John Shimkus in the news

Our representative in Congress, John Shimkus (R, Illinois-15), is in the news, having questioned whether prenatal care should be part of the cost of men’s health insurance. After all, men don’t have babies. That’s like a totally female thing.

Here, from Consumer Reports, is a helpful explanation of why men should have to pay for prenatal care. An excerpt:

Health insurance, like all insurance, works by pooling risks. The healthy subsidize the sick, who could be somebody else this year and you next year. Those risks include any kind of health care a person might need from birth to death—prenatal care through hospice. No individual is likely to need all of it, but we will all need some of it eventually.

So, as a middle-aged childless man you resent having to pay for maternity care or kids’ dental care. Shouldn’t turnabout be fair play? Shouldn’t pregnant women and kids be able to say, “Fine, but in that case why should we have to pay for your Viagra, or prostate cancer tests, or the heart attack and high blood pressure you are many times more likely to suffer from than we are?” Once you start down that road, it’s hard to know where to stop. If you slice and dice risks, eventually you don't have a risk pool at all, and the whole idea of insurance falls apart. [My emphasis.]

Notice though that Consumer Reports has limited the question to childless men. Shimkus was speaking of all men.

Heidi Stevens of the Chicago Tribune offers offers further reasons why men should have to pay for prenatal care:

Because lots of men have sex with women.

Because a lot of that sex produces babies.

Because men and women have an equal stake in those babies being born healthy.

Because all of us, even when we’re not the parents of those babies, have a stake in those babies being born healthy.

Because healthy babies, ideally, turn into healthy children.

Another Tribune item sums up matters in its headline: “U.S. Rep. John Shimkus’s foot finds warm welcome in mouth.” But Shimkus’s suggestion about prenatal care is not a mere gaffe, an “unfortunate choice of words,” as they say. His words reveal a fundamentally ungenerous regard for those who are not in his own comfortable shoes. It’s the same narrow, selfish thinking that underwrites, say, an older voter’s choice not to approve a bond issue for schools or libraries: “I don’t have children in school.” “I don’t use the library.” “Why should I,” &c.

*

March 11: Shimkus is standing by his remarks.

Three more posts with John Shimkus
Shimkus and the NRA : : Shimkus says that Bruce Rauner can make the trains run on time : Waiting for Godot Shimkus

“E” is for Ellington

 
Two Duke Ellington compositions: “Melancholia” and “Reflections in D.” Ellington, piano; Wendell Marshall, bass. Recorded April 14, 1953. From the album Piano Reflections (Capitol, 1953).

I’m still making my alphabetical way through my dad’s CDs: Julian “Cannonball” Adderley, Ivie Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Fred Astaire, Mildred Bailey, Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Art Blakey, Ruby Braff and Ellis Larkins, Clifford Brown, Dave Brubeck, Joe Bushkin, Hoagy Carmichael, Betty Carter, Ray Charles, Charlie Christian, Rosemary Clooney, Nat “King” Cole, John Coltrane, Bing Crosby, Miles Davis, Matt Dennis, Doris Day, Blossom Dearie, Paul Desmond, Tommy Dorsey, Billy Eckstine, and Duke Ellington. I’ve known Piano Reflections as an LP for a long time. And now it’s a CD.

Bonus: Norah Jones has recorded “Melancholia” with her own lyrics: “Don’t Miss You at All.” I would sometimes play this recording when teaching Sappho; it’s a perfect illustration of eros the sweetbitter (glukúpikron). Try it in a classroom: music to drop pins by. This Sinatra performance too.

Also from my dad’s CDs
Mildred Bailey : Tony Bennett : Charlie Christian : Blossom Dearie

VapoRub, the earliest camel-case brand name?

[H. S. Richardson, “Difficult Sales Problems Overcome by Truthful Advertising.” Associated Advertising (June 1921). Richardson’s father Lunsford Richardson founded the Vick Chemical Company. H. S. explains in this article that “Vick was an old family name, which my father adopted because he felt that it would be easier to remember than Richardson.”]

I wonder: could VapoRub be the earliest camel-case brand name? Wikipedia’s article about camel case has DryIce as its earliest example, from 1925. But here’s VapoRub in 1921. And here’s a 1920 advertisement with the product identified as both Vaporub and VapoRub. Notice in the advertisement below that camel case applies even when the product name is in all caps. The product’s original name was Vick’s Croup Salve — not quite the same modern ring as “the VapoRub.”


[This advertisement is part of the 1921 article. The caption: “Illustrating the policy of avoiding ‘cure all’ copy.” In other words, the claim that VapoRub is good for neuralgia or headache is presented as truthful advertising. This advertisement also illustrates the problem of subject-verb disagreement.]

Remembrance of Vicks past

From WNYC, “Just Put Some Vicks on It,” about Vicks VapoRub, which turns out to be not just a fragrant reminder of childhood but something like the WD-40 of mentholated ointments.

But not all uses are recommended. My dad revealed late in his life that his mother had him swallow this stuff when he had a cold or cough. I wonder if she ever tried it herself. One should never swallow Vicks VapoRub. Yikes (camphor).

Being wrong about beauty

Elaine Scarry is commenting on the experience of being wrong about beauty. Her example: realizing that palm trees are, after all, beautiful. She writes:

Those who remember making an error about beauty usually . . . recall the exact second when they first realized they had made an error. The revisionary moment comes as a perceptual slap or slam that itself has emphatic sensory properties.

