Poop Culture comes out in about three weeks. You can preorder it on Amazon now, or you can wait to find it at a store near you (assuming there’s an indie bookstore or a Barnes and Noble “Superstore,” whatever that means, near you — regular B&N’s aren’t carrying it. Yet.). Advance copies will be going out to reviewers soon, and one day in the very near future a box will arrive and I’ll finally hold in my hand the product of years’ worth of exertion and breath in what I sure hope will be only that new book smell and nothing else along with it.
Some key dates:
April 15 (?).Poop Culture hits the stores.
April 30. I speak at the Brown Center (seriously!) at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Much more info to come.
May 8. Poop Culture release party at Galapagos in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Featuring comedians, musicians, short films, and yours truly! Confirmed performers include Bobby Tisdale, Gabe and Jenny, Stuckey and Murray and Gregg Gethard, with more to come.
May 19 (?). A night of poop culture and poop humor in Philly, with Gregg Gethard and friends.
These are rumblings that portend bigger things. I’ve read enough stories on PoopReport to know how it works: I feel things churning, the nervous shifting, the sudden stabs of warning, but I’ll think that I can handle it; and then suddenly my book will explode all over the literary scene.
In other news, I’ve posted the video from my lecture at the University of Iowa a few weeks ago. Bad lighting, not the best recording, a few technical difficulties, and sometimes it’s hard to read the projection there on Youtube. But if you’re interested in my thoughts on poop and the mass media, here they are.
In one of the very best episodes of Futurama, Bender found himself lost in space after being shot out of a torpedo tube. While he floats aimlessly, a meteor crashes into him, seeding his body with microscopic intelligent beings who quickly form societies on his torso — and begin to worship him as a god. He treats it as a joke at first, ordering his followers to build him a factory to make beer; but when fumes from the brewery kill thousands, he begins to understand the moral ramifications of being a deity. He tries to perform miracles for his disciples, but everything he does only ends up hurting them. Soon he’s faced with the ultimate crisis: an apocalyptic war between the colony of Bender-fearing beings on his stomach and the colony on his ass — the citizens of which who, because Bender cannot see them, have decided that Bender does not exist. But Bender refuses to intervene in mortal affairs.
Nuclear war breaks out, killing every single being on Bender’s body.
I relate that story about the moral responsibilities of the mortal god because of a recent scientific discovery that human beings play host to “the densest bacterial ecosystem known in nature.” This comes to us from microbiologists at Washington University in St. Louis, who recently performed the most detailed ever analysis of human fecal matter.
“Using fecal samples from two healthy adult volunteers who did not receive any antibiotics or other medications for a year prior to the study, {microbiologist Jeffrey} Gordon and colleagues have described and analyzed more than 60,000 genes from each individual. The team’s findings, detailed in the June 2 issue of the journal Science, will help scientists better understand how these microscopic life forms perform their many functions. It will also help researchers determine whether the microbial communities we each carry inside are evolving as a result of changing diets and lifestyles.”
“This microbial community is as diverse as any found in Earth’s seas or soils, numbering up to 100 trillion individuals and representing more than 1,000 different species.”
And while these bacterial civilizations in your gut may or may not be aware of your role as their god, they are clearly aware of your actions — and your wrath. On blessed days, their god giveth them yogurt and bran muffins upon which they thrive in peaceful harmony; but every so often God becomes angry, and shoves into their fragile ecosystem habanero salsa or lamb vindaloo — and suddenly a peaceful civilization bursts into deadly chaos. Escherichia coli lob missiles at Ethanobrevibacter smithii; Helicobacter pylori unleash gas clouds intent on wiping out every member of the Fusobacterium genera; Peptostreptococcus turns on brother Peptostreptococcus; and the rivers of dead sluice out your anus.
Learn the lesson well: you, like Bender, are a god to lesser beings. Their fate is in your hands, and on your dinner plate. Proceed carefully with each bite you take — for each one has the potential to end a billion lives, or provide sustenance to a billion more. They pray for a life-giving rain of milk; they live in dread the torrents of beer that maliciously pour down your gullet.
Science has proven it: you are God of the Gut Flora. Please — act accordingly.
The flush toilet keeps humanity alive. Without toilets and sewers to carry away our poop, our waste would contaminate our drinking water, and our cities would collapse into epidemics of cholera — just as they did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when skyrocketing populations overwhelmed the backyard cesspools into which they emptied their bowels. (Read the fascinating story of how humanity beat cholera in Stephen Johnson’s The Ghost Map.)
But the millions of lives saved since humanity adopted toilet and sewers have come at a cost: every day we flush 108 million pounds of natural fertilizer down the toilet, while every day farmers exacerbate this imbalance in the food chain by applying 65 million pounds of nitrogen fertilizer to their land. But our sewage plants concentrate industrial contaminants and household chemicals into the sludge they produce, which means we can’t reuse processed sewage even if we wanted to. In the meantime, we flush 36 billion gallons of water daily down a $250-billion dollar infrastructure built just to recover all that water we flush down in the first place.
