The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [125]
Q: Did your research include travel?
A: Whenever my travels took me to places with springs or spas, I bathed. In the Roosevelt Bath in Saratoga Springs, New York, I sat in urine-coloured water—tepid because that made the minerals most effective. I went to Baden (which means “bath”) in Switzerland and Baden Baden (“bath bath”) in Germany, where people have bathed in the hot springs since pre-Roman times. I spent a week in the Turkish-style baths of Budapest, and a few wonderful days wandering through some of the oldest baths we have, in Pompeii and Herculaneum—they don’t function as baths any more, but it was fascinating to walk through the rooms with baths of different temperatures and experience their intimate scale.
Q: Did the book come together as you had planned?
A: I like the way a friend described The Dirt on Clean. I told her that it was going to have lots of pictures and little funny tidbits in the margins, as well as boxes for subjects like the history of soap or the technology behind the Romans’ great bathhouses. The friend said rather cautiously, as if she weren’t sure how I was going to take this, “Katherine, you’re writing a BATHROOM book.” So, yes, I have written a bathroom book, in more ways than one. People who don’t think they want to read a history can look at the marginalia and the pictures and it could find a place of honour in a bathroom. Other people can read the history in the middle of the pages, and I’m fine with either approach.
Q: You mention in the book that while you were working on it, people confided their washing eccentricities to you. Does this continue?
A: Now that the book has been published, I’m harvesting even more washing stories. At the end of a talk or interview, people will tell me privately about their Scottish aunt who never got into a tub but washed herself “piecemeal”—and yet always seemed perfectly clean. Or about their decision to give up deodorant when there seemed to be a link between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease, which has never been proven, and they’ve never returned to the practice. As always, I’m interested, and amused at the surreptitious way people reveal their “deviations.” It shows how thoroughly we’ve been conditioned to the one-bath-or-shower-a-day-with-soap-and-deodorant model. But, as our ancestors knew, there’s more than one way to skin a cat—or get clean.
Q: Has your own hygiene regime changed since you wrote The Dirt on Clean?
A: Yes. After reading about all those variations over twenty-eight centuries, I’m very aware of how arbitrary our current definition of “clean” is. I’m also aware that a person who works all day in front of a computer, whose house is filled with labour-saving devices and who can drive or take public transit is not necessarily getting particularly dirty or sweaty every single day. But while I’m showering less, paradoxically I’m bathing more. That’s because doing the book sensitized me to the pleasures of water—all that reading and writing about our relation to water, whether a fearful or a joyful relationship, has had an effect. I call it “recreational bathing,” which is very different from our puritanical, anxious worries about not being sufficiently clean.
Q: Is there anything you wish you could have gotten into The Dirt on Clean, but didn’t?
A: My book is about the West, and I wish I could have made Japan a Western country, because their unique attitudes to bathing intrigue me so much.
Q: In this age of superbugs and obsession with bacteria, where are we headed?
A: I hope that the pendulum will swing away from our neurotic insistence on impossibly high hygienic standards. It’s bad for us psychologically and even physically, as evidence mounts that our over-clean bodies and surroundings are associated with allergies and asthma. And it’s bad for the planet, as we waste water and endanger aquatic life