In Memoriam: Dr. James A. Blessing, Imparting Wisdom

The start of another semester, complete with relentless wars with technology: Chains of emails to program coordinators and my mentor instructor, the evils of the quasi-defunct Xerox machine in the Writing Program office at Rutgers-Newark. It was inevitable, as with the start of every term, that I'd be thinking of Dr. James Blessing, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Susquehanna University. And I was shocked, saddened, when I learned that Dr. Blessing had passed away on Thursday, 27 January.

When I was an undergraduate and one of Dr. Blessing's student workers in the Poli Sci department, we all knew that Dr. Blessing and "the technology"--as he unilaterally referred to computers and machines of most stripes--were seldom on speaking terms. But he still learned PowerPoint and prepared slides for his freshmen class--Comparative Government and Politics--because the students had asked him to do so. I helped Dr. Blessing save the PowerPoints on a flashdrive so he could easily access them in SU's smart classrooms. One morning in his office, before he was off to teach the freshmen course, he was telling me, for the umpteenth time, how distracting technology could be. As he waggled the flashdrive in his hand, that thumb-shaped, plastic wedge of a device suddenly looked absurd.

Because, of course, it was. Because, as I learned from being a TA at Bucknell and from leading my own section of freshman comp at Rutgers-Newark, Dr. Blessing was right. Technology is a distraction from what actually matters: the people one encounters.

(And I can't ignore the irony of using technology to say all of this.)

Dr. Blessing knew this, better than most, when he went to his classes--as he always phrased it--to "impart wisdom." Dr. Blessing was more than a good teacher and a good advisor to his students. He watched out for us, in and out of the classrooms. We were there to learn, and he would make sure we would. His hand-drawn diagrams were scrawled on the chalkboard to slow himself down so we, the students, could ask him questions and better understand the complex structure of the European Union; the PowerPoints he made for his freshmen class gave the students clear study aids.

He was wry, clever, sharp. And, though somewhat irascible, kind and brilliant as anything. In Dr. Blessing's classes and his company, your wit had to be quick, and you had to open your mind to inquiry.

During the three years I worked for the department, I was living on campus year round, and Dr. Blessing was there, too, looking after me. I had a succession of...hazardous cars, and whenever I drove anywhere, Dr. Blessing grilled me on my return to make sure nothing went awry, that my deathtrap cars did not fulfill their particular idiom. While my oldest brother was serving in Iraq, Dr. Blessing called me into his office and asked if I needed to talk about anything. And he listened, counseled--even when I knew he had stacks of papers from his different classes to get through.

Having taught at Susquehanna for 44 years, Dr. Blessing affected generations of Susquehanna students, shared with them his knowledge and his generosity. I'm not the only student with Dr. Blessing stories, and I'm not the only student who has found himself inspired by his example. Dr. Blessing has given us, firstly, the academic ability to inquire and to investigate. But he has also given us an example to live up to, a model for leading a compassionate and meaningful life.

I tend to avoid the creative nonfiction spiel like the proverbial plague, mainly because I'm not sure that I have anything worth saying. But maybe the point of the personal essay is precisely that it's personal, that it contributes to our understanding of how people think, that it makes us want to be better at whatever it is we do. Maybe, for me, the personal essay should be about what others have given. Not just to me, but to others. And this is what Dr. James Blessing has given me, and other Susquehanna students: Something to live for, someone worth writing about.

(Read Susquehanna University's in memoriam about Dr. Blessing.)

Caught in the Rye

Yesterday, J.D. Salinger--the author of the famous novel Catcher in the Rye--passed away, and with his passing, we’ve lost one of the final representatives of the Beat generation. More striking, though, is that we’ve lost somebody who, I feel, shifted the focus of fiction for people growing up in America.

During the 1950s, young adults got their politics from novels, short stories, and poems; you got rad hipster cred if you dressed in black turtlenecks like a Trotskyite and were seen reading Kerouac’s On the Road in public. Allen Ginsberg published poems such as “Howl” and “America” and “Kaddish.” A generation of writers disaffected by World War II and square social expectations revolted through cross-country travel, James Dean-esque slick-haired rebellion, and through experimentation (in both literature and drugs, it goes without saying).

Before I say anything more, I have to level with all of you. When I first read it, I hated The Catcher in the Rye; I thought Holden just needed to shut up. I read him as proto-emo, in a way. (But then again, when I was young, I was always trying to be grumpy and old.) I reread the novel a few years ago, though, and I came to appreciate it in a lot of ways.

So where does Catcher in the Rye fit into all of this? Salinger’s novel fits the tropes of the Beat novel--rebellion, defying social expectations, defying expectations in general. But the novel also changed the expectations of young adult literature. Holden wasn’t concerned with all the fake, hokey drama, and he made it abundantly clear that we wanted to dispel artifices of manner or behavior; through this lack of concern, though, he demonstrates just how important this stuff is. Conversation, emotions, that inner core of humanity are what drive both narratives and people.

Nowadays, young adults don’t get their politics from books. (Well, some of do, but I doubt that’s the case for the majority.) After all, there are enough politics on the radio, television, and the Internet--we're utterly swamped in politics! Instead, young adults are going to books--think Twilight or Harry Potter or almost any other children’s/y.a. lit out there--to get away from politics and for validation of the same things that Holden Caulfield went searching for. An understanding of the self, of others. It’s akin to the classic bildungsroman form that we’ve had across four centuries of English literature.

So in honor of Salinger, go to your local bookshop or library and pick up a copy of Catcher in the Rye. Give it a read (it’s a short book, should only take a day or two, tops). And ask yourself why you read.

I’m sure it’s not for politics. I imagine it’s to find something meaningful and emotionally compelling in the text and not, as Holden decries the expectations of most readers, to find “all that David Copperfield crap….my whole goddamn autobiography or something.”