The Professor's Bayonet

Years ago, my paternal grandfather taught me about the benefits of lying fallow. It is an agrarian term, meaning to leave alone for a period of time a piece of land typically used to grow produce. Simply put, it is the act of not sowing seed.  Let the field grow as it may. No planting. No fertilizing. No weeding.  Nothing.  The idea is to let a piece of land naturally replenish itself. Rest. Not b...

In an early episode, I shared how much the Transcendentalists impacted my decision to major in English.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, in specific, captured my imagination with his erudite rallying calls to trust thyself, to never imitate others, to believe in the sacredness of your own mind.  In retrospect, I can see how this would be quite appealing to a young man full of ambition and (ahem) himself; how...

Want your work reviewed and featured?https://48bconsulting.com/book-reviews/ Much has been said and written about John Steinbeck’s classic 1937 novella, Of Mice and Men . The tale of two bindlestiffs, Lennie and George, teaches readers about loyalty and love, sacrifice and justice while also imparting the value of parallelism and foreshadow in storytelling.  For those who would benefit from a refr...

Popular during medieval and Renaissance Europe, The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchical concept that organizes the entirety of the universe, beginning with God and going down to the lowest of life forms.  It ranks every member of creation as a way to understand it and, hence, give deference where deference is due.  First, there is the Trinitarian God, and beneath Him, the various orders of ange...

I am no theologian; however, I know enough about the Old Testament to be able to say that Christ and His cross are prefigured in it on numerous occasions: in Adam and Noah, in Joseph and David, in the rod of Moses, the prophecies of Isaiah, and, more on the nose, the sacrificial lamb.  What the Old Testament anticipates, the New Testament fulfills, making followers of Christ, Christians or little...

Inez Feltscher Stepman recently made the argument in the National Review that men should have their own space.  Before the 1990s, she writes, The Elks Club, the Virginia Military Institute and the Boy Scouts were exclusively male; however, with the fanatical push of so-called progressive ideologies, these institutions are now co-ed.  In fact, the cry to eliminate all-male spaces was vociferous, re...

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...

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? ...

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...

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 fam...

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...