One pastime I occasionally return to is looking up people
from one's past on Google to see if I can find where they are now, and doing
what. It's more easily done with men than women, sadly, because they are less
likely to have changed their name.
Finding someone can be gratifying if they seem to have done
well- however that may be judged- and in one or two cases I've got in touch
with them, or others with me. But it can also be very grim.
LinkedIn is a site where professionals post CV's to
advertise their talents to prospective employers, or for the sake of
'networking'. Last week I found a contemporary from Lancaster University Lancaster
a passion for process governance,
and I don't know if
I've ever read a more depressing phrase.
A couple of years ago
I found someone from my class at school, and a star pupil, who became a
trainer passionate about including games, exercises and
problem solving in any learning environment.
I hope this passion
for passion is a passing fashion because to one outside of that corporate
self-advertising environment, it all looks transparently like an exercise in
stock phrase-making that renders all its claims meaningless. It looks like
satire although you know it isn't but one assumes such profiles are what is
required, that industry takes them at their word and they are successful in
achieving what they set out to achieve because otherwise the first attempts at
them would have been laughed out of court and nobody would have written such
tripe again.
Where's the irony, the ambiguity, the self-deprecation.
However, another
computer-based pastime I indulge in more regularly is Sitemeter, which monitors
visitors to this website. It doesn't tell me who you are but claims to identify
the area the reader is in, how long they spent looking at how many pages and which
page they arrived at and left from. It might also say from where the reader was
referred here. Last week, someone in Australia
Library Webs: an
extensive Internet library which contains reliable websites from educational,
government and commercial establishments, including primary sources,
transcripts, videos, interactive websites, newspaper and magazine articles,
maps, images and statistics.
So I'm delighted, and
a little bit overawed, to be able to claim this website is a 'reliable,
educational establishment'.
But the difference is that they said it, not me. Only
unsolicited endorsements count and certainly not composite careerist lists of
off-the-peg buzzwords.
--
Recent reading has included Zwingli by G.R.Potter, Scenes
from Clerical Life by George Eliot and, most lately, William Tyndale, If God
Spare My Life by Brian Moynihan. The Zwingli had to be left halfway through as
my date with George Eliot became more pressing but it could well be taken up
again later.
All three books are about religious doctrine, to an
overwhelming or slightly lesser extent.
The Tyndale book shows how Wycliffe and Tyndale were a
hundred years ahead of Luther and Zwingli in their reforming zeal while George
Eliot's stories are set at a later time when an evangelical movement challenged
an established hegemony that was rather taking its position for granted.
But, reading the three books so closely together, it almost
seemed as if all history could be reduced to a simplistic equation based on
that idea and perhaps that is what Marx did. I don't really read books to
establish or learn about such theories. I much prefer to be entertained.
There is not much funny about burning people but the gap of
600 years since the start of the Reformation somehow makes it less horrific
than it happening today. It is very difficult to take sides because the
principle at stake is which side gets closer to the word of God but one can
sympathize with some figures more than others. However, the level of debate between Sir Thomas More and Tyndale is a joyful battery of the most heartfelt and hideous name-calling that leaves the small issues of crucial translations of words from the Hebrew, rather than the Latin, looking like mere footnotes. The frenzy of the debate between reform and
orthodoxy was such that once guilt was established, appeals and suspended
sentences were out of the question. The only suspended sentence was that one
would be hung but in one case, where the culprit was guilty of treason as well
as heresy, they were hung while a fire was lit beneath them. Hung for treason
and burn for heresy at the same time. It was comprehensive retribution if
nothing else.
But my favourite, so far, is the pope who sold his papal
tiara to pay off gambling debts.
Bishop John Hooper, of Gloucester (probably the one to whom
there is a monument outside the cathedral but it doesn't say that here)
surveyed his 311 clergy and found that 9 priests didn't know there were 10
commandments, most thought they were in the Old Testament and 168 didn't know
what they were. 10 couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer and 30 didn't know who was
its author (despite the clue in the title?), but
Many were incapable of reading their missals. The rest
(Tyndale said) were only interested in two books. One was a manual of female
anatomy, over which they would 'pore night and day' with the excuse it was 'all to teach the
midwives':
It's not the minutiae
of the debate on transubstantiation that fascinates but the insight into the
culture, how really not very long ago it was, how far we flatter ourselves
thinking that we've come so far since, wondering if history is linear and
progresses for the better or if it is cyclic and revisits old madness and, out
of all the things we care about or believe in now, which will seem very odd
indeed to future generations.
Well, there's being passionate about 'process governance'
for a start.
--
But all for all my claims to not being an over-achiever in
business, I still have to find things to spend small bonus awards on and so
this week bought a DVD player. I've not been able to watch my Trumpton or
Camberwick Green DVD's for some time now. I also have a few films with
Depardieu and Emmanuelle Beart in them.
And so, inevitably, I spent some time trying to find other
things to buy. There's not much I want, I'm glad to say, and I'm not convinced
the new facility is going to get much use after a first few usages. Obviously,
a few more French films. Quand J'etais Chanteur is only a couple of quid so one
can't not have that but one of the few remaining targets will be Derek Nimmo's
finest hour in All Gas and Gaiters.
I just don't seem to be interested in films.