About Diana and Rachael and Caitlin

I’m really looking forward to reading Rachael Stirling’s book about her glorious, brilliant mum, but I’m not sure I understand why the name of The Woman Who Thinks The Book Is Really Great is approximately four times bigger than the name of The Woman Who Actually Wrote The Bloody Thing.

About actors’ names

I chanced upon an enjoyable play this afternoon, about an (invented) encounter between Syd Barrett, leader of Pink Floyd before they got boring, and EM Forster, a novelist now better known for the spate of movie adaptations of his works that erupted in the 1980s/90s than for the books themselves. It wasn’t an entirely implausible meeting, since they both lived in Cambridge at the same time, but the connection was more how they responded the end of their period of creative genius. Forster settled into an amiable semi-retirement in King’s College; Barrett slipped into mental ill health from which he never fully recovered.

But the aspect of the play that really tickled me was the casting, or more specifically the names of the actors, which felt deliciously appropriate to the characters. “Simon Russell Beale” might well have been a character in one of Forster’s books, perhaps a first draft for the Reverend Arthur Beebe in A Room With a View. And “Tyger Drew-Honey” is surely a Blakean rant, chorus to an outtake from The Madcap Laughs. And if not, it should be.

PS: If you haven’t seen it, another encounter between Syd and the old guard, and one that actually happened:

About Alexa

You don’t choose your name but it can shape you, not necessarily in a good way. When I was at school, and for years after, people thought it was hilarious that I shared a forename with the central character (played by Ronnie Corbett) in the inexplicably popular sitcom Sorry! and the phrase “Language, Timothy!” would follow me down many a corridor. Now parents of children called Alexa are calling on Amazon to replace the brand identity of its digital assistant with “a non-human name”, because their kids are being teased. Which sounds sensible – until you ask what, in an interconnected, multi-lingual, multi-cultural world, a non-human name really is. Pretty much any combination of syllables can be used to name a human somewhere in the world (although not so much in New Zealand), so protecting little Alexa will necessitate dumping on some other poor kid. I bet they call it Timothy...

About the Tollemache-Tollemaches

Some people think I’m in possession of a good memory but in reality it’s always been pretty flawed, and is getting worse. I was never good at useful stuff like revising for exams, or learning lines for plays, or recalling birthdays. But other stuff, pointless stuff, adheres when I don’t even ask it to.

An example: at a very early age, I read in an old copy of the Guinness Book of Records that the longest surname was borne by one Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache and without any conscious effort I’ve remembered that name for more than four decades. When I went to a secondary school with delusions of grandeur, I discovered that there was a Major-General Sir Humphry Tollemache, Bt, on the board of governors, a name that would have sounded gloriously over-the-top in any other context, but I always assumed he was one of the provincial also-rans of the family. (“No, he’s one of the single-barrelled ones. We send him a Christmas card, but that’s all.”)

Sadly, I recently became aware that Leone’s record was something of a dud; in fact, Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache’s surname was merely the relatively succinct Tollemache-Tollemache and not, as the McWhirters asserted, Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. (Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet were just extra forenames.) However, to make up for that, I discovered that he had a brother with an even better name: Lyulph Ydwallo Odin Nestor Egbert Lyonel Toedmag Hugh Erchenwyne Saxon Esa Cromwell Orma Nevill Dysart Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache. Which is lovely, but for some reason, it’s not sticking.

PS: And as I wrote the above, I remembered the case of Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfe­schlegel­stein­hausen­berger­dorff­welche­vor­altern­waren­gewissen­haft­schafers­wessen­schafe­waren­wohl­gepflege­und­sorg­faltig­keit­be­schutzen­vor­an­greifen­durch­ihr­raub­gierig­feinde­welche­vor­altern­zwolf­hundert­tausend­jah­res­voran­die­er­scheinen­von­der­erste­erde­mensch­der­raum­schiff­genacht­mit­tung­stein­und­sieben­iridium­elek­trisch­motors­ge­brauch­licht­als­sein­ur­sprung­von­kraft­ge­start­sein­lange­fahrt­hin­zwischen­stern­artig­raum­auf­der­suchen­nach­bar­schaft­der­stern­welche­ge­habt­be­wohn­bar­planeten­kreise­drehen­sich­und­wo­hin­der­neue­rasse­von­ver­stand­ig­mensch­lich­keit­konnte­fort­pflanzen­und­sicher­freuen­an­lebens­lang­lich­freude­und­ru­he­mit­nicht­ein­furcht­vor­an­greifen­vor­anderer­intelligent­ge­schopfs­von­hin­zwischen­stern­art­ig­raum Sr, who made the poor old Tollemache-Tollemaches look rather amateurish. And I remembered that I did actually try to memorise his name, but never managed it.

