Friends and Football

Books, Friends and Football
Being seven hours away from home is tough, I found this out my very first week here last semester. I missed my home, my family and my friends so much and was constantly homesick, but through football I made a few friends that I spent quite a bit of time with, until they all transferred away, and I was left with the task of making new friends once again. I soon made new friends through football again and have found a group of guys that I really connect with and really help make Lenoir Rhyne feel like home. When I first started reading Zadie Smith’s book Swing Time I really connected with the friendship theme of it, and with the friendship theme in Robert Beatty’s book Serafina and The Black Cloak, the themes in these books and the lessons in the short essays and articles we read in English 131.02 have made me think about the friends I have made and the friends I have lost in the short time I have been here.
In Swing Time, Zadie Smith paints a scene of friendship while the main character is Africa traveling down a road, “I remember in particular two barefoot girl children, walking by the road, hand in hand. They looked like best friends. I waved to them, they waved back.” (pg.314). While I am not holding hands and walking down the road here in Hickory, this scene that Zadie Smith reminds me of the friendships I have made up here in Hickory, a place I did not even know existed. The friendship the girls have is awesome and the way Zadie Smith writes the scene you know that they have been friends for a long time, and while the friendships I have made up here have not been that long I feel as if these are guys I can count on for anything.
In relation to the friendship theme in Zadie Smiths book, Robert Beatty’s book Serafina and The Black Cloak, resonates a stronger friendship theme in my opinion. Serafina fears that people will not like her because of the way she looks, but soon finds out that the children do not care at all mainly because she saves them from the man in the Black Cloak. However, she creates a strong friendship with the nephew of the owner of the estate that she lives on only after just meeting at the beginning of the book. This relates more to me because I was a little worried that I might not be accepted, but through football I found common ground with a few guys I can now call friends. This is why I relate to Serafina more than the unamend protagonist in Zadie Smith’s Swing Time, Serafina throws herself into a world where she is uncomfortable and realizes that she was wrong to worry about being not accepted.
Speaking on how football introduced me to most of my friends up here it has influenced me in many other ways. This past fall semester I was pushed to the extreme by the previous coaching staff. I was put into the starting role my second day of fall camp and was expected to know all the play’s and do them flawlessly. When we read the excerpt from Michael Lewis’s book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game it took me back to last fall camp, where everything was going so fast that I could not keep up with it. Michael Lewis describes a play of football in depth and gives all these details that it makes it seem as if the play is going on forever but in reality, it only took about 3.5 seconds. This ties into my experience last semester with football so well, everything felt like it was rushing by me in blazing speed, but it was only going by in normal speed I was just extremely worried about wanting to impress the coaches, essentially by me worrying about that I did not do the best I could.
This semester has been a thousand times better, we as a team have a higher GPA, and we had a great spring, full of practice, conditioning and weight lifting. This coaching staff has brought in a new scheme and we have been learning it all spring but we finally have it down and I feel that this fall we will succeed in our endeavors on and off the field, by winning the SAC championship and having a 3.0 team GPA.
English 131.02 has made me think about several things and made me reflect on things as well. When we read Swing Time by Zadie Smith and Robert Beatty’s novel Serafina and the Black Cloak, it made me think of the situation with my friendship and relationships up here in Hickory, and Michael Lewis brought football into my mind in the excerpt from his book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, and how football as shaped my life here at Lenoir Rhyne.

Works Cited
Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. 2016. Penguin, 2017
Beatty, Robert. Serafina and the Black Cloak. 2015. Disney Hyperion, 2016
Lewis, Michael. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Chapter One Excerpt, Norton, 2006. Pp. 15-16
Lane, Anthony. “Reality, Hunger,” Review of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg and Lean on Pete, directed by Andrew Haigh. The New Yorker, 9 Apr. 2018, pp. 80-81.
Makant, Jordan. “Thought Twice; It’s Not Alright.” Impossible Angles. Main Street Rage, 2017. 18.
Kichener, Caroline. “Why So Many Adults Love Young-Adult Literature.” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/why-so-many-adults-are-love-young-adult-literture/547334/, 1 Dec. 2017, Accessed 9 Apr. 2018.

Annotated Bibliography
Smith, Zadie. Swing Time. 2016. Penguin, 2017
In Zadie Smith’s Swing Time You are introduced to the protagonist who remains nameless throughout the entire novel. The narrator (the protagonist) goes back and forth from childhood memories to the present adult lifetime. The book mainly focuses on her relationship with her best friend Tracey and how it shapes her actions and life in the present where she works as a manager for a pop artist, helping to build a school in a poor region of Africa.

Beatty, Robert. Serafina and the Black Cloak. 2015. Disney Hyperion, 2016
In Robert Beatty’s novel Serafina and the Black Cloak The main character is a small child who was found in the forest by the mechanic for an estate. Serafina is the main character and she lives with the mechanic in the basement and catches rats. One day children start to disappear so Serafina and the Nephew of the owner of the grand estate track down the man who wears the Black Cloak and is stealing the Children.