On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

“The exact second”: that rings true for me. It reminds me of something I posted in 2000 to rec.music.artists.beach-boys (remember newsgroups?), describing how I came to appreciate Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Before 1999, the Beach Boys for me were trivial, nothing more than striped shirts, “Surfer Girl,” “Surfin’ Safari,” and a Sunkist commercial. But:

In January 1999 I happened to rent a videotape of I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times. I’d remembered reading in the New York Times that the film was well done and told the story of Brian Wilson’s life (that rang a vague bell). There was much in the film that I didn’t take in, but I was struck by — mesmerized by — the Van Dyke Parks song “Orange Crate Art.” (His name rang a vague bell too.) I rewound that section of the tape many times and started figuring out the tune on the piano (nice chord changes). Then I went to the library, where I always go to explore music I don’t know much about, and discovered that there was a CD called Orange Crate Art available through interlibrary loan. I figured I should get Pet Sounds too. Why not?

Listening to both was an incredible reeducation in music. I don’t typically listen to music with a lot of “production” — in old jazz and blues recordings, production amounted to moving the musicians toward or away from the microphone (the only microphone!). So it took me a while to get used to production, and to then appreciate it. And the songs on Pet Sounds seemed so short — they seemed to barely get started before fading out. But I can mark the first moments in the album that really hit me — the huge drum sound that stops the intro to “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the slowing down and picking back up at the end, the intro to “You Still Believe in Me,” and the low note on “me.” So I kept listening.

My account jibes with another observation in Scarry’s book: that the experience of beauty “seems to incite, even to require, the act of replication.” ”Beauty,” Scarry says, “brings copies of itself into being.” Which is just what happened when I listened to “Orange Crate Art” again and again and then began playing the song on the piano. The copies need not be perfect.

I would like to read accounts of other people’s errors about beauty, recognitions that something once thought not beautiful is indeed beautiful, or that something once thought beautiful is not. Is Scarry right that there is usually an “exact second” in which one recognizes the error?

Also from this book
“When justice has been taken away”

“When justice has been taken away”

In periods when a human community is too young to have yet had time to create justice, as well as in periods when justice has been taken away, beautiful things (which do not rely on us to create them but come on their own and have never been absent from a human community) hold steadily visible the manifest good of equality and balance.

Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Also from this book
Being wrong about beauty

International Women’s Day

[Dia Internacional de la Mujer / International Women’s Day. Poster designed by the Women's Graphics Collective. Chicago, Illinois. 28 3/16" × 20 3/8".)]

“This bold poster was printed by the Chicago Women’s Graphics Collective to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8, 1975.” It’s Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day.

[The identifying information on the Cooper Hewitt page says “ca. 1980.” Whatever the year, it’s International Women’s Day. Some history here.]

Cobble Court on the move

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York marks the fiftieth anniversary of Cobble Court’s move to the Village. Short story long: Cobble Court is an old Manhattan farmhouse, transplanted from Lenox Hill to Greenwich Village in 1967. At one point before the transplant, the house served as the studio of Margaret Wise Brown. (Goodnight little house.)

You can find many photographs at Scouting New York, from a time when Cobble Court was in danger of being torn down for condominium development. Today, for now, Cobble Court appears to be safe.

A related post
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady (With an excerpt from Brennan’s New Yorker piece about the move)

Word of the day: counterpane

Our household has begun to use, in fun, the word counterpane. It’s an older word for bedspread, familiar to us from reading Willa Cather and Herman Melville. The word’s most famous appearance in literature must be in the title of the unforgettable fourth chapter of Moby-Dick: “The Counterpane.”

I began to wonder: counterpane, windowpane. Is a pane then a panel? Is the idea that a bedspread is made of such pieces, sewn together to make a whole? That sounded plausible. But why counter?

The Oxford English Dictionary has the answers to these questions. Counterpane is “an alteration of counterpoint,” with the second element of that word made into pane, which derives from the French pan and the Latin pannus, meaning “cloth.” The pane in windowpane (“a division of a window”) goes back to the same Latin pannus. How strange to see cloth grow transparent and harden.

That clears up pane. But why counter? The OED explains its history, which begins with the

Old French contrepointe . . . , synonym of countepointe, both forms being apparently corruptions of Old French cuilte-pointe, coulte-pointe, coute-pointe, repr[esenting] Latin culcita puncta . . . lit[erally] “quilt stabbed or stitched through, quilted mattress.” The first element is thus the same word as quilt.

So a counterpane is a quilt.

But what about countertop, or as the OED spells it, counter-top? Where does it fit in? It doesn’t. Its counter derives from the Anglo-Norman counteour, countour, which (omitting many steps) goes back to the Latin computātōrium: computāre, meaning “to compute, count,” and a suffix. A counter is first “anything used in counting or keeping account” and later “a banker’s or money-changer’s table; also, the table in a shop on which the money paid by purchasers is counted out, and across which goods are delivered.”

This post, I hope, has delivered the goods, or at least some of them, in over-the-counter fashion.

“Some staples”

In the March 13 New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson writes about the musician Jack White, who likes having fewer choices:

The number three is essential to his purposes. He says it entered his awareness one day when he was an apprentice in the upholstery shop. He saw that the owner had used three staples to secure a piece of fabric and he realized that “three was the minimum number of staples an upholsterer could use and call a piece done.” The White Stripes were built around the theme of three — guitar, drums, and voice. As both a stance and a misdirection, they wore only red, white, and black. White wanted the White Stripes to play the blues, but he didn’t want to be seen as a boy-girl band attempting them.

Some staples, some instruments, some colors. As a regular reader should know, “some,” as in Ernie Bushmiller’s “some rocks,” comes up now and then in these pages.