About the Earl of Rocksavage

There may or may not be a rumour that the Duchess of Cambridge (the one who’s married to the bald one, not the one who’s married to the ginger one, who people hate because they’re racist, I think) has had a falling-out with someone I’d never heard of until a couple of days ago.

She’s called Sarah Hanbury in real life, apparently, but in the weird neverwhere where this sort of thing matters, she’s known as the Marchioness of Cholmondeley (pronounced “Chumley”, obviously), which is less a title, more a disreputable pub in Soho that puts on bad drag acts on Thursdays.

Of rather more interest is her husband, who’s called David (so far, so dull), an Old Etonian (fancy!) and the Marquess of Cholmondeley (see pronunciation note above), but also the Lord Great Chamberlain of England, which I assume means that one of his ancestors was tasked with wiping George II’s bottom or suchlike. Even better, before his accession to that title, he was called the Earl of Rocksavage, which just has to be one of David Bowie’s more fleeting alter egos, probably less cool than the Thin White Duke but far, far better than Screaming Lord Byron. Just imagine swaggering around with that title in your teens and twenties, only to be informed, not only that your dad’s dead, but you’ve got a new, very silly name that you’ll have to spell out for people for the rest of your life. And that your 15 minutes of fame come when your wife has, or hasn’t had a row with someone that racist royalists prefer to the other one.

Never mind, at least they’re happy.

About Leonardo

If you’re going to publish a book called The Death of Expertise, bemoaning the lack of respect accorded to people who actually know stuff, maybe it’s not such a great idea, on only the second page of the preface, to refer to the man who painted the Mona Lisa as “Da Vinci”, as if that were his surname.

PS: It seems to be catching. Although it’s only the banal charlatan Jeff Koons, so, whatever.

Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof and all that that entails

I had a minor difference of opinion a few hours ago (on Twitter, so it doesn’t really count) about certain aspects of the media’s response to the death of Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof. My main beef was with this BBC article, which described her as “Writer and TV presenter Peaches Geldof”. Neither of these attributes is inaccurate but they are slightly misleading as to the reason she was a source of endless fascination to the media. She was of course famous in the first instance because both her parents were famous: their relationship and its public unravelling, lurching from tawdry farce to squalid tragedy, inevitably pitched her into the public eye, even if she only occupied a supporting role in the early days. Once that was done, she was essentially famous because she was famous. Yes, she wrote things, yes she presented TV things but when someone admonished me – “that was her job. That’s how she should be remembered” – I think a point may have been missed. And yes, as if it’s really necessary to say it, the whole business is unutterably sad and while we gawp and some of us shed a few vicarious tears, other people are grieving, really grieving, for a mother, a wife, a daughter, a sister. But none of those job descriptions showed up in the headlines either. Of course there’s a strong element of de mortuis in people’s sensitivities, but I wonder how many people are scrabbling through their own digital footprints trying to erase any negative comments they may have made about Ms Geldof and her various adolescent idiocies. The irresistible comparison is with Princess Diana: oh, if Twitter had been around in 1997...

In The Telegraph, Bryony Gordon attempts to defend Geldof’s reputation as a writer (she had a column for the paper when she was 14 years old) but unfortunately the passages she quotes rather have the opposite effect, focusing as they do on her solipsism, in particular the joys and pains of having a peculiar name. Fair enough, she did write (“She wrote. Therefore she was A WRITER,” as another of her online defenders put it, which would imply that everyone on Twitter is A WRITER as well) but ultimately she wrote about being who she was, which is why she got the job in the first place: Gordon does acknowledge “obvious accusations of nepotism” without ever really deciding whether they might have been justified. The Mail describes her as a “socialite” and that seems to fit the bill rather better.

It’s the name that dogged her whole life: not just the surname but the whole “Honeyblossom” thing, the whimsical kitsch that defined the criteria for the labels that famous people are now expected to apply to their offspring. When I heard the news of her death, I immediately tried to remember which of her siblings had the middle name “Frou Frou” before I realised that it’s actually a character in the Celeb strip cartoon in Private Eye. Of course, that doesn’t mean that a daft monicker necessarily guarantees a trajectory of fame, debauchery and an early demise: her own sister, Fifi Trixibelle, has apparently managed to bypass all that. Peaches embraced it and then passed on the curse/blessing to her own children, Astala Dylan Willow and Phaedra Bloom Forever. Ultimately, Peaches’s death made the news not because she was a writer, not because she was a TV presenter, not even particularly because her parents were who they were: people are interested because she was called Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof and that doesn’t require any further qualification. She became A WRITER the moment she first signed her name.

