My middle name "Kasmin"

This page was created on Thu Feb 10 2022 and last changed on Sat Oct 05 2024.

Sometimes people ask me about my middle name "Kasmin".

I was named after an art dealer called John Kasmin. Wikipedia has an article on him. Linked from that article are other articles such as Kasmin is a small man with a big name as a dealer in contemporary art, and John Kasmin: the rogue and his gallery. (If you want to read this article, to bypass the Financial Times' paywall, do a Google search for the article title, and then click the link.)

Here is a clip of John Kasmin in the 1970s, talking to artist David Hockney:

Although I know that my parents named me after him, I have no idea why. To the best of my recollection I have never met John Kasmin. I have no recollection of my parents meeting him. They never told me anything about him except a few things which turned out to be wildly incorrect, such as my mother claiming the name was Polish. They have also never described to me what kind of friendship they had with him or given me any reason at all why they would name me after him, such as some admirable qualities he might have had.

I was not able to get much sense out of either of my parents, who both seem to have mental problems of some kind, and for reasons I can only guess about, they seem to have named me after a very casual acquaintance whom they fell out of touch with quite shortly after I was born. I've written a much longer page which goes into detail about my relationship with my parents, and their extremely bizarre behaviour, for those who are interested.

Considering how barmy the selection of my middle name seems to have been, why use it in my email address? Around the 1990s, searching for my own name, I chanced upon "Ben's page of babes" by one Ben Bullock. I once got some hate email from someone who thought I was a police officer called Ben Bullock associated with the investigation of Stephen Lawrence's killers.

When I also found that email addresses or other user identities such as "benbullock" were already taken, at last I had a use for this very unusual middle name, as part of my email address or otherwise as a self-identifier.

However, I don't really use this name for other purposes, although it's recorded on my passport, birth certificate, etc. Because it's my "official name", it's ended up also being transliterated into my Japanese identity papers and bank account name and so on.

Coincidentally there is a Japanese name Kasumi, meaning "mist", which is similar to the Japanese transcription of my name, Kasumin, and Japanese people have asked me if this name is related to Japan in some way. The Japanese rendering of the name, カスミン (Kasumin), was not decided by me, but by a woman official at the Oho city hall (大穂市役所) in Tsukuba in 1994, when I first did my Alien Registration. From what I can find on Google, such as the Japanese Wikipedia article on David Hockney, John Kasmin's name also seems to be rendered as カスミン in Japan, so this is probably the closest rendition in Japanese.

Since Japanese people do not have middle names, this can become a nuisance, and, possibly because it comes last in my list of names when they're ordered Japanese fashion, some Japanese people call me "Kasmin", which I don't like. I also sometimes get turned in to "Benkasmin" by some very annoying software glitches. The worst example of all was that I was turned into Bullockben Kasmin by a software glitch at a credit card company, of all things.

Incidentally, my older sister was named "Rachel Anna", so only I got the eccentric naming.