Memoir Revision

“But wait, his knee never hit the ground!” shouted the commentator in the 2011 National Championship game as theAuburnsideline and fans exploded with cheers. The commentator was talking aboutAuburn’s stand out freshman running back Michael Dyer. Michael Dyer had appeared to be tackled after a short gain, but he was able to keep his knee from touching the ground. The freshman running back kept the play alive for a game changing thirty-seven yard gain onAuburn’s game winning drive.Auburnwent on to kick a field goal to win this game 22-19, which was a long awaited national championship.  I wasn’t always a die hardAuburnfan however. Both of my parents areAlabamafootball fans and they tried to make me anAlabamafan as well, but it was difficult being that neither of which was a big sports fan. It took a few good personal experiences along the road, but over the years I became anAuburnfan. I love the wayAuburnalways promises a thrilling game that’s guaranteed to keep you entertained.

               Auburn’s season in 2010 started out shaky. With Arkansas State scoring 26 points against Auburn in the first game of the season, I would have never thought that Auburn’s defense could match up to a strong offense. After that first game I prayed thatAuburnwould not have another horrible season like there 2008 season, where they only won five games. The week after this brought no relief.AuburnplayedMississippiStatewho in 2009 was a mediocre team at best.Auburnsurvived a scare by beatingMississippiState17-14. After an exciting and nerve wrecking seasonAuburnbrought home there first National Championship since 1957. It is this edge-of-your-seat madness that I love aboutAuburn. It doesn’t matter if the teamAuburnis facing is unranked or the second best team in the nation,Auburnalways manages to keep me nervous during the entire game. That is howAuburnplayed football this year, last year and the previous years before that since I can even remember watching them. This juggernaut of a football team has never been known to annihilate their opponent, but they have always promised an entertaining football game.

                This may come as a surprise to most, but I have not always been anAuburnfan. Growing up my parents were bothAlabamafans, my grandparents wereAlabamafans, even my great grandparents wereAlabamafans! This may seem like a lot for someone to live up to, but I’ve never been one to follow a trend. Sure I started out in this world as anAlabamafan, but for what reasons? I never knew why I went for the team I just knew that was the team I went for. My parents would catch anAlabamafootball game every now and then during the football season, not every week like most true fans. My mom wasn’t that big into sports and my dad was always doing house work on Saturdays. They were definitely not as devoted to the team as their parents and grandparents. So I stuck with this for a while, not really caring about football, just claiming to be a fan of a team I knew little about. Life for me at this point didn’t involve football. The only sports I played at the time were baseball, basketball, and soccer.  Little did I know how quickly all of this would change.

                When I was 6 my parents split up. My dad moved into apartments and my mom took the house. A year later my mom started dating a man she worked with named Ralph Flecker. They dated for a year and a half before finally deciding to marry, I didn’t find out they had decided to marry until after they were already married. The marriage came as a shock to me, but I was fine with it because I really liked Ralph. This soon led to us moving out toGrant,Alabamawhere we lived next door to Mitchell Payne who would soon become by best friend. Mitchell and I did everything together, mostly because there isn’t a whole lot to do in Grant. We went hiking on the mountain behind our house, swimming in the lake across the street, and rode go-carts in our front yard. My parents would cook meals for him and his parents would cook meals for me, so it wasn’t long before I noticed a significant difference in our families on Saturdays during autumn.

                My family would continue as they always had on Saturdays. Ralph was more of anAlabamafan than my mom and dad, but not much more. The only difference between them is he would read aboutAlabamain the papers on Sunday mornings and my mom and dad never did that. So it wasn’t until the first football Saturday I spent over at Mitchell’s house that I understood how important football actually was. My parents would have the game on, but they would be in the kitchen cooking or on the computer. Mitchell’s family would scream, cheer, and curse at the television trying to rally there team. I couldn’t understand how they could get so worked up over a football game, my parents never acted like this. About midway through the second quarter they asked me if I was anAlabamafan like the rest of my family and I answered with a whispered “yes”. They didn’t know me well at this time so they left the subject alone, but I was intrigued by the way they watched the game. Every Saturday after that I would spend over at Mitchell’s house watching theAuburngames with his family. As his family got to know me better they began to haggle me about the team I went for. I did enjoy watching the games at Mitchell’s house, even with the haggling, so this made me start to question how much of anAlabamafan I really was. Why would I cheer forAlabamawhen every memory I had of being anAlabamafootball fan was so unenthusiastic?Alabamafootball was dull to me, where asAuburnfootball was explosive and exciting. I never knew what was going to happen next, and everything involving this team had a million times more emotion involved than I had ever seen withAlabama. Weeks of watching Auburn play on Saturdays and I could not answer the question in my head, “Why am I anAlabamafan?” The only answer I could come up with was that my family members wereAlabamafans.

                Finally when I was 12 years old I decided to announce it. “I’ve decided that I am anAuburnfan,” I told Mitchell when we were on our way over to his house to watch the game. I was met with less haggling and it was a much friendlier environment to watch the game in when I got over to his house. When I told my mom, she could have cared less one way or the other as I presumed. My dad was a little bit harder to convince than my mom, however. The haggling was gone at Mitchell’s house, but it was only met by the haggling that began from my father. He was never the hugeAlabamafan himself, but he was always looking for something to pick at me about. I let him because I didn’t care, I knew that I was anAuburnfan and I had been for a while. After a few years of this not bothering me, he finally gave up on making fun of me for being anAuburnfan and decided to find other things to pick at me about.

                I have stuck with Auburnthrough the best and the worst since I became a fan. I never once thought of going back to Alabama. Some people may say that a true fan is a fan of the same team there entire life, I feel like I can argue that. I love Auburnfootball, and everything about it. I love how the team plays football. I love them when they win and when they lose. If you’re ever looking for me on a Saturday afternoon in autumn you can bet that I’ll be glued to a television set watching the Auburn Tigers continue to give me a reason to be their fan. It was a long path I took to becoming an Auburnfan, but I’m glad I got here. On January 10^th 2011 I received the best gift a fan could get when, after years of loyalty,Auburn won the BCS National Championship. Watching the confetti burst onto the field afterAuburn’s victory was a dream come true!

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paper 4

For my Litterary analysis I decided to analyze “Up in Michigan”. I already researched the story some while writing paper three so I decided that it would be easiest just to continue with this topic. I was thinking I would make my thesis along the lines of how Liz was not actually a victim and that she wanted to have sex as much as or more than Jim wanted to. I felt like there were more feelings going on behind the scenes than were shown, and if Liz didnt want to have sex she would not have gone with Jim out to the dock.

Class Summary

In class today I got a better idea as how to structure my sentences better. I learned more about how to cite my work and create a good work cited page for my work. I also came up with a few more ideas to add to my summary so it looks more like a summary and less like an introduction.

Response to feedback (paper 2)

The problems I need to attend to most is getting my paper more organized. I tend to jump from one topic to the next with nothing leading up to it. I also need to fix my grammar and get better at finding my thesis statement. I also dont identify who my pronouns are identifying very well. My thesis was also confusing. Most of my errors in paper 1 are reoccuring in paper 2, but this happened mostly because I did not refer to paper 1 at all while I was writing paper 2. I feel like I can effectively fix most of my errors from the first 2 papers on the third one.

Paper 3

Graham Hanline

Literature Review

Reviewing the article “Ernest Hemingways Miltonic Twist on ‘Up in Michigan’”, by Ian

Maloney, gave me a whole different view of the short story “Up in Michigan”. Ian Maloney

suggests that Hemingway based “Up in Michigan” on John Milton’s collection of poetry

Paradise Lost. Milton compares Jim from “Up in Michigan” to Eve from “Paradise Lost”. “‘Up

in Michigan’ views Jim Gilmore and Liz Coates as the byproducts of Adam and Eve’s

misjudgments in Milton’s Paradise Lost.”(Maloney, Ernest Hemingways Miltonic Twist on ‘Up

in Michigan’). Milton gives strong examples to prove this as well. Maloney compares Jim and

Liz’s sex scene clouded with mist with Satan possessing Adam in Paradise Lost. “After Satan’s

famous soliloquy in Book Nine of Paradise Lost, “Like a black mist low creeping, he held on/

His midnight search, where soonest he might find/The Serpent. . . . (180–182). Before possessing

the serpent (“in at his Mouth/ The Devil enterd” 187–188), Satan drifts into the garden as a

mist.”(Maloney, ). Maloney also makes comparisons of the walk home as being the same as

Adam and Eve’s walk out of hell. Maloney states “What hasn’t changed from Milton to

Hemingway is the road back from the Fall.”(Maloney, ). The thesis of his article is “The

movement from Milton to Hemingway has been from an interdependent, cooperating couple to a

stoic, injured individual.”(Maloney, ).

