is on the move. What the film version

00:03:53

Episode 44 - A Cut Flower

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/12/17

Medical ethicist Charles Camosy brilliantly offers the following analogy about the current state of Western culture. The West, he argues, is like a flower that has been recently cut at the base of its stem. It will retain its beauty for a time but not forever. Cut off from its roots – its source of nourishment – it will wilt, then fade, then perish altogether in the vase in which it sits. The root system, he continues, is Christianity. Western culture has divorced itself from the profound

00:04:48

Episode 43 - Surprised by Hope

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/12/10

In his 2008 book, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Anglican bishop and New Testament scholar N.T. Wright tackles several misconceptions many have about what happens when we die. Popular thought is that, if we are good, we pass on to heaven never mind what feelings and convictions we harbor about Jesus Christ. Being nice or, as the saying goes, being a good human is the point. We do not have to concern ourselves so much with a relationship with

00:04:33

Episode 42 - Charlotte's Web

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/12/03

It was likely the first time I appreciated the power of story, and I was only a boy of about four-years-old. Charlotte’s Web, which was written by E.B. White, illustrated by Garth Williams, and published in 1952 by Harper and Brothers, was not read to me before bedtime; rather, like many other kids who were born in the 70s, I experienced this classic work of children’s fiction via what my grandfather used to call the Boob tube. The story of a barnyard pig who escapes the slaughterhouse thanks to

00:03:45

Episode 41 - To Build a Fire

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/11/26

The first version of Jack London’s classic short story, “To Build a Fire,” was published in 1902, but we are going to explore the most popular version: his 1908 revision that contains a native dog. The unnamed protagonist is seeking his fortune in the Yukon territory where the temperature can drop well below zero. The conditions can be brutal, but despite the warnings of an older man from Sulphur Creek, the younger man heads into the boreal forest, followed by a four-footed companion. Sure

00:04:55

Episode 40 - Awake, Not Woke

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/11/19

Noelle Mering’s book, Awake, Not Woke: A Christian Response to the Cult of Progressive Ideology, details in gripping language how so many twisted ideas are currently running rampant throughout Western society. Objective truth is under assault, and to reject woke orthodoxy is to invite vicious criticism from its militant disciples. A spade can no longer be called a spade if doing so departs from the approved, politically correct narrative. It is insanity in its purest form. Orwellian in its

00:04:43

Episode 39 - America, Whitman, and the question of...

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/11/12

The first line of Walt Whitman’s popular poem, “Song of Myself” reveals much about the current state of the American union. He writes, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself” -- a line as simple as it is direct. The crescendo leading up to this statement, of course, is decades, even centuries long; however, for our purposes, we might simply say that the Age of Reason that largely took place in the 18th century eventually yielded to the Romantic period – that time when the focus turned from the

00:04:36

Episode 38 - Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/11/05

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost The poem is worth quoting in its entirety: Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The

00:03:30

Episode 37 - Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/10/29

Impressively, Mary Shelley started to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, when she was just eighteen years old. She had been in Geneva, and to stave off boredom due to having to stay indoors as a result of inclement weather, Shelley, along with stepsister Claire Clairmont and other literary greats Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, decided to have a fiction writing contest. The person who could compose the best ghost story wins. Mary Shelley triumphed. It was the

00:04:52

Episode 36 - The Marquis de Sade

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/10/22

The Marquis de Sade was born in 1740 to a French noble family. Writer, political activist, and most notably libertine – or someone who questions or challenges most moral principles, especially those concerning sex – his influence on Western culture remains significant. His major works – The120 Days of Sodom, Justine, Juliette and Philosophy in the Bedroom – combine disturbingly graphic descriptions of murder, rape, torture and sex acts with discourses on sexuality, religion, politics, and

00:05:20

Episode 35 - Struthers Library Theatre

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/10/15

Built in 1882, Struthers Library Theatre, located in Warren, Pennsylvania, stood as the cultural epicenter to the many denizens of this forested community. The Victorian-styled venue once featured, to name a handful of entertainment dignitaries, Harry Houdini, John Philip Sousa, and Cecil B. DeMille, and it was also squarely in the Vaudeville circuit. This grand stage, nestled in the rolling hills of the Allegheny mountains, was nothing to scoff at. Though the region was typically known for

00:04:37

Episode 34 - Trailing Clouds of Glory

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/10/08

In his poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality” 19th century Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, famously penned the following lines: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting / And cometh from afar; / Not in entire forgetfulness, / And not in utter nakedness, / But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” The poem, in many ways, is a lament on getting

00:05:31

Episode 33 - Agitating the Gravel

The Professor"s Bayonet ·

2024/10/01

I used to write with a British accent. The voice in my head as I wrestled with ideas, looking for connections, hoping for conclusions, reaching for just the right word was an invention. I had never been to England, you see. I grew up in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania – Youngsville, if you are interested – and, but for Canada, which to us never really counted, had never been out of the country. But here I was in college, surrounded by individuals from all over – big cities, many of

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