{"id":60082,"date":"2016-08-26T11:30:12","date_gmt":"2016-08-26T16:30:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60082"},"modified":"2016-08-26T10:41:34","modified_gmt":"2016-08-26T15:41:34","slug":"dr-blake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=60082","title":{"rendered":"Dr. Blake"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been punched in the stomach. But I remember what it feels like with this news: Dr. Jim Blake, my college advisor, died a few months ago in Oil City, PA<\/a>. \u00a0He was 68. \u00a0That I’m hearing about it a few seasons late shows how life’s\u00a0sturm<\/em>\u00a0und drang\u00a0<\/em>will have its way.<\/p>\n

Dr. Blake was one of the two best teachers I ever had, and one of the most influential people in my life in many ways. \u00a0It was he who\u00a0passed on to me his love of analysis\u00a0and of fairly\u00a0relentless logic, yes – but also how to find joy, stimulation and meaning in how words were put together; the packing of meaning into every word of a great poem, the layers of symbols and meaning in a great book, the ruthless economy of a well-honed phrase. \u00a0 And he showed a lot of us how four years of studying literature could be a good, powerful and important force in ones’ *real life* – which is, I’m afraid, a lost art in the modern college.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Beyond that? Incredible as it may seem in this age, it was Dr. Blake – an English professor who called himself a “monarchist” – who showed me that I really wasn’t the bobblehead I had been when I started college; “Mitch, you’re not a liberal”, he said in his Queens accent during out of our hours of talking about policis, philosophy, current events; he shook his head and made me read Solzhenitzyn, Paul Johnson, P.J. O’Rourke, Dostoevskii and Tolstoii. \u00a0And by golly, he was right; once my brain turned on, I was a conservative after all. When I pulled punched my ballot for Ronald Reagan in 1984 (albeit without telling my parents), and started my first conservative talk show in 1986, and every day I do the NARN or write my blog today, Dr. Blake was and is there.<\/p>\n

I’ve thought a lot over the years; would the modern humanities academy know what to do about a Dr. Blake – an English prof with a fearsome BS detector and no patience for the PC fripperies of the modern humanities academy?<\/p>\n

Oh, it would be an epic battle indeed.<\/p>\n

The only tragedy in his death is that not every college kid had or will have the opportunity to learn from him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a long, long time since I’ve been punched in the stomach. But I remember what it feels like with this news: Dr. Jim Blake, my college advisor, died a few months ago in Oil City, PA. \u00a0He was 68. \u00a0That I’m hearing about it a few seasons late shows how life’s\u00a0sturm\u00a0und drang\u00a0will have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memoriam","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60082"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60090,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60082\/revisions\/60090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}