Old Man and the Sea Symbolism Picture

Not a lot to say here. I'll let this one fall down on its own. Although I must give the author props for his beauteous picture, there are at least twenty things wrong with this analysis.

Contents of a Young Man's Pocket

Although I frequently read essays from my essay collection, I occasionally find ones that I don't even remember adding. This essay is one of those gems. Starting out, it seems to be just an essay about the short story, "Contents of a Dead Man's Pocket," with a really bad introduction. However, once the author tells us of the contents of said pocket, it is clear (at least to those who have read the short story) that it is not. The essay is actually about a man named James, who from what I can tell is a Mary Sue of the author. Perhaps an astute reader could guess that James was a "memory type man" from the contents of his pockets: a camera, a pencil and eraser case, and an ipod, but not me. He carried the camera because his personal motto was "No proof no truth", and I can only assume that he pronounces it "troof".

Then, around the second page, there is a massive shift from third person to first person, where we learn that James was the author all along (!). Honestly, I was completely surprised by this revelation, considering that I really had no god-damn idea what the hell this essay was even talking about until the end.

Long story short, this is a great essay. Next time I pull out my binders for a little bit of story-time, this essay is going to be read aloud. I hope that everybody enjoys this as much as I did.

Side-note: I'm using my parents' printer, so the scans look a little different. I don't know how to stop it from scanning the whole screen, even if there's not paper there. I suppose I could spend time and photoshop that part out, but most everybody that knows me knows I am too lazy to do such a thing, so you're just going to have to deal with it.

Update soon. I promise.

If anybody checks for the update I promised, I'm sorry to say that I haven't gotten to it yet. I just had my last final earlier today and the rest of my day was filled with packing up my dorm-room. In the mean time, I recommend two other sources of bad writing to hold you together:

http://shitmystudentswrite.tumblr.com/
http://sichumor.tumblr.com/

I just found about the first blog earlier today, so I can't necessarily give it my wholehearted recommendation, though I have high hopes that older posts and future posts will live up to what I've read in the first few pages. However, I absolutely adore the [sic] humor lady and have been reading her posts for a few months. Support her! She needs it after spending all day reading shit people submit to her as a literary agent.

"Free Bird, Triumphal Nationalism" and "Romanticism"

Many times, when we searched for papers we would find many that were clearly for the same assignment. Or, as the author of "Romanticism" would say, being written for the same assignment is what makes this puts this into the category of being written for the same assignment. Sometimes, we would find two reasonable and articulate responses. Other times, we would find two equally awful responses and treasure them forever.

Since these two were short assignments, I will omit analysis and let them stand (fall) on their own. Before you read , you may want to listen to the triumphal nationalism of Lynrd Skynrd's "Free Bird" or the romanticism of Sean McGee's "My Story" to gain perspective:

"Free Bird" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np0solnL1XY
"My Story" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxdogev7mA

The roaring 20's

If I posed the question of how best to describe the lifestyle of the 1920's, most people would respond with perhaps a mention of how an economic boom led to increasingly luxurious lives. However, they would be wrong and uneducated in their conclusions. This essay opened my eyes to the best way to describe it, calling it, "the roaring 20's, the Jazz age, known as an age of prosperity."

With this new-found prosperity, America could become a nation that was fertile ground for heroes--heroes who could hit sixty home-runs in a season. I never realized that three of the heroes that we associate with associate with the "roaring 20's, the Jazz age, known as an age of prosperity" (Babe Ruth, Charles Linbergh, and Henry Ford) were so similar. For example, I never knew that they were the first to do something/get 0ver sixty home-runs in a season/gain the respect of people by doing unheard of things.

I now present to the world another one of my favorite essays of all time, which is simply titled "Chapter 31 essay".

The Cream of the Crop

It may be best to not to start with the one of best, but screw that. The following essay was the first essay we found that was truly a piece of (anti?)art. Although written by a high school freshman, the hilarity of this is still appreciable even beyond the level of simply bad writing. I understand that everybody writes poorly at some time or another and that the "first draft of anything is shit," but this goes beyond that. I remember one essay I wrote freshman year where I introduced a point by saying, "clearly, fairly obviously, ..." which perhaps belongs among the essays in my three overstuffed binders of bad writing. So, I invite anyone who reads this to appreciate the joy of bad writing in all of its humor without feeling I sit on my high horse.

Analysis:
This is a beautiful piece that begins weakly, like most freshman-level English papers. But, once we are introduced to Roy Hobbs (main character) in the fifth sentence, we begin to see there is something special about this work. The always nonstandard capitalization of "The Alchemist" leaves the reader tense and excited--what could it mean to be "the alchemist"? This is contrasted with "The Natural", whose title deserves to be capitalized normally--"why?", the reader is forced to contemplate, would the author choose such symbolic typography? I don't think we ever learn the true reasoning, which leaves the reader to constantly and recurrently contemplate the work's true meaning, like any good art should.

Moving into the first body paragraph, I do not have an emotional response to his first quote, until he tells me that it is powerful and that it, of course, ties into the language of the world. The two footnotes leave me with confusion in the same manner as the capitalization. Where do they point to? Why is one a subscript and one a superscript?

Towards the end, the author begins to write more personally. I completely understand that "life itself is a goal to attain" and understand that that is why he is alive (2). I certainly am alive so that I can achieve life. We are then given a very personal admission from the author. That is, he is still learning "right from wrong and good ideas from bad ideas" (2). I cannot agree more.

With the unintroduced quote from Roy Hobbs, we are finally led into gaining a true sense of the author's thesis about how the language of the world talks to us. Oh wait, just kidding, the universe "doesn't conspire to help anyone on their personal journey outside of Hollywood" (3).

Rating:
10/10

This is one of those essays that no matter how many times I read it brings me to tears. I particularly enjoy reading it out loud to an excited audience. Once I have reached second half of the second page, I find myself unable to talk, as tears run down my face, and find making words nearly impossible. I present to you one of the crowning achievements of a year and a half of recycle-bin diving and paper pile scavenging: