Russian Literature Online

You know there’s a difference between pornography and erotica, don’t you? Think about it. We’ll get to it later.

Before I get to the purpose of sex scenes in fiction I will start with the purpose of fiction. You read fiction because you enjoy it. When you read a really good book, you are off into another world. An intimate world.

Fiction provides a degree of intimacy rarely found in real life. Where else can you read another person’s mind, discover his conscious and subconscious motives?

Humans are story-tellers. Everyone has a story to tell because everyone uses language to share visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile, and kinesthetic memories.

Everyone listens to, or reads, a well told story.

Tension makes a good story.

Now, here’s the kicker: believable tension among identifiable characters in authentic situations, no matter how imaginary, creates unforgettable stories.

Think back to a favorite novel you read as a child-one that transported you and showed you new information about human nature. Mine was “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”. I was ten or eleven. My mother saw me reading it and said, “Oh, you don’t want to read that!” I had nearly finished reading it so continued behind her back. That book taught me about sex. No one else did. It was a gentle teaching.

Perhaps that’s why I approve of sex scenes in fiction and why I write them.

Everyone has sexual feelings. How each person lives with his sexual feelings is idiosyncratic. No two people have identical attitudes toward sex, male myths to the contrary.

A sexual scene in a novel can be highly effective for characterization and theme. Memorable characters in literature, and life, for that matter, often confuse love and lust. He or she believes he is in love with someone who is ultimately all wrong for him–or her.

This confusion provides underlying tensions that enhance the plot.

Identifiable characters are created with just enough specific information such as speech inflection, body language and dialogue to make you say as you read, “I knew a guy just like that. His father was a bear.”

Or, “She shouldn’t be so uptight around men. But I would be, too, if I grew up with that grandmother.”

Put these identifiable characters in an authentic, albeit imaginary, situation and you have an unforgettable story.

As readers glimpsing the thoughts and feelings of a well-rounded character, we learn about ourselves in the privacy of our own living room. We identify with the lead characters and say, “Oh yeah.”

Shakespeare’s characters are enduring because he gave them contradictions. To this day we can watch Mercutio explode and think, I’ve felt like that. Or Hamlet struggling with his conscience because he didn’t know what to believe. Shakespeare gave his characters sexual drive as well as confusion. His sexual scenes produced on stage naturally were not as explicit as those can be in novels read in privacy

Characters make a story for me. I have fun and take great care creating my characters.

And, the difference between pornography and erotica in fiction? For pornography, I quote Lee Siegel’s fascinating essay about Norman Mailer in the New York Times Book Review January 21, 2007: “In his book about Marilyn Monroe, Norman Mailer wrote, ‘Since sex is, after all, the most special form of human communication, and the technological society is built on expanding communication in much the way capitalism was built on the expansive properties of capital and money, the perspective is toward greater promiscuity.’ If you are seeking an explanation for why pornography takes up most of the Internet, there it is.”

Pornography, like lots of money every Friday, has a happy ending even if it’s always the same, but erotica ends unhappily with longing. In both, the characters are indistinguishable.

Which remind me of a friend who wrote and published several historical romance novels. She didn’t like to write erotic scenes but the genre required one per novel. Therefore, she cut and pasted the one scene she had written and simply changed the names for all subsequent novels. It didn’t matter in that genre if the characters were indistinguishable as long as the longing came through.

© Evelyn Cole, MA, MFA, The Whole-mind Writer
http://www.write-for-wealth.com
evycole@hughes.net

Cole’s chief aim in life is to convince everyone to understand the power of the subconscious mind and synchronize it with goals of the conscious mind. Along with “Mind Nudges”, “Brainsweep” and “Your Right to Happpiness”, she has published three novels and several poems that dramatize subconscious power.

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In a few short years, the amateur digital spewing phenomenon known as blogging has become an Internet fixture and has spawned a few explosive online successes (MySpace, YouTube) and more than a few bloggers whose opinions became valued professional resources (The Drudge Report, for political news and opinion). Like so many of the good things on the web, what began as projects of individual dedication became an important addition to our social and economic fabric.

Now, the rise of podcasts has led to what may become an addition to our cultural fabric. There are a host of sites that will allow you to download audio books for a fee, as an alternative to buying the cassette or CD. The costs of these downloads aren’t any bargain compared to the audio or printed copy; you are simply spared the chore of seeking out the product in a brick-and- mortar store.

A more interesting phenomenon that has arisen in conjunction with podcast technology is the introduction of websites that provide free audio books. These books are, for the most part, classics that are in the public domain; no usage permission from author or publisher is required. Also of interest is the fact that many of these books are read by amateurs - that is to say, untrained actors or voices. There is no such thing as amateur status when it comes to consuming literature.

Some of these amateurs have become veterans in their own right. These people are volunteers solicited by the websites that provide these audio feeds and who have produced large amounts of work: one Southern California housewife has recorded more than one hundred chapters for the website Librivox. Some of the plays provided via free podcast are voiced by collections of actors - one per role.

While Librivox focuses on classics, Podiobooks.com provides serialized audio presentations of recent publications and books that have yet to be published. Their website allows you to “subscribe” to a book (for no fee) and receive a chapter a week via email. Even books that have been completed and are listed in the Podiobooks catalogue are delivered one chapter at a time. Because much of this writing is current, the site suggests that donations to authors are not out of line. Podiobooks is promoting the notion that cross-fertilization of books in both printed and spoken format will heighten interest in both.

Then there is the blog-oriented format of Dead White Males. This site is heavy on the literary reflections of its founder, provided in print. There are essays on elements of Shakespeare and other great authors, along with a blog site that allows for commentary on the essays. Incorporated into the site are a dozen podcasts ranging from modern poetry to Hardy’s Return of the Native. This site is like attending a lit seminar with no chronological limitations.

Project Gutenberg is a website founded by Michael Hart, the gentleman who claims to have invented the ebook in 1971. Those must have taken days to download. In any case, the web site has a healthy category of ebooks in multiple languages available for download. Some have been created for this website and others provided by volunteers or other websites. Project Gutenberg is an archive that claims to be the largest resource for free audiobooks on the web.

This is a sampling of sites and each of them has its own approach to the same end: providing free literature online. A laudable goal, worthy of the early anarchy that characterized the birth of the Internet.

Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate for ApolloHosting.com. She brings years of experience as a small business consultant to helping prospective clients understand the ways in which a website may benefit them both personally and professionally. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, vps hosting, and web design services to a wide range of customers. Established in 1999, Apollo prides itself on the highest levels of customer support.

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In the face of Gnosticism, which so spiritualized God into an abstract Deity detached from the world, John strongly presented the Christian doctrine of the God who created and is very much present in the world He created. John seems to go to great lengths to emphasize the pre-existence of and the real humanity of Jesus Christ.

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us. We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ. We write this to make our joy complete. 1 John 1:1-4.

James Holden notes in The Johnannine Epistles that John makes a series “of references to the Last Days, the Day of Judgement, and the coming resurrection of the believer, which are all anti-Gnostic in tendency and are at the center of his mind and a prime reason for the urgency of his attack on the heretics. The emergence of false teaching was such a desperate threat that it ignited a furious Christian conviction.”

The Johannine Epistles seem to be part of an intentional campaign to halt those who would depreciate the Johannine tradition of Christian teaching through Gnosticism. The defense of the reality of the human Jesus as the way to God and the nature of the moral struggle were two causes which were absolutely critical to defend. It was also crucial to insist, as John did, that the two could in no way be separated.

The negative assertion of the Epistles clearly shows that the heretics claim to belong to the Christian congregation were unjustified. John rigidly opposes the Gnostics who were within the Christian community and claimed to represent the “genuine” Christian faith.

The Johnannine Epistles strikes at the core of the Gnostic system that denied God as world creator and rejected, as Bultmann so adequately put it, “the Christian idea of revelation namely, the paradox that a historical event (or historical form) in the eschatological event (or form) is grounded in the historical fact that Jesus Christ has come. The Gnosticizing false teachers deny precisely that Jesus has come in the flesh.”

No one can read John’s Epistles and not “feel” his hard blows against the Gnostic idea that certain conditions have to be met in order for man to be able to come to the knowledge of God and subsequently, procure a “direct vision.” John does not bite his tongue in succinctly pointing out that knowledge of God is not a theoretical or speculative knowledge, but is rather a relationship with God, in which the one knowing is validated in his existence (and conduct) by God.

In summary, the Johannine Epistles boldly attacks the heretical teachings that were agitating the young Christian communities. Such doctrines not only undercut the foundations of the church’s inherited witness from the apostles, but it also dissolved the traditional ties with Jewish faith in a Creator God. John wanted to arrest the Gnostic persuasion by strengthening the authority of Christianity and safeguard the church against the insidious dangers of heresy.

NOTE: The intent of this article, Gnosticism and the Johannine Literature - Part 1 & 2, is to give a brief overview of the Johnannine Epistles response to Gnosticism. It is limited in scope and severely deficient in addressing the vast content found in John’s Epistle’s relating to Gnosticism.

REFERENCES:
Walter Nigg, The Heretics.
Werner Foerster, Gnosis.
Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels.
James Holden, The Johannine Epistles.
Rudolf Bultmann, The Johannine Epistles.

RECOMMENDED READING: The New Gnosticism
http://www.vow.org/archives/feminism/new_gnosticism/troubling_the_church.html

Rev. Saundra L. Washington, D.D., is an ordained clergywoman, veteran social worker, and Founder of AMEN Ministries. She is also the author of two coffee table books: Room Beneath the Snow: Poems that Preach and Negative Disturbances: Homilies that Teach which can be reviewed on her site. Her new book, Out of Deep Waters: My Grief Management Workbook, though delayed in publication, is expected to be available early 2006.

You have an open invitation to visit us at AMEN Ministries: Your Soul’s Service Station for reviewing spiritual services being offered, obtain spiritual refreshing and soul edification, get your daily dose of humor, browse our newly expanded Stop & Shop Store and to visit our prayer sanctum for quiet time with God.

Blessings to all!

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As Christianity developed and came into contact with other cultural forms, it encountered many diverse challenges. Although the theological conflict certainly resulted in a better understanding of the meaning of Christ and a clearer presentation of Christian belief, it presented a serious threat to the very existence of Christianity. The challenge was in the arena of thought and it would either “make” or “break” Christianity. Gnosticism posed such a challenge.

Gnosticism was one of several sects existing during the early life of the Christian church. It denotes the teachings of a group of first and second century deviationists who were the scorned objects of many orthodox fathers. Gnosticism claimed to be a sure way to the knowledge, hence the vision, of God. It claimed that its rites, ceremonies, prescriptions, and its path to God were divinely inspired and transmitted to the elite esoteric through a mysterious tradition. Furthermore, it claimed, in essence, that its magical formulas offered an infallible means to salvation.

Gnosticism exerted a particular attraction upon the educated and sophisticated church Christians and threatened to overwhelm the primitive communities. The church increasingly came to think of the Gnostics as dangerous opponents of which there could be no peaceful co-existence. Nigg expresses it thusly: “There was no room for both to live peacefully side by side; one group had to yield to the other, especially since the Gnostics ‘claimed to form the true pneumatic (i.e. spiritual) church.’”

As I explained in an earlier article on Gnosticism, the basic doctrine of Gnosticism was that matter is essentially evil and spirit is essentially good. Since God could not be charged with the responsibility for the evil constitution of the world, the Gnostics differentiated the supreme God from the Creator of the world. Therefore, to account for evil matter, the Gnostics evolved a doctrine of emanations from God. These emanations flowed from God and each further from Him until finally there was one so distant from Him that it could touch matter. This emanation was the creator of the world.

It is not difficult to understand why the Christian church had serious problems with this doctrine. It tended to spiritualize God into a being who could not possibly have anything to do with the world. God’s presence was not in the world and neither did He participate in the world. Christ was thought to be the superior of emanations. He was attributed the decisive role in the cosmic process.

A group of Gnostics known as Docetists held the belief that Christ’s body had only been a phantom. The true Christ, they contended, has no bodily form which is why He was able to accomplish redemption.

The Cerinthian Gnostics held that Jesus was merely a man and was not born of a virgin but was the natural born son of Mary and Joseph. They did credit Him however, with being far beyond other men in justice, wisdom and prudence. These Gnostics further believed that Christ descended upon Jesus at the baptism and then He proclaimed the unknown Father and performed miracles. Understand that for these Cerinthian Gnostics Christ was impassable and separated from Jesus again before the Passion. Jesus then suffered and was raised again, but Christ remained impassable, since He was pneumatic. Jesus Christ is thus the bearer of the call who proclaims the Father who, up until that point was unknown (Foerster).

Pagels, in his book, The Gnostic Gospels, points out that some Valentinian Gnostics “even went so far as to claim that humanity created God and so, from its own inner potential, discovered for itself the revelation of truth.”

The Gnostic belief system then, simultaneously destroyed the divinity and humanness of Jesus; a doctrine central to the Christian faith. Not only did Gnosticism deny the incarnate Christ, but their ethics was in violation of traditional church views.

One branch of Gnosticism advocated strict asceticism, the extirpation of all sensuality to be as much like Christ as possible. Sexual intercourse was absolutely forbidden. These Gnostics opposed marital relationships as well, even for the purpose of procreation. The extreme antagonism toward the body was again founded upon their view of the evil character of matter. Evil was a physical quality.

According to Werner Forester (Gnosis), the antithetical ethic, unlimited freedom from all matter, was also practiced by some Gnostics. It directly glorified pleasure as a divine phenomenon. The most perfect among the Gnostics “freely practice everything that is forbidden…For they eat food that was offered to idols with indifference, and they are the first to arrive at any festival party of the Gentiles that takes place in honor of the idol…and some, who are immoderately given over to the desires of the flesh, say that they are repaying to the flesh what belongs to the flesh, and to the spirit what belongs to the spirit.” Lust was highly exalted as the bond between all created things. Sin was to be obliterated through sexual release.

As you can probably guess, Gnosticism was a system fused with ideas from the Orient, Greek and Christian philosophy. Cerinthus was one of the early proponents of this view. It was a religious phenomenon firmly grounded in a dualism between spirit and matter. Salvation was predicated on knowledge dispensed by an emanation from the supreme God. Christ was an appearance without a real human body or nature. Jesus was a human man like any other man.

Gnosticism threatened to undermine the essential foundations of Christianity. These foundations the church was bound and determined to protect even if only to preserve the human historical Jesus.

The Epistles of John forcefully attack the Gnostics and therefore express the antagonism existing between these opponents. In Part 2 we will explore John’s strong reaction to this great threat to the Christian faith.

Rev. Saundra L. Washington, D.D., is an ordained clergywoman, veteran social worker, and Founder of AMEN Ministries. She is also the author of two coffee table books: Room Beneath the Snow: Poems that Preach and Negative Disturbances: Homilies that Teach which can be reviewed on her site. Her new book, Out of Deep Waters: My Grief Management Workbook, though delayed in publication, is expected to be available early 2006.

You have an open invitation to visit us at AMEN Ministries: Your Soul’s Service Station for reviewing spiritual services being offered, obtain spiritual refreshing and soul edification, get your daily dose of humor, browse our newly expanded Stop & Shop Store and to visit our prayer sanctum for quiet time with God.

Blessings to all!

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When we dip into the rich variety of novels, poems, and plays which constitute English Literature we are reading works which have lasted for generations, or centuries, and they have lasted because they are good. These works say something worth saying, and say it with artistry strong enough to survive while lesser works drop into obscurity.

Literature is part of our cultural heritage which is freely available to everyone, and which can enrich our lives in all kinds of ways. Once we have broken the barriers that make studying literature seem daunting, we find that literary works can be entertaining, beautiful, funny, or tragic. They can convey profundity of thought, richness of emotion, and insight into character. They take us beyond our limited experience of life to show us the lives of other people at other times. They stir us intellectually and emotionally, and deepen our understanding of our history, our society, and our own individual lives.

In great writing from the past we find the England of our ancestors, and we not only see the country and the people as they were, but we also soak up the climate of the times through the language itself, its vocabulary, grammar, and tone. We would only have to consider the writing of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Boswell, Dickens, and Samuel Beckett side by side to see how the way writers use language embodies the cultural atmosphere of their time.

Literature can also give us glimpses of much earlier ages. Glimpses of Celtic Ireland in the poetry of W. B. Yeats, or of the Romans in Shakespeare’s plays, for example, can take us in our imaginations back to the roots of our culture, and the sense of continuity and change we get from surveying our history enhances our understanding of our modern world.

Literature can enrich our experience in other ways too. London, for example, is all the more interesting a city when behind what we see today we see the London known to Dickens, Boswell and Johnson, or Shakespeare. And our feeling for nature can be deepened when a landscape calls to mind images from, say, Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy, or Ted Hughes.

The world of English literature consists, apart from anything else, of an astonishing array of characters, from the noble to the despicable - representations of people from all walks of life engaged in all kinds of activities. Through their characters great authors convey their insights into human nature, and we might find that we can better understand people we know if we recognise in them characteristics we have encountered in literature. Perhaps we see that a certain man’s behaviour resembles that of Antony in Antony and Cleopatra, or a certain woman is rather like The Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Seeing such similarities can help us to understand and accept other people.

Good works of literature are not museum pieces, preserved and studied only for historical interest. They last because they remain fresh, transcending as well as embodying the era in which they were written. Each reader reading each work is a new and unique event and the works speak to us now, telling us truths about human life which are relevant to all times.

We don’t have to read far before we find that a writer has portrayed a character who is in some way like us, confronting life-experiences in some way like our own and when we find ourselves caught up with the struggles of a character perhaps we are rehearsing the struggles to come in our own lives. And when we are moved by a poem it can enrich us by putting words to feelings which had lain dormant for lack of a way of expressing them, or been long-forgotten in the daily round of the workplace, the supermarket, the traffic jam, and the TV News.

We can gain a lot from literature in many ways, but the most rewarding experiences can come in those moments when we feel the author has communicated something personally to us, one individual to another. Such moments can help validate our personal experience at a depth which is rarely reached by everyday life or the mass media.

So why do we need to study English Literature, instead of just reading it? Well, we don’t need to, but when visiting a country for the first time it can help to have books by people who have been there before by our side.

When we start to read literature, particularly older works, we have to accept that we are not going to get the instant gratification that we have become used to from popular entertainment. We have to make an effort to accommodate to the writer’s use of language, and to appreciate the ideas he is offering. Critics can help us make that transition, and can help fill out our understanding by telling us something about the social climate in which a work was written, or about the personal circumstances of the author while he was writing it.

We are not going to enjoy every literary work, and there may be times when we find reading a critic is more interesting than reading the actual work. Reading the work of a good critic can be edifying in itself. Making the effort to shape our own thoughts into an essay is also an edifying experience, and just as good literature lasts, so do the personal benefits that we gain from studying and writing about it.

Whether we choose to study it or read it for pleasure, when we look back over our literature we are looking back over incredible richness. Not just museum pieces, but living works which we can buy in bookshops, borrow from the library, or download from the internet and read today, right now.

Ian Mackean runs the sites http://www.literature-study-online.com, which features a substantial collection of Resources and Essays, (and where his site on Short Story Writing can also be found,) and http://www.Booksmadeintomovies.com. He is the editor of The Essentials of Literature in English post-1914, ISBN 0340882689, which was published by Hodder Arnold in 2005. (When not writing about literature or short story writing he is a keen amateur photographer, and has made a site of his photography at http://www.photo-zen.com)

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As literature and writing evolve, more and more people join the successful ranks of bloggers, online article writers, and eBook authors. Are we not sure that what we are doing here today on the Internet is not omnipotent? I believe what we write on the Internet today, will in fact, be how history judges us tomorrow.

Is Blogging changing Literature and Writing in the present period? We know that online article writers are beginning to change content on the Internet and that people spend as much time on the Internet as they do reading newspapers and watch TV combined now.

Some might believe as others have said in the past that “what we say here today will be forgotten,” but will it? And will those who played a part in making history in cyber space be the ones who literally changed the face and the future of the written human culture? What say you?

The answer is indeed left for the historians and the entrepreneurial victors of these Internet venues and yet we are well on our way to making that history a reality with our own participation on Blogs, online article sites and content writing.

With this incredible responsibility before us; we must commit thinking time to the cause and understand the importance of this cross-roads in designing the future on the Internet. Let’s make a difference!

http://www.american.edu/lfs/tesol/In%20Press%20Paper–Future%20of%20Written%20Culture.pdf

I certainly hope this article is of interest and that is has propelled thought. The goal is simple; to help you in your quest to be the best in 2007. I thank you for reading my many articles on diverse subjects, which interest you.

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is a guest writer for Our Spokane Magazine in Spokane, Washington

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We have much literature out there that gives a record of our world’s spirit, the problems and the individuals that merge with the panorama of our sick societies. These writers of words I talk about, explore the syndrome and consequences of a wretched world, whatever remedy they come up with will not be good enough, perhaps they are more the cause than the cure, so it would seem; impulsive writers today, are no different than yesterday, as will be tomorrow. All they can do is apologize for their dangerous fragmented conflicting statements and actions. Sensualists, sensationalists, they dig deep for the breaking down of our language, in a world filled with narrations, it is not hard to do.

People, places and actions, footnotes and drugs, projections and the human conditions, they all continue unchanged. Perhaps we are being tickled too much.

Gossip, too many pronouns, we are all foreigners on this planet; we’ve come from someplace else—believe it or not. Yet, we await our fix, and forgo the actions needed to put things in order—all we got are flat statements of external events…!

We have a civilization with angry eyes, living on the murky shore, condemned to exile on this earth, to dreams and ugly riots, and gutter criticism. We see in so many poems—this kind of writing; the crippled art of modern poetry, ravaged scenes; oh, it’s perhaps all true, but must we relive it, can our stomachs hold it in—how long? It gives us dreary nights, let’s find beauty in literature, and perhaps we will find beauty in life.