The Professor's Bayonet

I am grateful that I belong to a generation that got to sit and listen to stories about World War II from the mouths of those who lived it.  Grampa, my mother’s father, had already been in the army when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, but my great uncles had likely joined up when another uncle, Uncle Sam, issued the call.  I remember sitting at a table with old men who called each other boys. ...

Home ownership had always been the plan, but it was an experience I had when we were living in a little apartment that really lit the fuse.  Our three girls were little.  The youngest had just come along.  It was the beginning of the Disney princess fad, and those who know what I am talking about know exactly what that meant: dresses and crowns, DVDs and catchy songs the kids would belt out at ran...

I have my Uncle Barry to thank for introducing my father to my mother.  He was a Marine stationed at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and one day, after making hamburgers for dinner, he decided to toss the grease outside but forgot about the screen door in the process.  The result?  He got splattered with boiling grease and had to go to the infirmary where he was attended to by a Navy corpsman, my da...

In The Professor’s Bayonet, I attempted to cut through what I perceived to be a lot of nonsense in order to offer something thoughtful to chew on.  The episodes were not long on purpose. Having arrived at episode 100, however, I am met with the cold reality that, despite my best efforts, I have been unsuccessful at growing my audience.  I have a very dedicated bunch, and to them, I am very, very g...

If you have ever sat in a literature class, you have likely heard of this term: iambic pentameter.  It is used to describe the da-dum, da-dum, da-dum rhythm often found in poetry.  One syllable is unstressed but the syllable immediately after is stressed: Da-dum, da-dum, da-dum.  Often likened to a human heartbeat, iambic pentameter appeals to even novice students of literature because the meter i...

Shel Silverstein’s vastly popular children’s book, The Giving Tree , has been a fixture in most nurseries since its publication in 1964.  Both the story and the illustrations are simple. It begins with a tree who loves a little boy who would gather her leaves, climb up her trunk, and swing from her branches.  The boy was imaginative and joyful, and, Silverstein writes, “when he was tired he would...

Allen Ginsberg begins his 1956 poem “Howl” with the following words: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, / dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, / angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, / who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and...

American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, first preached his sermon entitled “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in Northampton, Massachusetts in 1741.  This was the catalyst for the first Great Awakening, that time in American history when hordes of individuals flocked back to the faith, sobered up by what lawless living might lead to – in a word, damnation.  Before this sermon, the faithful were...

Published in 1968, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” begins with an infestation of crabs on a property inhabited by Pelayo and Elisenda, a couple of humble means, living on a Columbian shore.  The crabs begin to rot, and believing this rot is making his and Elisenda’s baby sick, Pelayo is tasked with disposing them in the sea; however, upon his return, he s...

William Shakespeare’s 1623 tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra , is renowned for its depiction of a complex and fully developed female character in the person of one of its title figures.  Cleopatra, recalling the inexperience of her youth, exclaims, “My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood, to say as I said then.”  She had been, in other words, a novice at all things pertaining to li...

Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of his famous work, Don Quixote, in 1605 and then the second part in 1615.  Officially titled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of LaManchaland , this Spanish classic would influence literature in countless ways.  It follows the story of Alonso Quijano who so voraciously consumes tales of knightly chivalry that, soon enough, he loses his mind and deci...

The Bible is filled with them: characters who enter the action and then just as suddenly depart, leaving readers to contemplate their significance in light of the greater story being told – that of God’s everlasting love and His plan to save our souls.  The average student might be tempted to gloss over these characters in their pursuit of the wider interpretation, but Catherine Lawton is no avera...

Boubacar Boris Diop’s riveting account of the 1994 Rwandan genocide should give pause to anyone tempted to place too much stock in humankind’s ability to keep the peace.  Tensions between two ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutu, reached a tipping point, and for a span of around one-hundred days, members of the Tutsi tribe butchered the Hutu by the thousands.  It was, note some, as if the devil...