Maloney supports the main point of his argument with strong examples, and great

comparisons between the characters in “Up in Michigan” and those in Paradise Lost. When

reading this article you get a strong feel of where Ernest Hemingway came from and how he

grew up. Hemingway’s sister, Marcelline Hemingway Sanford, was quoted in this article as

saying “Ernest and I did a lot of reading. Sets of the classics, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray,

Stevenson, and Shakespeare filled many of the shelves in our family library. I don’t think we

skipped any of them”(Maloney, ). This quote led Maloney to believe that Hemingway must have

read some of Milton’s work growing up. With quotes like these Maloney convinces me that he is

correct in his analysis of the story. Other critics of “Up in Michigan” only talk about the sex

scene where Maloney goes into full detail of the story from beginning to end.

This article was useful in helping me to understand “Up in Michigan” more clearly. I feel

like now this story was Ernest Hemingway’s way of showing how mankind has fallen since we

got kicked out of Eden. Ernest Hemingway was very clever in the way he put all of these

comparisons from Milton into his own story. All were subtle, Jim the blacksmith from “Up in

Michigan” was compared to Adam the gardener from Paradise Lost. Jim and Liz having sex was

compared to Satan possessing Adam. I feel I can go back and reread “Up in Michigan” and

understand all of these comparisons and get a better feel for what Ernest Hemingway was trying

to accomplish. Maloney also made the story more interesting for me by writing this article. I’m a

big fan of stories that have a hidden meaning or purpose, and now I feel like this is one of those

stories. Hemingway was not trying to be a sexist pig by writing “Up in Michigan” he was trying

to show everybody how society has fallen.

I like how this article gave a hidden comparison between “Up in Michigan” and Paradise

Lost. The article was surprising to me because when I read the title I just assumed it was going to

be another rant about the sex scene in “Up in Michigan”. Once I started to read the article and

realized what it was really about I got hooked on Maloney’s theory. Stories today normally are

not as deep as Maloney has made “Up in Michigan”. My favorite comparison between Paradise

Lost and “Up in Michigan” was definitely the sex scene compared to Satan possessing Adam.

The article was well written and a great theory behind “Up in Michigan”.

today i found a good article on “Up in Michigan” it’s called Ernest Hemingways Miltonic Twist in “Up in Michigan”. This is what i have decided to review for my third paper.

Response to Feedback

The first thing that I did once I got my paper was go straight to the last page to see the grade. I then looked over the highlighted material on the rubric to see where I could have improved in my paper. I then went to the beginning of my paper and looked through to see the comments. When I saw a comment I would reread the paragraph to see how the paragraph sounded to me. I then tried to correct my errors in my head so I would be able to get a better grade on my next paper. I wasnt expecting a great grade on this paper just because it was the first paper and I was a little fuzzy on the assignment. I was not too disappointed in my grade because I knew it wasnt my best work, and I also knew that I got an A no matter what so that helped a lot. My main error that I noticed was with my thesis. It seemed that the majority of my errors revolved around me not having a strong introduction paragraph and a week thesis. If I can improve on this then I feel like I can greatly improve on my entire paper.

Memoirs Paper

 The first time I ever really considered myself an Alabama fan was back in 3rd grade when I was questioned as to which team I was for. Ignorantly I responded to this question “Alabama because that’s the state that we’re in.” My parents had been Alabama fans since they were born, but I on the other hand could have cared less about football in general. The only sports I played up until the 7th grade were baseball, basketball, and soccer. My friends played football on the local peewee teams, but my parents never really made football seem like an option for me.
When I was 12 years old I decided to sit down and actually try to watch one of these Alabama football games that everyone hyped about. I sat there and watched for three hours and I could not have been more disappointed. The way Alabama played football in that game was beyond boring. They lazily ran the ball into their linemen and fell forward for 3 yard gains at a time until this game was over. There was nothing spectacular about it, no big hits, no big catches, nothing big at all. My neighbor, who also was my best friend, invited me over to watch the auburn game with his family later that day. I wasn’t too excited to go since I had just sat through one of the most boring things that I had ever watched on television, but I decided to anyway since there was nothing for me to do at my house. The Auburn game I watched with him and his family had so much more emotion than the Alabama game I had watched previously. The running back would refuse to go down and when he was finally forced to he made sure to lay an incredible hit on the other guy before doing so. The wide receivers streaked down the field as if they were on fire. Everything about this game was more spectacular than anything I had watched earlier that day. From that day on I knew that the Auburn Tigers were the team I was going to root for.