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INTRODUCTION TO ETHNIC STUDIES Students must read all three books:
ENGLISH
Some are required to read one novel, and others two. That is the summer reading list for students entering St. Ignatius College Prep in San Francisco. I've never heard of these authors. In the summer of 1966, I read six novels, all classics, all required. Is is capitalized in a title.
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Laurent Demets, FSSP, is the only priest stationed year-round in Vietnam, a lonely post. Keep the lighthouse keeper in your prayers. Camosun College says
Literature acts as a time capsule. It gives us direct, immersive insight into the values, struggles, and triumphs of past civilizations, making history feel personal rather than just a timeline of facts. [acts] American Military University says Regular exposure to well-crafted narratives, poetry, and prose naturally expands vocabulary and improves the ability to articulate thoughts and write persuasively. John Henry Newman says The classics are the comprehensive expression of human nature and thought, both in brilliance and sinfulness, read and taught for the purpose of cultivating and purifying the whole human mind. Thomas Aquinas says Even a rigorous philosopher is bound to be a lover of myths and poetic fables and must acknowledge that poetry captures the wonder that sparks deeper understanding. Apostle Paul says In Acts 17:28, he preaches at the Areopagus in Athens. To prove that God is always near, he quotes the Greek poet Epimenides, saying, "For in him we live and move and have our being," and in the same sentence he quotes Stoic philosopher Aratus, saying, "For we are also his offspring." "Who are you?" asks Mrs. Poe. "Joseph Dunlop." March 31, 1957 What is the box? tall, rectangular a sacrament Who are you? Ira Grossel, Zionist Is Mrs. Poe real or a disguise? There are two houses, and one is empty. How do we know both aren't empty? What is meant by lower ground? Why the heavy coat? Why the scarf? Give up? All right, she represents an angel, his guardian, and angels are beneath us, remaining fixed where they are forever, and we are created in God's image. I'm not teaching anything. This is basic Catholic doctrine you ought to know. The amount is not an accident. Figure it out yourself. There are 23 science fiction stories in my Reading List out of 102, all but one recorded by narrators I searched for far and wide to bring to you. Get started before it's too late ... or remain brainwashed and in the dark.
1 My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
2 Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; 3 If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; 4 If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. 5 I have seen roses damasked, red and white, 6 But no such roses see I in her cheeks; 7 And in some perfumes is there more delight 8 Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. 9 I love to hear her speak, yet well I know 10 That music hath a far more pleasing sound; 11 I grant I never saw a goddess go; 12 My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. 13 And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare 14 As any she belied with false compare. Shakespeare Shakespeare's Macbeth features King Duncan, a name sometimes linked to the same Scottish, English, Irish root as Dunn, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (Act 1, Scene 4) uses the word "dun" (the dull-brown/gray color) for a classic pun. The root is from Scotland, but, in fact, most relatives fled England, and I don't own shares in Dunkin' Donuts. Though I am a daughter to his blood,
I am not to his manners. O Lorenzo, If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife, Become a Christian and thy loving wife. Jessica Catholic Shakespeare invented the name “Jessica”. The first known usage is in The Merchant of Venice. Jessica is the daughter of the money-lending, pound-of-flesh-demanding Shylock. She runs off with Lorenzo and takes plenty of Shylock’s money and jewels with her. In her first speech, Act II, scene 3, she states rather bluntly that her father’s lifestyle does not please her: “our house is hell”. And in her second, she expresses a hope—apparently sincere—for conversion: she is “ashamed to be [her] father’s child”. Born 1828 Nantes Died 1905 Amiens In his 1865 novel From the Earth to the Moon, French poet and novelist Jules Verne got more than one detail right, including the state that would launch spaceships. Verne imagined a three-man crew in a projectile fired from Florida near modern-day Cape Canaveral that splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, just like Apollo 11, more than one hundred years later. That’s a remarkably accurate forecast for a piece of fiction written during the American Civil War. While his books were primarily written to inspire an interest in science, Verne heavily infused his stories with moral concepts and themes of Providence. Some of his narratives, such as Master Zakarius (1854) and the redemptive arc of Captain Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, feature strong Catholic undertones cautioning against hubris and the dangers of playing God. Known as the Father of Science Fiction, Verne wrote and published Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea as a magazine serial in March 1869 to June 1870, subsequently published in complete book form in 1870. The American film adaptation of the same name was released in the US on 12/23/1954. Disney films were and are a bit too lightweight for me, whereas Verne is widely considered the ultimate "proto-steampunk" author. Trump will be highly rated for his Pentagon UAP file releases and is not the Zionist that I thought he was, as he recently bawled out Bibi gun. The United States will be in the best position to negotiate when first contact is made with macroperegrinans. Postings on my website will be more sparse as I begin a memoir, which sounds presumptuous, even to me. However, I might be a unique witness to the revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s centered in San Francisco, and the lucky recipient of science fiction television and films. Later came classic sci-fi literature. If ever on the brink of World War Three, that is when the macroperegrinans, good and bad, are likely to intervene.
The observer moves through the crowd like a detective.
Tertullian QUINTUS SEPTIMIUS FLORENS TERTULLIANUS, first Catholic author to produce an extensive corpus of Latin literature, died AD 240. All those Catholic YouTubers who can't get themselves back far enough are proven wrong. They are not detectives. Gemini
Postmodernism is a late 20th-century intellectual, artistic, and cultural movement that arose as a skeptical reaction to the ideals of Modernism and the Enlightenment. It rejects the concept of universal truths, objective reality, and grand, overarching narratives, arguing instead that knowledge and meaning are subjective and culturally constructed. Core Concepts
Key Characteristics in Practice
Major Thinkers & Influences While the movement is decentralized, it is largely driven by philosophers and cultural theorists who scrutinized how society constructs its values:
However, to understand what has happened to English departments across America, one must read some well-known authors who fit this mold. I have. They would guillotine me and everyone on my Reading List. Despite his crabby reputation and protectiveness over words, detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler ultimately relied on the editorial process to refine his manuscripts for publication. Dorothy Gardiner was one of the editors. When The Atlantic Monthly, now The Atlantic, changed his punctuation and phrasing, Chandler fired off a 1947 letter to editor Edward Weeks, stating: "By the way, would you convey my compliments to the proofreader and tell him or her that I would thank them to pay some attention to the punctuation of my sentences ... not try to improve the grammar of a writer who is being paid quite a lot of money to write exactly the way he writes." I edit Gemini constantly: some you see and some you don't.
Where the gentle Avon flows And a trailing rambler grows There’s a window shining into the night And a casement curtain flutters and blows in candle light And a girl sits listening there To a haunting old world air As if someone played so softly below All entranced, she hears that sweet serenade of long ago All the while her wonder grows As that music comes and goes Ah, what magic makes this rare delight? Her calling awakes the midsummer night Who can it be playing out there Playing for me such a sweet air? Clavicord bells tinkling in time Why do you chime? Why do you ring, ding ding? Tell me, minstrel, tell me the tale of love you sing! Phantom answer came there none But she waited on and on Till her window grew bright with dawn’s early glow And that bygone lover haunting the night was silent below He no longer played that sweet serenade of long ago The sweet serenade of long ago Ronald Binge 1951 1599 English author Shakespeare publishes Romeo and Juliet. 1524 Italian author da Porto names Romeo Montecchi in a novella Giulietta e Romeo. 1321 Italian author Dante creates Romeo of Villanova in an epic poem Paradiso. gentle father, gentle man, gentle ghost American Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald 1896-1940 First published in The Smart Set magazine in June 1922, it was later included in his collection Tales of the Jazz Age. Plangent is loud, reverberating melancholy: "the plangent sound of a harpsichord".  Columbia University's English department does not officially ban Western literature, but it has shifted heavily toward a "multicultural" approach, with critics and students saying that the department actively devalues or frames the traditional Western canon as "racist" and "Eurocentric". The department has increasingly emphasized diverse, anti-colonial narratives. The teachers are radical Marxists and require politically correct pronouns: Ze / Hir / Hirs; Xe / Xem / Xyr. An example is ENGL UN1100 Intro to Latinx Literature and Culture Carlos Alonso Nugent.
Gemini Columbia University is named in honor of Christopher Columbus, a widely used poetic, personified name for America. Originally founded as King's College in 1754, the institution was renamed Columbia College in 1784, following the American War of Independence (9/3/1783) to reflect patriotic pride in the nation. NYC Azaan My reading lists are not Eurocentric. Before a road trip, American boys might exclaim, “I call shotgun.” The idea of a shotgun seat dates to the Wild West, when an armed man rode beside the driver on a stagecoach to protect passengers from possible bandits. Hollywood Westerns popularized the phrase, and by the 1950s, it was common slang.
Gemini has totaled the robberies, designated as such because they occurred outside the coach. Four to six horses pulled a standard stagecoach. The number depended on the terrain, weight of the coach, including passengers, and required speed for the journey. In the United States between 1850 and 1900, very few people were obese compared to modern standards. While obesity existed, it was rare, and average body weights were significantly lower than today. Wells Fargo 350 (1870 to 1884) California 457 (1856 to 1913) Arizona 130 (1875 to 1903) The most common stagecoach shotgun, a strictly defensive firearm, was a short-barreled (18–24 inch), side-by-side, double-barreled shotgun, referred to as a coach gun, messenger gun, or scattergun. These were favored for their reliability, high close-range stopping power, and compact maneuverability in tight spaces. 4/9/2026
The Vatican rejected Ciszek's cause for beatification. Life Father Walter Joseph Ciszek, SJ, 1904-1984, was a Polish American priest and missionary in the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1963. President John F. Kennedy negotiated his release one month before being assassinated. Born in 1904 in Shenandoah, PA, to Polish immigrants, Ciszek entered the Society of Jesus in 1928. The following year, he learned that Pope Pius XI was calling on seminarians to enter a new Russian center in Rome to prepare priests for work in Russia. He was ordained in 1937. He was assigned to work in Poland. When war broke out in 1939, Ciszek was able to enter Russia with false identification papers. He worked as an unskilled laborer until June 1941 when the secret police arrested him as a suspected spy. Lubyanka Ciszek was sent to the infamous Lubyanka Prison in Moscow, where he was interrogated as a Vatican spy and sentenced to 15 years of hard labor in Siberia. Although forced to work in a Gulag coal mine, Ciszek found ways to hear confessions and say Mass. In 1955, his sentence ended early because he had surpassed his work quotas, and he was freed from the forced labor camp but forced to live in the Gulag city of Norilsk, where he worked in a chemical factory. In Norilsk, he and other priests cared for a growing parish but, before too long, the KGB threatened to arrest him if he continued. Missioned to another city, the KGB quickly shut him down again. Release In 1963, Fr. Ciszek learned that he was going home. In a release negotiated by JFK, he and an American student were returned to the United States in exchange for two Soviet agents. Syncretism Following his return, Fr. Ciszek worked at the syncretic John XXIII Center at Fordham University, now the syncretic Center for Eastern Christian Studies at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, until his death in 1984. Syncretic refers to the blending or merging of different, often contradictory, beliefs, cultures, or philosophies into a new, unified system, such as Haitian Voodoo, African + Catholic. Vatican 2 He believed that the Council's actual documents were sound but objected when fundamental Catholic teachings were questioned in its name. He concluded that many had used the Council to justify heterodoxy, beliefs at odds with established doctrine, through misinterpretation. He was thunderstruck by the indifference to religion in the West. Having suffered for the faith in a country where it was suppressed, he found it jarring to see many Americans treat faith as a mere formality that could be easily discarded. Ciszek did not participate in the theological debates of the 1960s—having been cut off from them for decades—and he remained a staunch defender of the Catholic faith, urging believers to follow God's will and accept the work of God rather than succumbing to the anti-clerical temptations of the era. Sabotage The New Order church killed his cause. Hamlet by William Shakespeare She's aware of Bernadette Soubirous. figures of speech: allusion; metaphor; simile rhetorical devices: double entendre; imagery; irony; rhyme Can you find Catholic math in one of the dresses? The boat displays the Fibonacci Sequence, uncovered by Catholic Leonardo Bonacci. He introduced the sequence to Western Europe in his 1202 book, Liber Abaci, where he used it to calculate the growth of a rabbit population. Beyond the sequence, he is responsible for introducing the Indian Arabic numeral system (0-9), replacing Roman numerals. Swift wrote and produced the track alongside Max Martin and Shellback, The Life of a Showgirl. Lyrics I heard you calling On the megaphone You wanna see me all alone As legend has it you Are quite the pyro You light the match to watch it blow And if you'd never come for me I might've drowned in the melancholy I swore my loyalty to me, myself, and I Right before you lit my sky up [lit up my sky] All that time I sat alone in my tower You were just honing your powers Now I can see it all (see it all) Late one night You dug me out of my grave and Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia Keep it one hundred On the land, the sea, the sky Pledge allegiance to your hands Your team, your vibes Don't care where the hell you been 'Cause now you're mine It's 'bout to be the sleepless night You've been dreaming of The fate of Ophelia The eldest daughter of a nobleman Ophelia lived in fantasy But love was a cold bed full of scorpions The venom stole her sanity And if you'd never come for me I might've lingered in purgatory You wrap around me like a chain, a crown, a vine Pulling me into the fire All that time I sat alone in my tower You were just honing your powers Now I can see it all (see it all) Late one night You dug me out of my grave and Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia Keep it one hundred On the land, the sea, the sky Pledge allegiance to your hands Your team, your vibes Don't care where the hell you been 'Cause now you're mine It's 'bout to be the sleepless night You've been dreaming of The fate of Ophelia 'Tis locked inside my memory And only you possess the key No longer drowning and deceived All because you came for me Locked inside my memory And only you possess the key No longer drowning and deceived All because you came for me All that time I sat alone in my tower You were just honing your powers Now I can see it all (I can see it all) Late one night You dug me out of my grave and Saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia Keep it one hundred On the land, the sea, the sky Pledge allegiance to your hands Your team, your vibes Don't care where the hell you been 'Cause now you're mine It's 'bout to be the sleepless night You've been dreaming of The fate of Ophelia You saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia Marilyn Monroe great music for a swing dance The Birth of Venus Italian: Nascita di Venere Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli 1484-1486  Updike
John Updike (1932-2009), author of Rabbit, Run, published 1960, was an antinomian WASP and closet Jew. An antinomian believes that Christians are released by grace from the obligation of observing the moral law. The last Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, published 1990, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The founder of the Pulitzer Prize, Joseph Pulitzer, was born to Jewish parents in Hungary in 1847. While he was of Magyar Jewish origin and raised in a Jewish home, he married a protestant, did not raise his children as Jews, and did not publicly identify with Judaism in later life. Pritzker Jay Robert Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, born 1965, is a Jew.
He has been a prominent voice against rising antisemitism [misspelled], often linking this work to his and his family's history, with the Holocaust, WTTW +6 (end of Gemini AI) Prevost Robert Francis Prevost, born Chicago 1955, aka Leo, is the same. I made a decision in my Jesuit high school between Rabbit, Run and The Grapes of Wrath and correctly chose the latter, the Holy Ghost at work. Don't be fooled.  Recommendation
I highly recommend this AD 1999 book, an anthology of short stories set in India and New England and written by Jhumpa Lahiri. My student brought me up to date: Urdu is a combination of Arabic, Farsi, and Punjabi, an Indo-Aryan language spoken by as many as 150 million people and in India's Punjab state. Doomscrolling (Gemini) The book is an antidote to doomscrolling, the compulsive, habitual consumption of negative news on social media, often leading to anxiety, depression, and poor sleep, widely practiced with 31% of American adults doing it daily. It is especially prevalent among Gen Z (51%) and Gen Y (46%), often driven by anxiety, boredom, and the need to feel in control. Women and people with trauma histories are also highly vulnerable. Even Gen A is doing it, leading to children who don't know how to read or do simple math. Gen Y 1981-1996 Gen Z 1997-2012 Gen A 2010-2024 Consult my Reading List. Jack London b. 1/12/1876 San Francisco d. 11/22/1916 Glen Ellen, 50 miles north, age 40 death cert: uremic poisoning following renal colic, kidney failure/stones His most famous novels are The Call of the Wild and White Fang, set in the Yukon. Published in 1909 when he was 33, Martin Eden is focused on the life, struggles, and inner world of a single man. It follows a working-class sailor's obsessive pursuit of education, fame as a writer, and high-society love, which ultimately leads to profound disillusionment and isolation. Chapter 1 1893 Sealing Voyage At age 17, London signed on to the sealing schooner Sophie Sutherland. After spending time in the Bering Sea, the ship stopped in Yokohama, where London spent time exploring the city and surrounding areas. 1904 War Correspondent London returned to Yokohama, arriving 1/25/1904 aboard the steam ship Siberia to cover the Russo-Japanese War for the Hearst syndicate. The Japanese military placed restrictions on journalists, resulting in multiple arrests and confrontations with officials. He documented the conflict before being forced to leave. Teddy Roosevelt, who visited San Francisco in 1903, had intervened. https://www.loc.gov/item/00694419/ Systemic Lupus Erythematosus
It is a chronic autoimmune disease where the immune system attacks the body's own tissues and organs, including skin, joints, kidneys, and brain. God spared Mary Flannery O'Connor by giving her that. He spared her of all the changes, for she died 1964, on the brink of an apostatic church, but he didn't spare me, baptized just three years before. He works in strange ways, don't He? "Temple of the Holy Ghost" and "Revelation" are numbers 68 and 69. Detective Jeff O'Driscoll
Summit County Utah Sheriff's Office Notice the unusual shape on his forehead, cup/chalice. George B. Severson The Jew, ABC4 Utah, has a truly diabolical name. KPCW KPCW of NPR had its federal funding slashed. https://www.kpcw.org/ Lisa Darden The mother of Richins had a female lover. https://townlift.com/2024/03/mother-of-kouri-richins-under-investigation-for-2006-death-of-her-partner/ The Indian tribe in Catholic Ernest Hemingway's short story "Indian Camp" is not explicitly named within the text, but they are understood to be Ojibwe, aka Ojibway or Chippewa. Based on his upbringing in Northern Michigan, Hemingway’s portrayal is rooted in his experiences with the Ojibwe and Ottawa tribes in that region. (source David Publishing) Ernest died at 61 from a self-inflicted gunshot. It is true that my dad killed himself in a much worse way, and you will never know how, and I loved him more. By the end of the novel I realized that the thug dreamt up was the character I loved most. |
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