I would like to begin with a basic question: Can you give me the name of your great-great-grandfather?  How about your great-great-grandmother?  The likely answer is a simple no. The names of those on whose shoulders we stand are lost to time.  And this is to say nothing about their very lives: what they did to bring in money, what dreams they had, the quirks they possessed, the countless intricac...

Clinton, Arkansas is like any small town in America.  The backdrop for Monica Potts’s memoir, The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in Rural America , this far-flung part of the world is, according to Potts, where dreams go to die.  Resources are few if any, and those who live there suffer under the weight of their own ignorance or, worse, self-inflicted wounds in the form o...

The night is darkest before dawn.  That is the saying, at least.  Just before the first faint rays of the sun arrive, the world is pitch black.  Of course, countless individuals have teased out of this reality analogies that are intended to offer perspective when things are not going well.  When circumstances are rough – really, really rough – take heart because there is about to be a reversal, pe...

I have commented on Shirley Jackson’s short story, “The Lottery,” in a previous episode – 51 to be precise.  The story is about how a village has a yearly lottery where one person is randomly selected to be stoned to death by the rest.  It is a tale about public execution, in other words, which, on its face, is shocking enough were it not for the fact that the vast bulk of the story is civilized. ...

Tom Holland does not claim to be a believer.  He does not follow what once was called The Way, yet his sprawling history of Christianity is populated with a host of historical tidbits that could easily win nonbelievers over to the cause.  His book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World , begins in ancient Greece with how the emerging Western culture was, indeed, primed to receive...

Clinton Romesha’s New York Times bestselling book, Red Platoon , details the deadly and savage battle that occurred in command outpost Keating in 2009.  This remote battle station in a far-flung part of Afghanistan was overrun by Taliban fighters before most of the American soldiers were even out of bed.  Described as a toilet bowl, command outpost Keating was, geographically speaking, surrounded...

The preface to Dr. Paul Kengor’s 2020 book The Devil and Karl Marx includes the following assertion: “Any ideology (and, here, he is talking about communism) with a trail of rot like this is not of God but of the forces against God.  It is not of God’s creation but a fallen angel’s anti-creation.  It is not of the light but of the dark.”  The impact Karl Marx and his pernicious ideology has had on...

In fear for his life, Old Testament prophet, Elijah, fled from the evil machinations of Jezebel and into the wilderness whereupon he found a solitary broom tree.  He sat beneath it and prayed for death, saying “Enough, Lord!  Take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors” after which he reclined and fell asleep.  He had had enough.  In his mind, his best days were behind him and what remained...

David Herbert Lawrence, popularly known as D.H. Lawrence, famously penned a poem entitled “Self-Pity.”  Published in 1929, it reads:  I never saw a wild thing  sorry for itself.  A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough  without ever having felt sorry for itself.  The poem is short, but it captures so much truth about the natural world and ourselves.  What is it about human beings that we s...

Arthur Miller’s 1949 stage play, Death of a Salesman , resonates with me even today.  Willy Loman, the aged and sad protagonist, wants nothing more than to be liked: by his clients, by his boss, by his sons and wife.  Being liked is what gives his life meaning.  Being liked is what gives Willy Loman purpose.  But time waits for no man, and after a failed business trip to Boston, Willy, at the prom...

Scott Gould can be forgiven for plot structures that are a little too on the nose and convenient. The events that unfold in his book, Peace Like A River , are neatly stacked, making the story feel a bit contrived. He can also be forgiven for being a trifle too liberal with endowing each and every character with some quirk. The formula chaffs; indeed, it compromises Gould’s ultimate thesis, which,...

Twentieth-century French philosopher Jacques Derrida famously argued that there is slippage in language, resulting from the break between the signifier and the signified.  A signifier is the word we see – on a piece of paper, a billboard, a computer or smartphone screen, wherever – and the signified is what that word points to in order to give it meaning.  We see the word “cat,” for example – a si...