PS: Katie Hopkins (someone else whose obituaries will include some negotiable job descriptions) gets it in the neck for thinking that the probity of the nation’s legislators is more important than the death of someone with whom she had a row on telly a few weeks ago. I have little time for Ms Hopkins, who is either genuinely vile or she just makes money from pretending to be so, but in this case I’ve got a very modest dash of sympathy for her.

PPS: Tanya Gold on Peaches’s digital death.

In praise of Thavolia Glymph

I’ve been kicking around a few ideas for a novel recently. It’s not exactly a work of naturalism, seeing as how it’s set in an imaginary island state that includes components of about six Asian cities, and I want some of the names to reflect that disconnected oddness. So far I’ve got a magazine publisher called Valpolicella Wang and a gay chef, Reinhardt Funt, neither of which entirely satisfy. I’m always impressed by fiction writers who get the names of their characters dead right, implying all the appropriate tropes of background and personality without seeming to try too hard. The trick is to be odd but not entirely implausible and of course, very few pitch every name right every time; Dickens and Waugh are masters of the game but for every Wilkins Micawber or Margot Beste-Chetwynde there’s a Georgiana Podsnap and a Miles Malpractice, which are just silly.

More recent exponents of the art are Kurt Vonnegut (who gave us Kilgore Trout, Montana Wildhack and Valencia Merble but was probably trying too hard when he created Isadore Raspberry-19 Cohen) and Thomas Pynchon, responsible for Oedipa Maas, Brock Vond and Laszlo Jamf. You can just about imagine someone bearing one of those names in real life but the chances are that nobody actually does, which is handy if you want your characters to do something really horrid without their namesakes taking legal action. I speak as someone whose name has twice been appropriated in the cause of fiction, once in a Doctor Who novel, then in a Commando comic, in neither case applied to characters who committed any atrocities as far as I recall. But then my name is just very slightly out of the ordinary. The only time I’ve known it to provoke more than a flicker of reaction came the first time I visited the United States. “Foot-man?” sneered the man checking my passport. “What sort of a name is that?” “US Immigration?” I responded, reading the badge on his uniform. “What sort of a name is that?” Except I didn’t of course, because I was 17 and a bit scared.

So for a name to work, it has to be a bit odder than Tim Footman, but not to the point of outright goofiness. I’d have been really proud if I’d concocted a character called Thavolia Glymph. I mean, what a name; such mouthfeel. Each part could stand alone. Thavolia, I’m thinking, is some imaginary princedom, on the border between Ruritania and Shangri-La. And Glymph? A glum nymph? But it’s when they come together that the magic really happens. As I type the letters, a whole, fully formed character comes to life in the space between the screen and my eyes. I’d have identified her as the leader of an eschatological cult in Pynchon’s next book but one. Or maybe one of Reinhardt Funt’s fag hags.

So I’m at once grateful to and frustrated by Hadley Freeman (another good name, but only if you know she’s a woman) in The Guardian who informs us of the existence of a real Thavolia Glymph, an academic at Duke University. (What is it about academia? Remember the mighty Drummond Bone?) I’m sure she’s a fine scholar in her field; but were I ever to attend one of her lectures, I’d worry that all her words would become an indistinct blur as I focused my attention on the weird glory of her name and wondering if I’d slipped through some sort of conceptual portal and found myself within a work of literary fiction. Although maybe that’s happened already. Foot-man. What sort of a name is that?

(The picture shows Professor Glymph examining Lincoln’s inkwell. Which is obviously a pretty rubbish inkwell, since ink from it was never used to write her magnificent name.)

Oil on water

Forgive my lazy ignorance, but I’d always assumed that “Canaletto” was a nickname, based on the fact that he painted lots of pictures of Venice. I’ve only just discovered that it’s simply a diminutive of his real surname, which was Canal. It’s the only case of nominative determinism that I can think of among major painters; unless, of course, someone has evidence that Van Gogh was christened Vincent Sunflower, or that Lucian Freud’s birth certificate identifies his father as Mr Gloomynakedlady.

Plunk rock

I’m sorry to say that I’ve never been able to play a musical instrument, but deep down I know I should really have been a bass player. It’s all about temperament; it’s the Eeyore-ish, resentful glumness about them, based on the fact that, excepting the case of those who operate in the realms of funk and reggae, only about 10% of the audience will be able to identify the noise they’re making, above those ghastly egomaniacs, the guitarists and drummers and saxophonists. One way that bassists do assert their individuality, though, is through the medium of deliciously preposterous names. Don’t believe me? All the following are American jazz bass players; bar one, who’s a fictional character in a book by Thomas Pynchon. 

