May 04, 2007

Brown Reasons to Live--Poop Culture in Baltimore City Paper

Poop here:
http://www.citypaper.com/columns/story.asp?id=13536

BROWN REASONS TO LIVE
With A Socio-Scatological New Book, Dave Praeger Wants To Be Your Number Two

Emily Flake

Dave Praeger
Toilets, Victorians, and the Shaming of the Poo
Brown Center at MICA (snicker) on April 30 at 7 p.m.

In 1993, author Taro Gomi released Everyone Poops, a children's book designed to explain, well, just that: Every one of us, human or no, takes dumps as a necessary and natural part of the beautiful cycle of life. The reviews were decidedly mixed. "Okay, so everybody does it--does everyone have to talk about it?" grumped Publishers Weekly. "Does anyone really need an entire book on the subject?" wondered the squeamish School Library Journal.

Brooklyn, N.Y.-based writer Dave Praeger answers that rhetorical question with a resounding yes, significantly upping the ante on Gomi's exploration of the subject with Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped by Its Grossest National Product, a scholarly, entertaining look at that which most of us would sooner ignore.

The book, like so many these days, began life as a web site, launched way back in 2000. "I was working at a failing dot-com and I had a lot of time on my hands," Praeger says over the phone by way of explanation. A friend told him a funny poop story one day, and, noting that the internet lacked a forum for such tales--put your hand down, Monozine--decided to start one himself.

Today, that site boasts 10,000 unique visitors per day and 3,500 registered users with names like General Colon Pow and Di Urheea, who earn points for posting stories and poop-related news. The site covers an astonishing breadth of shit-centric topics, from shitting during childbirth to "Turd Terrorism," a discussion of whether or not it's OK to take vengeance poops in the parking lots of businesses that won't let you do your business. This site is also likely the only place on the internet you are likely to encounter the word "fartwa."

Despite the obvious public interest in the matter, Praeger had a hard time selling the idea of a book. "All the big publishers said no to my agent," he says. "The editors were really into it, but none of the marketing people wanted to touch it." He finally went on his own to Los Angeles indie publisher Feral House, which bills itself as a publisher of "high quality books on forbidden topics." Feral was more than willing to go fecal, and Praeger's proposal finally found a home.

But internet obsession aside, how much is there to say really about poop? Can the unmentionable by-product really carry a whole book? "I always knew there would be enough to write about," Praeger asserts. More worrying was the lack of writers that shared his conviction--the amount of available poop scholarship looked thin, and Praeger worried that his book would be based largely on conjecture. But with some thorough digging, he managed to unearth a small but respectable pile of reference materials, from articles published in psychiatric journals to the great lost tome of poop studies, Alexander Kira's 1975 The Bathroom. The long out-of-print work stands as one of the few in-depth analyses for the layman of water-closet functionality and the psychology behind bathroom design. There's plenty to say about shitting, as it turns out, it's just that nobody's wanted to say it.

Poop psychology is a cornerstone of Praeger's work. Pre-Industrial Revolution, pooping was mainly a matter of finding the proper receptacle, and that accomplished, the poop went out with the rest of the trash. With the rise of industries and the urban centers that fed them, that meant, increasingly, into the streets. It was a booming time for cholera bacteria. The upper classes, wishing to separate themselves from the teeming, shitting, choleric masses, devised ways of hiding their offal-making, giving rise to the modern toilet. That the toilet was not in widespread use until the early 20th century will make the modern shitter shudder--how on earth could we imagine pooping into a chamber pot or a hole dug into the ground, pulling our soiled knickers back up, and going about our daily business, all without the benefit of a flush or even a place to wash our hands?

According to Praeger, the Victorian state of poop denial lives on strong in American society today, even as we've dispensed with all their other hang-ups regarding the body. Shit still revolts us, and many of us fall into the category Praeger terms "Shameful Shitters," slinking in and out of bathrooms, praying that nobody can tell what we're up to--perhaps we do, in fact, need it drilled into our heads as preschoolers that everyone poops.

Americans are also very stubborn when it comes to poop practices. "The word `bidet' just sounds too fey," Praeger says, explaining American aversion to that wonder of bathroom ass-fountain engineering. In 2001 both Kimberly-Clark and Procter and Gamble introduced wet-wipe style toilet paper, the better to wipe out any Klingons surrounding Uranus. "Other cultures find the dry wipe disgusting," Praeger says, and on reflection, it does seem a bit unsanitary. But old poop habits die hard. Both products were a colossal flop. When faced with the difficulty of convincing people to change up their bathroom routine, perhaps we should heave a sigh of relief that our forbears even accepted the toilet so readily.

But the toilet is just the beginning, a step on the way to the Platonic ideal of poop custodianship. Praeger plans to devote his next book to the future of human waste management. "The toilet has done an amazing job of protecting us from cholera," he says, "but at the cost of severing our link in the food chain." Noting that some Penn State researchers have been looking into how to use sewage to power fuel cells, Praeger muses, "Using your poop to power your home: This is my vision of utopia."

Having already written one book on the subject and launched a successful online community, does Praeger fear the long brown shadow his obsession could cast on his writing career? Is he afraid of pigeonholing himself as the Poop Guru? "Indeed, at times, it really bothers me," he says. "But my site entertains people and my book educates people--what more can a person do with their life?"

It remains to be seen whether the public appetite for a poop book will reflect the activity of the Poop Report site--Amazon.com lists the book's official release date as May 1, but Praeger says there's not really an official date as such, and that the book has been trickling into stores. Posting and reading poop stories on the web is as private an act as making the poo itself; purchasing a book on the subject may feel a little too . . . public for some people, akin to whistling your way into the office bathroom with a newspaper in your hand.

"People generally have one of two reactions when I tell them about the book," Praeger says. "They either find an excuse to leave the conversation, or they immediately tell me their own shit stories." If enough of the latter are willing to put their money where their poop is, Praeger can look forward to a long life on the backs of toilets across the country. And he doesn't worry that his work toward opening up the national boundaries of poop discourse will erode the taboos that make shit such a hilarious subject. "If I possess the power to make poop unfunny," he says, "America should fear me more than it fears bin Laden."

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