Lewis, Michael. The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, Chapter One Excerpt, Norton, 2006. Pp. 15-16
In this excerpt from Michael Lewis’s book, he speaks on a specific play where quarterback Joe Theismann gets injured from a sack committed by Lawrence Taylor. In the excerpt he describes how slow it may look to the viewers of a football game but it goes extremely fast. He also explains the dangers of football and effects it has on men who play it.

Lane, Anthony. “Reality, Hunger,” Review of Ready Player One, directed by Steven Spielberg and Lean on Pete, directed by Andrew Haigh. The New Yorker, 9 Apr. 2018, pp. 80-81.
In this review of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of the book Ready Player One, Anthony Lane goes into detail on how this was not one of Spielberg’s best work. He explains how the protagonist’s avatar is pretty generic and his companions are too. He the goes into talk about the movie Lean on Pete and discusses how a meeting between Wade Watts and Charley Thompson, who is the main character of Lean on Pete, would be interesting.

Makant, Jordan. “Thought Twice; It’s Not Alright.” Impossible Angles. Main Street Rage, 2017. 18.
In this poem by Jordan Makant he writes off of Bob Dylan’s song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, in the song Bob Dylan is describing how he broke up with a girl and she doesn’t really understand why bt he tells her don’t worry about it because its fine. Well Jordan Makant says it is not fine because he’s still in love with her even after he let her go.

Kichener, Caroline. “Why So Many Adults Love Young-Adult Literature.” The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/why-so-many-adults-are-love-young-adult-literture/547334/, 1 Dec. 2017, Accessed 9 Apr. 2018.
The author of this article pulls from Young Adult literature authors and professors of literature at university’s saying that adults enjoy the young adult side of literature because it reminds them of coming of age and brings them back to simpler times that they can relate too even though they might be out of the intended audience.

 

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How Friendships are Made and Broken

Swing Time by Zadie Smith is about a woman, whose name is not given to us the reader throughout the entire book, and her childhood and most of her adult life. Zadie Smith flips between the narrator’s childhood adventures and perils to her adult life experience in Africa and other places, while she does this she weaves the story of friendship the narrator has with a girl named Tracey. The technique of flipping between points in time instead of a chronological timeline lets us see the direct impact that her experiences in the past affect her actions in the future, especially with the past adventures with Tracey. The theme of friendship in this book is one of the more powerful ones and Zadie Smith uses the characters to express this. Smith uses the characters to show that friendships can be fun and amazing, but can also cause you pain and hurt one or more parties involved.
In one of the scenes where the narrator is in Africa, she is riding along a African road on the way to a village she was helping out when she spots two young girls holding hands and walking down the side of the road all smiles and laughs. She sees them and thinks about how her and Tracey used to be good friends, “Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship”. (Pg. 314) This line directly displays the narrators feeling on friendship. She sees the young girls as how her and Tracey used to be, and how in their youth they felt like they were smarter and cooler than the adults who watched over them.
The narrator’s relationship was stretched because of getting older and having new interests, so by the time they were about to go to college this happened, and Smith uses the following scene to express this point about friendship, “I sang about faithful friends. Tracey turned my way, and smiled, a melancholy but affectionate smile, or maybe it only carried the memory of affection.”. (Pg. 266) When she Smith writes the phrase a “memory of affection” it shows that the friendship is over or dying out, like they only are together because they must be. The narrator wants the friendship to carry on because she gives the tone of hope through her word choice and tone when she says “carried the memory of affection”, this word choice and tone display hope and feelings of reconciliation that the narrator wants but Tracey is not willing to return. Smith writes this scene well and truly describes how friendships can be lost over time because of differences.
In the epilogue of Swing Time the narrator feels that she needs to go to help take care of Tracey’s children or take care of them together entirely. She wants to become friends with Tracey again but does not no how exactly, so she goes to were Tracy lives to figure out the best way to do it, “She was right above me, on her balcony, in a dressing gown and slippers, her hands in the air, turning, turning, her children around her, everybody dancing” (Pg.453). When Smith writes this it lets you see Tracey into a better light, because the whole book we have seen her a s a no good trouble make, but now we see her as the good person and mother that everyone wanted her to be especially the narrator. While the book ends there the end scene of Tracey dancing gives the reader hope that maybe, just maybe the friendship the Smith so well crafted can become one once again.
The theme of friendship in Swing Time reveals that this book is about the rise, fall , and rekindle of friendship. The friendship was not all good but Zadie Smith uses those bad times and the good times to explain that not all the times in friendship are good ones, you have to have the bad times to even out the good times.

Football In South Georgia

Hi everyone my name is Ian Brinson and I am currently a freshman here at Lenoir Rhyne University. I would like to start off today by telling you all about how football is a big part of my life, and how important it is back home. I am from a place called Moultrie Georgia and Football is the biggest thing there, Friday nights everyone in the county goes to the game to support the Packers and I was lucky enough to be able to play for them. My time spent on the football field in South Georgia was time well spent and it taught me a lot about character and what it means to be a leader and hard worker. These skills are what helped me to attain an offer from Lenoir Rhyne and help get my college education paid for so I can take care of my future family. These pictures are of me an my parents on Senior night my senior year, the next one is of me warming up for a game in high school and the last one is of me here at Lenoir Rhyne on media day last semester. Football is an important part of my life and helps me in more ways then none.

 

The Journey Begins

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Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton