Secrecy « Writing Privacy

Posts Tagged 'Secrecy'

Confidential

Published January 21, 2012 Literature , research , Writing 2 Comments
Tags: Alphaville, Andrew Marvell, Facebook, Literature, Poetry, Privacy, Secrecy, Self-Confidence, Sir Thomas Fairfax, Solitude

How much can you put yourself into the mind of another individual? It’s not a trick question: though I ask it a lot, I seem to do it a lot too.

My work on Marvell and Private Lives took up most of 2011, and it’s been a wonderful introspective process because the way I’ve symbiotically linked our biographies together has given me license to think as deeply and darkly as I please.

But now, just as I come to wrap this up, there’s something quite subtle which doesn’t add up.

Marvell almost always strikes the reader as the shy, demure sort. Occasionally women are abruptly visible, but otherwise they are teasingly distant, obscured, or absent. He weaves threads of complicated desire behind fastastical themes and layers of honeycombed language.

But perhaps that’s just his writing. After all, his publishing history is thin, and there’s little sign that Marvell placed a great deal of value on the majority of his own poems. Perhaps he’s even embarrassed by them. Why would that be?

Continue reading ‘Confidential’

Agency: Too Much Left Unsaid

Published December 17, 2011 Leicester , Literature , research Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Early Modern, Literature, Poetry, Print Culture, Privacy, Secrecy

What is said, matters. How it is said, matters. To whom it is said, matters. When it is said, matters.

The little nuances of our communication are more intricate and powerful than we often care to believe. How much value do we place on the words ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’? When does ‘never’ mean never? Why does one person’s way of speaking catch our imagination in a different way to another?

After the Fact

I’ve had the privilege of hearing the inspiring Tom Lockwood twice before: at the British Milton Seminar in 2008, and at his Chatterton Lecture on John Donne in 2009 (I’m heard 67 minutes in). His recent presentation at Leicester’s Early Modern Seminar on ‘agency’ presented a particular conundrum which is encountered – as often happens – in study and life combined.

What agency do words have after the fact? If something is said too late, does it matter that it was said at all? What if something is not said, or revealed too late?

Continue reading ‘Agency: Too Much Left Unsaid’

The Invisible Self

Published December 2, 2011 Edinburgh , Literature 3 Comments
Tags: Edinburgh, Friendship, Poetry, Privacy, Psychology, Secrecy, Self-Confidence, Self-Discipline

As a child, I remember keeping two football posters for any length of time. One was Chris Waddle at Sheffield Wednesday, the other was Gary Speed at Leeds.

Sad times. I lament saying that when encountering the headline ‘Gary Speed found dead’, I knew what the cause would be.

Removing the football side of this story, there was a universally liked and respected individual (which is a real challenge in football), with talent, good looks, a wonderful family. Everyone spoke highly of him, admired his energy, and said how happy he always seemed.

A life, alas, defined by its too-perfect happiness. It’s not a new phenomenon to believe that the happiest people are often the most unstable, and there’s sociological suggestions that the happiest states have the highest suicide rates.

Perfect happiness is a symptom. It’s the perfect mask to the secret invisible self. Continue reading ‘The Invisible Self’

‘To His Coy Mistress’? To Her Coy Master

Published July 18, 2011 Literature , research 1 Comment
Tags: Alcohol, Andrew Marvell, Autobiography, English Civil War, John Donne, Literature, Nigel Smith, Oscar Wilde, Poetry, Privacy, Psychology, Secrecy, Self-Confidence

This last week, so spoilt by social activity, the guards slipped and I revealed far too much. Now I must deal with the inner consequences of opening my mouth and letting fingers run too liberally across the keyboard. There are two ways this can go: either rein it back in and keep up pretences, or try to absolve it from the system. Wherever this takes me, then…

Parallel Lines

About 18 months ago, I joked that one of the most irrevocable traces of Andrew Marvell’s life was still rather unfamiliar to me. Now, I daresay, that has changed. In fact, ‘exalting the muse’ might be a useful description. The parallels only ever seem to run deeper…

"With great admiration, and in friendship, and thinking of the next Marvellians"

What most reviews of Nigel Smith’s new Andrew Marvell biography have not addressed is his controversial method of using the poems as evidence in chronological areas of best-fit. It’s brave and highly worthwhile, and a point worth raising because personal engagement with the poet and his troubled private reflections necessarily tempt us into handling evidence differently.

But how differently? Continue reading ‘‘To His Coy Mistress’? To Her Coy Master’

Privacy and Parliamentary Privilege

Published June 14, 2011 Literature , Politics Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Censorship, Early Modern, English Civil War, English Revolution, Literature, Politics, Privacy, Public Sphere, Richard Lovelace, Secrecy, Seventeenth Century, Speech-Acts

Parliament in 1647

This recent period has been plagued with privacy issues, the biggest of which, no doubt, has been the issue of super-injunctions.

While it has been good from a ‘subject branding’ perspective to have been asked about this, to be blunt, I simply couldn’t have cared less. About the surface matter, at least. Footballers and their deviance is nothing new. Nor does it matter to the outside world other than as hot gossip. So little of the intrusiveness of private lives gleefully splayed across front pages can be claimed to have significant public interest.

