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Secret

illicit - clandestine - hidden - occult - privacy - secret history - secret museum - sub rosa

Secrecy

Secrecy is the practice of hiding information from others. That which is kept hidden is known as the secret. Secrecy is often controversial. Many people claim that, at least in some situations, it is better for everyone if everyone knows all the facts—there should be no secrets. Closely allied—perhaps synonymous—notions of confidentiality and privacy are often considered virtues (One should keep confidences and respect privacy.) --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret [Nov 2005]

Transparency

In sociology, politics, ethics, law, economics, business, management, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is transparent if all information about it is freely available. Thus when courts of law admit the public, when fluctuating prices in financial markets are published in newspapers, those processes are transparent; when military authorities classify their plans as secret, transparency is absent. This can be seen as either positive or negative; positive, because it can increase national security, negative, because it can lead to secrecy and even a military dictatorship.

Some organisations and networks, for example, Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux community and Indymedia, insist that not only the ordinary information of interest to the community is made freely available, but that all (or nearly all) meta-levels of organising and decision-making are themselves also published. This is known as radical transparency. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_%28humanities%29 [Jun 2005]

Radical transparency
Radical transparency is a management method where nearly all decision making is carried out publicly.

All draft documents, all arguments for and against a proposal, the decisions about the decision making process itself, and all final decisions, are made publicly and remain publicly archived.

The only exceptions to full transparency include data related to personal security or passwords or keys necessary for physical access required to carry out publicly negotiated decisions. Any technical actions which are perceived to be controversial or political are considered to lack legitimacy until a clear, radically transparent decision has been made concerning them. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency [Jun 2005]

see also: internet - politics - transparency

Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century - Greil Marcus

    Lipstick Traces, a Secret History of 20th Century - Greil Marcus [Amazon.com] ... In the 1989 ‘Lipstick Traces - A Secret History of the Twentieth Century’ Greil Marcus traces a subliminal trajectory where nearly-invisible connections arc across punk, the Situationists of 1968, Dada in 1916, the Enrages of the French Revolution and heretical millenarianism in medieval times. He isn’t describing the direct causal link of past and present but suggesting a more opaque entanglement. “Is history simply a matter of events that leave behind those things that can be weighed and measured - new institutions, new maps, new rulers - or is it also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?....If the language they are speaking, the impulse they are voicing, has it’s own history, might it not tell a very different story from the one we’ve been hearing all our lives?”

Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing by Ian McCormick (Editor)

  • Secret Sexualities: A Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Century Writing by Ian McCormick (Editor) [Amazon US]
    "...guaranteed to keep the reader turning the pages to see what comes next..and..the selectons are painstakingly documented and a thoughtful, well-written introductoin to each section is provided as well." --D.C. Culberston, Baltimore Alternative

    Ian McCormick is a Senior Lecturer at Nene College, England. --About the Author

    A groundbreaking, comprehensive study of lesbian and gay culture from 1620-1785, Secret Sexualities collects for the first time a broad range of rare primary documents from the Renaissance. --Amazon.com

    My Secret Life: An Erotic Diary of Victorian London - James R. Kincaid

    My Secret Life: An Erotic Diary of Victorian London - James R. Kincaid [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

    A memoir by an adventurous Victorian Londoner chronicles his precocious childhood sexuality through the end of his ""amatory career,"" during which he engaged in hundreds of romantic interludes with lovers from all walks of life. Reprint. --Ingram At an early age, the author of this scintillating memoir began keeping a diary of his sexual adventures. Representing more than 40 years, his erotic diary uncovers the secret side of Victorian England--the sensual experiments that made 19th-century Britain far more indulgent than history claims. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. --Book Description

    The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (1987) - Walter Kendrick

  • The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (1987) - Walter Kendrick [amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
    Village Voice editor Kendrick (The Novel Machine) goes back to the erotic murals of ancient Pompeii and forward to the recent presidential commissions on pornography to demonstrate how public attitudes toward pornography and censorship have changed. PW noted that this is a "well-researched, nontitillating study of the phenomenon." -- Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

    Walter Kendrick traces the relatively recent concept of pornography - the word was not coined until the late 18th century - which became a public issue once the printing press gave ordinary people access to the erotica of the Greeks and Romans, the art and literature of the French enlightenment, and the poems of the Earl of Rochester and John Cleland's Fanny Hill. From the secret museums to the pornography trials of Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterly's Lover, to Mapplethorpe, cable TV, and the Internet, Kendrick explores how conceptions of pornography relate to issues of freedom of expression and censorship. --amazon.com

    The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (2001) - Ian Gibson

    The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee (2001) - Ian Gibson [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

    The life and times of a Victorian gentleman of irrepressible curiosity-and shockingly repressed desire. Henry Spencer Ashb ee (1884-1900) was a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman, a family man who counted among his many friends the celebrated adventurer Sir Ric hard Francis Burton. But he was a gentleman with a secret-one so delicious that he rented a separate apartment to contain it. Within the well-appointed chambers of Gray's Inn, Ashbee concealed an astonishingly vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong. Ian Gibson, the acclaimed biographer of Lorca and Dal, now turns his attention to the hitherto little-known Ashb ee, a man who happily supported his wife and four children but spent his spare time meticulously cat aloguing such risqutitles as Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving and The Marchioness's Amorous Pastimes. And with exclusive access to Ashbee's diaries and his family's archives, Gibson has uncovered evidence that Ashbee may himself have been the author of the notorious My Secret Life-the "true" autobiography of an unnamed Victorian gentleman and his sexual adventures. With his celebrated touch for evoking both his subject and his subject's era, Gibson has created a telling and provocative portrait of a fascinating character and the no less intriguing age that made him possible. --Synopsis via Amazon.com

    About the Author
    Ian Gibson lives in a village near Granada, Spain. His Federico García Lorca: A Life won numerous awards and was named a best book of the year by the New York Times and the Boston Globe.

    The life and times of a Victorian gentleman of irrepressible curiosity-and shockingly repressed desire.

    Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900) was a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman, a family man who counted among his many friends the celebrated adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. But he was a gentleman with a secret-one so delicious that he rented a separate apartment to contain it. Within the well-appointed chambers of Gray's Inn, Ashbee concealed an astonishingly vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong. --Book Description via Amazon.com

    Ian Gibson, the acclaimed biographer of Lorca and Dalí, now turns his attention to the hitherto little-known Ashbee, a man who happily supported his wife and four children but spent his spare time meticulously cataloguing such risqué titles as Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving and The Marchioness's Amorous Pastimes. And with exclusive access to Ashbee's diaries and his family's archives, Gibson has uncovered evidence that Ashbee may himself have been the author of the notorious My Secret Life-the "true" autobiography of an unnamed Victorian gentleman and his sexual adventures. With his celebrated touch for evoking both his subject and his subject's era, Gibson has created a telling and provocative portrait of a fascinating character and the no less intriguing age that made him possible

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