A few weeks ago, a reporter for the magazine Scienceline interviewed me about these issues — issues that I examine in depth in my book. Last week she learned that the Bronx Zoo recently opened a state-of-the-art public bathroom with composting toilets to reduce water usage and recover waste for use as fertilizer. So on Saturday my wife and I joined Andrea the reporter to coo at grizzly bears, marvel at tigers, and check out the new facilities.
The restrooms are bright, airy, and plastered with infographics explaining the benefits of the Clivus Multrum foam flush toilets. Instead of flushing with 1.6 gallons of water, these toilets generate a biocompatible foam to lubricate the bowl and wash your waste down into the compost receptacle below. It uses just three ounces of water — 98.5% less than a normal toilet. According to Clivus Multrum, this facility will handle over 500,000 people a year and save over a million gallons of water.
(Even though this new restroom opened in November, there has been no press because the Zoo convinced all the papers to wait until Earth Day in April to publish anything. Which means this site just scooped the New York Times!)
After giving the facilities a go, Andrea, Jenny, and I reconvened to discuss our impressions. All of us marveled at how nice the restrooms smelled — not Pine-Sol good, but better, like fresh sawdust. Even though poop was busy composting in receptacles just below the toilets, and even though there were no traps or filters between the poop and our noses, the system was perfectly ventilated. The architecture was great, the place was sparkling, and everything about the experience was top-notch — except when it came to flushing the toilet.
Whenever I’m in a public toilet, my inclination is to flush with my foot. That’s what my dad taught me, and the lesson stuck. No matter how clean-smelling these toilets may be, they’re still public toilets, and public toilets are disgusting. No one wants to touch anything in a public toilet. And yet:
I didn’t want to touch the toilet lid, which I had to move to access the flush button. And I certainly didn’t want to touch the flush button — never mind touching it twice, as the sign implores. Enlightened pooper though I may be, I can only imagine all the disgusting fingers that have been jabbing into that hole — fingers that have just swiped toilet paper across a dirty butt, but have not yet been cleansed with soap and water.
At minimum, the flush mechanism should be a traditional handle. Better yet, it should be a giant, friendly knob that you want to turn — a fun, whimsical, sanitary interface that’s in keeping with the architectural spirit of the bathroom. Not this dark, recessed, disgusting plastic button in which God knows what will surely collect.
People don’t like change. And people certainly don’t like changing something as fundamental as the way they go to the bathroom. As one of only two points of interface between the pooper and the toilet, I worry that this flush button will single-handedly make 500,000 people a year associate the experience of ecologically-sound toilets with sticking their finger in some disgusting hole, twice. With as critical as these new toilets are to the future of humanity, that’s an association humanity can’t afford to make.
Last December, New Yorkers were given a taste of what the public toilets in Heaven must be like when Charmin opened up temporary luxury toilets in Times Square. Shoppers streamed in and streamed out during the Christmas season; but by the time the ball dropped the toilets had been dismantled, and New Yorkers were once again queued up at McDonalds thanks to a lack of publicly-funded options. A similar experience began last December on London’s Oxford Street, except their luxury bathroom is here to stay. The difference: it costs a pound to drop a pound — that is, $2 just to do what comes most natural.
This is a sad (and, for some people’s dry cleaning bill, disastrous) byproduct of economic growth: as wealth increases, public toilets disappear.
Oxford Street’s luxury toilet-and-powder-room, called WC1 (a clever pun riffing off the postal code of the area), cost almost $2.5 million to build. At WC1, the equivalent of two dollars entitles you to “the loveliest loos in the world” replete with “only the softest toilet tissue.” Ten dollars gets you “the ultimate girly moment,” which, near as I can tell, translates into free hand cream and hairspray.
(Whether guys are allowed to experience the ultimate manly moment is not clear; but most guys shopping on Oxford Street are probably eager for an excuse to nip into the local pub anyway.)
That WC1 exists at all is testament to a problem plaguing modern cities. Call it Brown Flight: as a population’s wealth grows, the priority given to public amenities shrinks. In London, according to the Bloomberg article linked above, the number of public toilets dropped an incredible forty percent from 2000 to 2005, leaving just 415 in a city of 7.5 million. (Although, to be fair, legions of Starbucks and McDonalds have arisen to take their place.) Those that remain are often in states of horrid disrepair — I remember a set of greasy stairs in the middle of London’s Shepherd’s Bush Green leading down into a dank facility so miasmatic that fear alone gave me the strength to wait until I got back to my flat.
The Bloomberg article continues this train of thought. “In Beijing, where the average salary is a 10th of London’s, there are 7,700 toilets, or one for every 1,948 people. China’s capital plans to renovate 3,700 in time for the 2008 Olympics. London, which will host the 2012 games and has one toilet per 18,000 residents, has no such plans.”
What better could illustrate the negative correlation between private wealth and public toilets? Beijing has 7,700 public toilets aren’t just for tourists or travelers — they’re for the many citizens who don’t have facilities in their flats. In Westernized countries, we’ve relegated the toilet so deeply into the private home that we’ve forgotten that not everyone can always hold it long enough to make it there. With the luxury of private bathrooms comes an aversion to spending taxpayer dollars on public ones.
