The Professor's Bayonet

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, “Dea...

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 obl...

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 Lo...

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...

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 man...

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...

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 pr...

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 c...

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. ...

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...

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...

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....

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 n...

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...

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 nex...

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 o...

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....

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...

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 empl...

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 an...

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 Revolucionaria...

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....

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 biscuit...

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 hi...

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...