The Alteration (a historical prosopography)

I reread The Alteration a couple of months ago (I love The Alteration). A friend who read it at the same time noted the sheer wealth of historical allusion. I thought there would be a list somewhere, but couldn't find it, though wikipedia is a decent crib for some of it. So I made my own. For those who have not read the Alteration, 1) read The Alteration, 2) it's an alternative history where the divergence from ours comes in the Reformation: Luther, Calvin and Thomas More are successively Pope ('The three Northern Popes') and Arthur, Henry VIII's (here, Henry the Abominable) elder brother has a son (Stephen II) who is restored to the throne by Catholic forces. Britain is therefore catholic and the church is triumphant. As a result, almost every historical figure (unless they are American) has been pressed into the service of the church, usually in painting one of them or composing for it. Amis spends much of his time amusing himself by having real figures pop up in unlikely places.

So here goes. Page references from the Vintage Classics edition and refer to their first appearance only.

Contemporary figures - it's set in 1976 (*denotes a any reference that's less than obvious):

• A.J. Ayer, Professor of dogmatic theology (119)
• Tony Benn, as 'Lord Stansgate', head of the Holy Office in England (122)
• Beria, Monsignor (8) 
• Enrico Berlinguer, Cardinal and chief of staff to Pope John XXIV (109) 
• Anthony Burgess, still a novelist, but who has met an unspecified bad end by the 70s (194) 
• Francis Crick, a disastrous scientist (194)
• Philip K. Dick, who Amis has great fun with, making him an alternative history writer, whose Man in the high castle outlines 'our'  history  - or something close to it (25)
• Ian Fleming*, as author of the Father Bond novels - with a nod to Chesterton (78)
• [Paul] Foot, a policeman for the church, not a crusading journalist (126) 
• Harry Harrison*, I think this is who is meant as the engineer who builds the channel tunnel, as an homage to his SF story on the issue (105)
• Himmler, Monsignor (8)
• Ernest Lough, singer, presented as the case for castration - his career faltered once his voice broke (50)
• Paulo Maserati*, the Papal 'inventor general' [There's no useful contemporary Maserati, but the link is clear] (194)
• [Corin] Redgrave, a policeman for the church (126)
• Keith Roberts, as another alternative history author - I'm told there's complicated reference about dancing, Galliard here doing duty for the real life Pavane. (132)
• Jean-Paul Sartre, Monsignor and Jesuit (though I've not actually found the reference)
• Tolkien*, or at least an author of Lord of the Chalices, (78)
• Harold Wilson*, reinvented as Pope John XXIV (109)
• John Wyndham*, as J.B. Harris - Wyndham's real name - author of The orc awakes (100)
• Fritz Wunderlich*, the castrato Federicus Mirabilis (9)
• Wolfgang Windgassen*,the castrato Lupigradus Viaventosa (9)

Historical references:

• Benedict Arnold, American leader. So significant, he gets the capital named after him (164)
• John Bacon, sculptor (16)
• William Bartholomew*, called Bartley here, but the writer of Hear my prayer (50)
• Beethoven, here dying young (28)
• Blake, though only as a painter of frescoes (8)
• Brunel, who Amis credits with designing the highest cathedral spires of the world (10)
• George Butterworth (201)
• Jefferson Davis, ambassador to England (63)
• Rudolf Diesel, whose eponymous invention is ubiquitous as electrical ignition is discouraged (13)
• Epstein, Anglicised to Epstone here, but still a sculptor (8)
• Gainsborough (7)
• Richard Grenville, knight and sailor, who fights at Lepanto, with not against the Spanish (109)
• Kenneth Grahame*, assuming that's what's meant by The Wind in the Cloisters (77).
• Hockney, referred to, maliciously, as 'excessively traditionalist, almost archaizing' painter (8)
• Holman Hunt, painter (8)
• Willem de Kooning, painter (78)
• Rudyard Kipling, the First citizen of 'New England' 1914-18 (56)
• Thomas Kyd, whose version of Hamlet is famous (14)  
• Labelye, bridge builder, who builds here the London bridge he never did in reality (173)
• Michelangelo*, here 'Boonarotty', ie.Buonarroti, who kills himself when Luther, as pope, stops the construction of St Peter's (111)
• William Morris (8)
• Mozart, given both extra years and more compositions (8)
• Nelson, here famous for defeating the Turks at Lipari (200)
• Purcell, seemingly unaffected: there's a Dido and Aeneas here too (12)
• Edgar Allen Poe, a New England General (177)
• Satie*, though a piano maker rather than pianist (61)
• Schumann composer (30)
• Shakespeare, famous only in America, banned in England (152)
• Percy Shelley, who survived longer and led an expedition that burnt down the Vatican in 1853, but dismissed as a 'minor versifier' (199)
• Sopwith, engineer, but a builder of a channel bridge rather than aeroplanes (105)
• Jonathan Swift*, only a book Saint Lemuel's Travels (77)
• Zachary Taylor, one imagines still American President, certainly important enough to get a major New York bridge named after him (164)
• Tintoretto, the painter of the victory at Lepanto in Amis' and the real world (109)
• Turner, who paints a ceiling devoted to the restoration of Catholicism in England (7)
• Velluti, the most famous castrato in this version of history, as in ours (34)
• Weber, composer  (30)
• Wagner, composer (201)
• James McNeill Whistler, though we only know he had airship named for him  (177)
• Wren, architect (7)
• Yamamoto* (maybe), in Amis' world he's an architect. He's most likely the same as the real commander in chief of the Japanese navy (155)

There are a few others who may be specific individuals (e.g., Joshua Pellow, the 'archpresbyter'), but I think they are pure inventions. There are also references to places which suggest different roles for the individuals concerned, all in the US - Cranmeria, Hussville and Wyclif city - but not enough to go on. 

What have I missed?

An elegy for lost data

Notoriously, I have a database of my friends. Specifically, I have a small spreadsheet on which I record my core friends - about 50 of them - and various facts, including how often I see them. I also have spreadsheets that record in detail a variety of other things, including my books and reading. No-one really remembers them though. Now, they are all gone - or at least 2012 is - as I put them memory stick on which they reside in the washing machine. The data for 2012 is lost. I was, and am, very upset about this. A doesn't really understand why.

Now I've had these for about ten years, maybe a bit more. I started them for quite prosaic reasons. I built a list of books because at the time most of my books were still at my parents' house and I didn't want to buy duplicates. I started recording presents when I bought the same thing for the same person two years in a row. I built the Friends database to win an argument over how many of my friends were Tories - less than half as it happens. But I've kept them because they're useful, and interesting. They've expanded in function of course. It was the Books DB that told me I'd not read about 15% of the books in the house, and so I read them. It's the Friends DB that means I don't forget to catch up with people who aren't front of mind. A record of what I cook, and where, from means I could throw out half my cookbooks last year, and forced me to discover more in those I kept. There's more, minor (I also recorded when people first met JR on the Friends DB) and major (the Books DB also records reading levels, allowing me to note the catastrophic baby-induced collapse in volume). I'll now never have that information for 2012.

But the loss I feel is bigger than that - I feel like I have lost part of my past. Without the data, I'm forced to rely on my perception of what happened, and perception is irredeemably faulty, unsystematic and unreliable, and just plain wrong. We know this - that's why we write things down, it's why we take photographs. For me, the information in those spreadsheets was part of my narrative of my past. The information contained allowed me, quickly, to access accurately the past. I'm not making any great claim for the information they held as a record of my life, but they captured part of it, and with ten years of data, they were compelling. And now they are gone. I can replicate some of the information, but not much, and though I've only lost one year, the sequence is broken and the data will always be incomplete. So will the narrative they supported.

I mourn.