Ronnie Boykins
Wellman Braud
Monty Budwig
Jimmy Butts
Spanky DeBrest
Malachi Favors
Squire Gersh
Chris Lightcap
Cecil McBee
Grachan Moncur II
Kurt Mondaugen
Buell Neidlinger
Lonnie Plaxico
Esperanza Spalding
Victor Sproles
Hank Van Sickle
Ike Sturm
Leroy Vinnegar
Virtue Hampton Whitted
Chester Zardis

The fact that you almost certainly can’t spot the ringer suggests to me that the majority of bassists are in fact minor characters from the works of Pynchon (or Kurt Vonnegut, or possibly Philip K Dick) who have temporarily invaded what mere mortals (and trombonists) foolishly know as ‘the real world’.

Biba Kopf? Who’s she?

Regrets, I’ve had plenty, and I don’t mind mentioning them. At inordinate length, to anyone who’s buying.

According to a profoundly unscientific straw poll on Twitter and Facebook, these are just some of the pseudonyms I could have chosen if I’d really wanted to be a highly successful music journalist: Dirk Nastie; Glen Thrips; Rick Ord; (Tim?) Phutmon; Ace Ventura; Jeff Senstarship; Tim Shaar Footy; Tim Shaar True; Tommi Fanto; Tom Fantomi; Tad Foot-Tapper; Mitch Carper. Thanks to all who contributed to the experience. At last, I know where I went wrong in my life.

Actually the real reason I never became a successful music journalist was that I was always trying to write stuff like this, but never quite pulling it off:

Everywhere you look, there seem to be increasing signs that we are living inside a novel that JG Ballard started to write at the exact moment he died, a novel that takes the form of a reverberating hallucination that just keeps giving. Perhaps the novel/hallucination ends when Ballard himself is the most followed character on Facebook, his brain radiating astounding time-bending realities at the centre of the new post-internet universe where the numerous and multiplying levels of our existence interact. For reasons that help the writing of this column, the soundtrack to this novel/hallucination would be best supplied by Prince, himself currently mucking around with reality and his possible mysterious connection to it in ways that mix up the Ballardian with splashes of obsessive Gaga narcissism, madcap McLuhan theorising, larky Russell Brand lunacy and teasing Dylan masking.

The days of heavy balls

The bizarre and almost certainly suspect circumstances that have made Portsmouth the favourites to win this year's FA Cup have spurred me into a little research. (Or to be more precise, aimless wafting through Wikipedia.)

Trivia hounds will know that the only time Pompey have got their salty paws on the trophy was in 1939, and since competitive football essentially closed down for the duration of the war, they claim quite rightly that they have held the FA Cup longer than any other team. Some nerds may also be aware that manager Jack Tinn ascribed the team's triumph to his "lucky spats". What's not remembered so well is that Pompey's opening goal was scored by one Bert Barlow.

I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking that if more footballers were called Bert Barlow (and more managers wore spats, rather than unpleasant branded cagoules), the sport and the world would be a better place.

And it's equally intriguing that in the first FA Cup of which I have a coherent memory (1975), not only were all the players, officials and managers English, but five members of the losing Fulham team were called John.

One day we'll go deaf

I found myself flicking through Welcome to the Machine the other day. No, I haven't quite yet descended into the Norma Desmond zone, transfixed by the flickering image of my own lost glory. I've been asked to contribute to a new Radiohead-related project, and I was trying to calculate how much of the previous text I might be able to recycle without matters slipping through the hazy fence that separates postmodern self-reference from tedious repetition and self-plagiarism.

Anyway, my finger happened to stop leafing at the picture section in the middle. Now, I didn't want pictures in the book to start with, and I had nothing to with the selection or the design. But there is an intriguing collage on the 12th page, just under the representation of a tiresome student's bookcase. (Franz Kafka next to Philip K Dick may be an Alan Bennett joke, but I suspect not.)

It consists of a number of portraits of people I mention in the book as having some sort of influence, however tenuous, on OK Computer. They are: the White-Album-period Beatles; JG Ballard; George Orwell; Samuel Beckett; Kraftwerk; Louis Armstrong; Miles Davis; Kurt Cobain; and someone who I thought might be Umberto Eco (which would have been pretty shrewd thinking on the part of the designer, because I didn't actually mention Eco in the book, although I really should have done) or perhaps the possibly-done-in-by-spooks weapons expert David Kelly, but now I'm pretty certain it's the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.

Which in turn got me thinking: what a bloody incredible band they'd make. OK, some of them aren't strictly musicians, but those guys could write lyrics and hit cowbells. In fact, I'd like to see Beckett as an on-stage dancer, like Bez, or the naked lady from Hawkwind. I just can't think of a good name for them. Anyone? And is there a deliriously unfeasible dream supergroup you've concocted in your own idle moments?

Nomination rumination

I don't really like my name. Actually, change that. I've got no real problem with my name, but I can't stand a lot of the associations it has. I remember when I was a teenager, there were about eight Tory Tims in the House of Commons, and no Labour. This was also the era of Timothy Lumsden in the sitcom Sorry ("Language, Timothy!"), who then gave way to Harry Enfield's Tim Nice-But-Dim, in turn supplanted by Tim ("Come on, Tim!") Henman. In fiction and real life alike, the name seems to be a shorthand either for right-wing venality or middle-class ineffectiveness.

Of course, there are cool Tims: Messrs Roth and Berners-Lee are two you'd happily buy a pint for. But whenever I introduce myself, I always wonder whether people picture me with a big poster of Margaret Thatcher on my bedroom ceiling.

It could be worse, of course. I could be a Cuthbert or a Vivian. And if I really hated my given name, I'd make the effort of changing it. I did go through a very brief phase of calling myself "Baz" (short for Sebastian, since you ask), and I've used a number of pseudonyms for writing facetious letters to the music press. I've considered using my middle name, but it's rather common (in the mathematical, rather than socio-economic sense); there are at least two Jameses in my blogroll alone. I keep coming back to Tim, because, well, it's my name, like. And my parents chose it, and they're seldom wrong about anything (except for a brief flirtation with hessian wallpaper in the early 1980s).

But let's throw this one to the wolves of nomenclature. If I actually made a determined effort to change my name, what should it be? And what about yours?

Potting the brown

The gentleman on the left is Senator Sam Brownback, one of the contenders for the Republican nomination for next year's American Presidential elections. Senator Brownback is described as being on the right wing of the party: presumably he perceives President Bush to be some kind of leftish subversive intellectual.

Of course, Senator Brownback holds resolutely conservative views on such hot-button issues as gay marriage, abortion, immigration and blowing up Abroadistan. So it's unfortunate that the word 'Brownback' suggests to me one or more of the following:

a) A slang term for a variety of heroin. ("Sheesh man, that gelcap o' brownback laid me out for two days.")

b) A slang term for an illegal immigrant. ("The harbour police just intercepted a crate with two dozen brownbacks come to work as hookers.")

c) Something unimaginable for which gentlemen advertise their fondness by means of a complex code of handkerchiefs in the back pocket. Or non-consenting variant of the same. ("That dumbass on my landing got uppity over a meth deal, so I got six brothers to brownback him in the showers. Mofo couldn't sit down for a week.")

Sorry, I've been watching The Wire.

Plane speaking

I confessed a few weeks ago that I'd referred to JG Ballard's Crash in my Radiohead book, without actually having read it and, like a sinner scrabbling for redemption, I'm studiously going through all the references and noting the ones I haven't actually read, watched or heard. In Chapter 25, I discuss the technological developments that have destroyed the notion of The Rock Album as a discrete set of songs in a non-negotiable order. I compare these changes with the experiments in reader interactivity carried out by the experimentalist writers BS Johnson and Georges Perec, and link these, via a footnote, to the web-based discussions that caused changes to the script of the 2006 film Snakes on a Plane. And, being a complete ponce, the one I hadn't actually experienced in all its glory was the schlocky movie. So today I endeavoured to rectify this. But I only lasted 20 minutes. Bear in mind that I'd managed to plough through Perec's Life: A User's Manual (the 99 chapters of which you can read in any order, guided by a 59-page index, a chronology, a checklist of stories, a floorplan of the building in which the action takes place and a profound interest in jigsaws) and Johnson's The Unfortunates (the 27 chapters of which can be read in any order you bloody well like, although Johnson politely suggests you read the first and last in their conventional places), so a lowest-common-denominator thriller about reptiles running amok on a flight from Hawaii to Los Angeles ought to be straightforward, yeah? Sadly, not. But what stopped me wasn't the wafer-thin characterisation, the cliche-strewm script or even the remedial acting. It was the fact that the hero, the alpha-male FBI agent played by cooler-than-dry-ice Samuel L Jackson was named.... Neville. Now, apologies to any Nevilles out there but c'mon, it's not the sort of name that seeps a cocktail of sang-froid and testosterone from every pore, is it? It's a dealbreaker as far as the audience goes, like finding out that Satan has elected to name his son... Adrian...