More interesting is the legal implications when thousands of people have denounced privacy laws by flouting collectively. Continue reading ‘Privacy and Parliamentary Privilege’

“Finders Keepers, holder Seekers hidden Secrets”: Writing in Cryptics

Published May 29, 2011 Knightmare , Literature 1 Comment
Tags: Knightmare, Literature, Poetry, Privacy, Psychology, Public Sphere, Secrecy, Self-Confidence, Speech-Acts, Thomas Wyatt

Finders Keepers, Knightmare S7

Most of us are guilty of this at some point: writing in cryptics. Why do we do it? Why express ourselves in terms that are not meant to be understood? Is it, perhaps, a deep subconscious desire to be public with our privacy? Is it more about reaching out, or being reached out to?

Aside from studying a poet forever burying his truth beneath layers of perplexity (if we are ever meant to find it at all), what interests me is the human tendency to overcomplicate problems, either out of shame, embarrassment or in trying to rescue some moral dignity.

Scenario: person A is in a relationship but goes to spend the day with person B, whom they have always had an attraction to. Person A ends the day feeling sheepish, unsettled and awkward, and explains it off as ‘it’s complicated’. It’s not complicated at all, but a collection of guilt and other unpleasant sensations that determines a distinctly defensive response. The majority of us will tie situations in knots to avoid a palpably and unescapably naked truth.

Continue reading ‘“Finders Keepers, holder Seekers hidden Secrets”: Writing in Cryptics’

An MP Turning Down a Secret Bribe? Bipolar Privacy

Published January 22, 2011 Literature , Politics , research 1 Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Early Modern, Literature, MPs' Expenses, Nigel Smith, Politics, Privacy, Restoration, Secrecy, Seventeenth Century

There are two sides to privacy: the bright side and the dark side. It is often politics which brings these to the fore. In 2009, the scandal surrounding MPs expenses showed the ugly art of secrecy breeding secrecy, and the ramifications are only now beginning to take effect.

Yet key public figures constantly find themselves involved with, or victim of, private and secretive practices. The prime minister’s communications chief, Andy Coulson, still suspected by many of complicity in secret phone-tapping, has just resigned. As has shadow chancellor Alan Johnson, citing private issues, after a member of his security team was alleged to have had an affair with his wife.

Mr Brightside

Andrew Marvell was MP elect for Hull for almost two decades from 1659. Interestingly, his inclination towards secrecy and privacy has rarely complicated the view of him as an honest, dedicated, and incorruptible public servant. And I was pleased to recently stumble across an anecdote about Marvell from the mid-eighteenth century that celebrates (as well we might today) the value of an honest politician. It relates to expenses, no less!

Continue reading ‘An MP Turning Down a Secret Bribe? Bipolar Privacy’

A Green Thought: Private Minds

Published January 10, 2011 Literature , research , Writing 4 Comments
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Body Dysmorphic Disorder, Dorian Gray, Dysmorphophobia, Literature, Oscar Wilde, Privacy, research, Secrecy, Self-Confidence, Solitude, Writing

It is a great shame that it is so difficult to make personal experience count in professional or academic writing.

The first time I attempted genuine research was looking at Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray through the lens of dysmorphophobia, or body dysmorphic disorder. Of course, it wasn’t random reading of somatoform disorder textbooks that brought this match to my attention, but personal experience. And, to be honest, personal experience does not always match what textbooks or research papers have to say.

There’s a scene where Dorian’s portrait is revealed, and Dorian is momentarily ecstatic with it, then inexplicably miserable. It’s one of many emotional episodes that seem so tangibly familiar to me, yet so difficult to map credibly and analytically into academic writing. This is probably why, despite being my most unique piece of work, it has never become anything more than a reference in a personal newspaper article on the subject of BDD.

The same scenario surfaces for Andrew Marvell. Continue reading ‘A Green Thought: Private Minds’

Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010

Published December 31, 2010 Literature , Music 12 Comments
Tags: Alphaville, dilemma, Elegy, Identity, Literature, Music, Privacy, Ryan Farish, Secrecy, Sleepthief, T.S. Eliot

2010 has been, it seems, a sad year for many people. My own sad story has been punctuated with glimpses of light. End-of-year epilogues are so hard to write, but in the light of some illuminating and wistful hopes and dreams that have consumed me recently, I’d like to share some meaningful pieces.

I can be jealously protective of some of my favourite hidden treasures. It is part of what makes things appealing to me. But their allusions are telling, and stories can be built around them.

Continue reading ‘Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010′

Public Hypocrites and Private Anger

Published December 21, 2010 Politics , research Leave a Comment
Tags: Andrew Marvell, Autobiography, Early Modern, English Civil War, English Revolution, Human Nature, Hypocrisy, Interregnum, Kingship, Literature, Marchamont Nedham, Nigel Smith, Politics, Print Culture, Privacy, Psychology, Public Sphere, research, Secrecy, Self-Promotion, Seventeenth Century, Sleepthief, Thomas May

What grates so much about hypocrisy? Is it observing people changing their mind? Breaking promises? Breaking trust?

To speak in one way and act in another is something almost all of us do. We would be hypocrites ourselves to deny it. Often, it is a tool of diplomacy, of fitting in, even of subjugating oneself. Just like the well-meaning white lie…

Yet, distinct from the more innocent ‘forgetfulness’ or the more calculated and sinister ‘betrayal’, which often uses secrecy as its veil, hypocrisy often bites because it is flagrantly public; it is exuded through public channels, and knowledge reaches us that way. Inconsistencies and reversals are paraded in disregard of those with whom bonds were formed through the old values now abandoned. Worse still is when the hypocrisy seems fuelled precisely by this form of conquest and deliberately targets those left behind, the victims.

Continue reading ‘Public Hypocrites and Private Anger’

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	KaM on Shadow Seasons: An Epilogue,…
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Writing Privacy

Posts Tagged 'Secrecy'

Confidential