How to use averages

We've had a baby; he's coming up for eight months now & I'm very fond of him. So far he seems to be be doing the things he should. He's nailed rolling over, is pretty good at sitting up and picking things up and while he hasn't quite got round to crawling, he's pretty close. I was apparently pretty retarded at those things, so he's up on me. He's a bit below average weight, and he's well below average for sleeping.

At least, I think he's below average for sleeping - neither standard baby books nor doctors tell you what the average is. I'm a big fan of averages, properly used of course - for example you really need standard deviation to understand cricket averages properly. In other areas, the baby profession is also keen on averages. They have very detailed tables of weight, height, and even head circumference and how it will change over time. It's therefore possible to worry, in detail, about the trajectory of your baby's weight gain, yet it's impossible to worry about his ability to sleep through the night (or rather, to worry about it with data). At the moment, I know which one I am more concerned about.

Depressingly, I think they do it deliberately. Weight is a lead indicator for health, so they have to track it, and they might as well get parents to do it. However, everything else may well be held back to avoid parental panic about how their baby is below average (we're guilty of this too; worrying the doctor about his changing weight position). Of course, just under half of babies are below average so, to put it another way, I have a horrible feeling we limit information to parents because we assume for they will fail to understand statistics properly.

On one level, I suppose this doesn't really matter, but what it means is that those of us who can understand stats don't get some useful information. For example, my boss has a baby about five months younger than JR, who already sleeps better. Good for him, but he needs to know that's better than average to calibrate his expectations of me (and others) who may not have such obliging offspring. On the other hand, A is of the opinion that being able to work out that you're in receipt of a baby that's in the lower deciles for sleeping is mostly depressing - there's not much you can do about it after all.

For me though, if there are numbers to be had, I'd like them. This of course isn't limited to babies, but with babies I think I'm right. It would certainly make conversations with parents on this subject less frustrating.

Relative poverty

I've always hated the term 'relative poverty.' It's false language and disingenuous. I was reminded of it by this rather good post on it - my favourite line - 'if Warren Buffet moved to London poverty would increase' - I think nicely skewers the point.

Some technical notes: The definition of relative poverty is 60% of median average income. The details are here. For a single adult, it means an income below £5,200 per annum excluding income tax, council tax and housing costs, (rents, mortgage interest, buildings insurance, water charges).

Now, the level of relative poverty may have kept me as a student (no, that's a lie, but I had a rather extravagant student life, and it could have done), and it's clearly not a lot of money, but it's not poverty to have a house, insurance, and a decent amount of spending money.

What they actually mean is of course inequality. Inequality is important, we can all have opinions on it, but it's not necessarily linked to poverty, so can we defend policy on relative poverty on inequality grounds please? And not raise the totem of poverty, which is overly emotive and just not true.

Personally, I am not very interested in inequality, rather in outcomes for the genuinely poor, which is why most of my donations go abroad. Anyway, this isn't even one of the things that annoys me most about government use of statistics and maths: that's the tax system, but I'll post on that later.

Black and White

If political creeds had similar sanctified locations to religions, then Grantham is effectively the Bethlehem of modern economic conservatism. Now while it doesn't really live up to this billing, though I am told there is a plaque, it was the occasion of my having argument there about a more constant Tory problem.

I was taken to task for referring to the White Dominions and accused of casual racism. I cannot exactly remember why I referred to them, but it was just in passing. Yet not only did the people I was with have no knowledge of what they were, but nor did anyone else I asked that weekend. Some of them really ought to have done: Anna did twentieth century history, and others actually come from them, and they still didn't know.

To clear up any confusion, the White Dominions were:
Canada (from 1867)
Australia (1907)
New Zealand (1907)
Newfoundland (1907) - I had to look this one up
South Africa (1910)

Their dominion status refers to self-government under the Empire; White is, well, obvious. And the phrase doesn't really apply now, the wikipedia article on the dominions tries to claim they are known as the White Commonwealth, but this is nonsense.

Now, it doesn't really matter if most people don't know about them and what they are called, though I was surprised that no-one did. However, it does highlight a couple of problems. Firstly, everyone was scandalised, albeit mildly, by the perceived racism in the term. But that's not right. It isn't a racist term and we need a be a bit more careful about what we call out on that basis.

Secondly, and much more worrying, it is symptomatic about ignorance of the Empire. I don't know a great deal about the Empire - I never studied it and have never been formally taught about it (save for a very bad essay on the East India Company). But I am comparatively well informed, because schools don't teach it. And they should. It shaped the laws and lives of millions and it continues to do so for billions today. The murky moral waters of compulsion, reparation, asylum, immigration and international law are impossible to understand without a basic impression of the imperial age and why things are as they are. Instead, I learnt about the industrial revolution for three years, all more boring than the last.

Unrelated, in a further discussion, it was noted that I also don't really like black music, or - as I put it - 'I prefer it to be mediated by whites' (I'm really not doing myself any favours here). I'm not alone in this I discover, but it did cause me to go inspect my CD collection (OK, really the database) to check how true that was. I astonished even myself:

We have 724 CDs (at last count). Just over 50 are by black artists. This seems shameful, but it's almost all blues. And I think that's the point: I have a lot of music of black origin - you can trace a line from Chuck Berry through to any number of white rock & roll artists and beyond. I know I should have more Jazz, but I die a little inside when I listen to it so I haven't bothered. But I'm looking at where things come from, imperfectly and selectively of course, but I am trying.

And that doesn't happen when people don't get taught about the Empire. Because without that information, they can't argue.

Taxonomy

Why can't people categorise things properly? iTunes appears to think Iris Dement's Infamous Angel is a pop album. It's got a track with the word Opry in it, how hard can it be?

It's very good though.

Long words

In one of my less prescient moments, a few weeks ago I decided that it would be good to go for a day of test cricket this weekend, but instead of going today, where it appears to be rather good weather, I went yesterday, when it rained, and rained, and rained. We missed the first two overs that were played, little realising that such a loss represented 25% of the action.

The interminable rain delays meant that we wandered around Lord's for much of the day. Even in an almost abandoned test, the museum was not that busy (though it did have last year's exhibits in), Andrew played famous person spotting and - in a fit of weakness - we bought Ed Smith's new book, What sport tells us about life (Note how it's £6 cheaper on Amazon). Ed Smith is a very well educated man, who has a better degree than me. However, shockingly, while we dithered about buying his book, he accused us of pontificating - he meant prevaricating. I should stress that while am no stranger to pontificating, but I am assured I was not on this occasion.

Sport may teach you about life, but it would seem not much about words.

Notes from a pedant

I'm not very good at keeping this up to date. I rarely have anything to say. In fact as I get older I notice that I have less and less news. In the last six weeks I can think of little of personal news (Christmas doesn't count) other than a very expensive phone bill from India, where Orange have very expensive charges -bastards (it is a lot cheaper in France). I really ought to know better, given where I work.

Anyway, this post isn't about roaming, but it is vaguely linked, in that it is a comment on technology. Actually it's not about technology either, but a pedantic point about music categorisation, occasioned by my iTunes and its inability to distinguish albums from CDs . It is made more irritating as I spend much of my day job writing about convergence (at the moment mostly for this).

As an example, consider as I am sure many of you will be able to do, the career of the Bonzo Dog Doo-dah Band, one of my personal favourites. The best compilation of their work is to be found on a rather splendid (and very good value) three CD set called the Cornology. I dutifully loaded up onto my computer which cheerfully told me I had three albums, except I don't. There are clearly six albums on these discs (two to a CD) and it has taken many minutes to disentangle the album from CD onto my iTunes. When we can store all my music on the tiny piece of hardware that is my iPod, I don't see why this cannot be dealt with automatically. Similarly, albums spread over two CDs are not two albums. It isn't complicated.

I know it's a pedantic and anal point, but it has been irritating me for months. It cannot be that hard to fix. By the way, the new Bonzo's album is worth every penny and more. Buy it.