On the controversial matter of literature in the bathroom

A couple of weeks ago in Deborah Solomon’s interview with John Waters in the Sunday Times, I read this disturbing exchange:

Is there anyone you would actually kill if you knew you could get away with it?
I find it repellent when people do yoga exercises at the gate in airports. I want to kill them.
That’s reasonable.
There are little things that get on my nerves, like people who have reading material in their powder room. When you go in someone’s house, and next to the toilet they have a huge basket of magazines, I find that repellent. I recommend against straining while reading.

I made a mental note then and there never to invite John Waters to my house, and if he ever happened to come over, to discourage him from using any of our bathrooms. This may seem like a draconian measure, given that John Waters appears to be a very amusing person and I enjoy the company of amusing persons, but in this matter of bathroom reading material I fear we might come to blows.
I bring this up because June happens to be BATHROOM READING MONTH (it is also Effective Communications Month, but we won’t be addressing that, for obvious reasons; and Surf Music Month, which is just plain heartwarming.) and in the spirit of the month I feel that I should own up to our household’s stance in the Décor slash Literary Taste discussion. It is this:
All our bathrooms contain reading matter, and not only that, but each bathroom contains reading matter on a specific theme.
The truth is, it never occurred to me it could be otherwise because in the parental home this is the way it is done and was always done.

It never fails to shock me to come upon some irrefutable evidence of how like my mother I am. Because we are so different.

If anyone ever asks me about my mother one of the very first things I will say, after alluding to her youthful beauty and seven suitors, is how unlike we are. She is self-contained; I am emotionally needy. She has a closet full of Chanel suits and matching pillbox hats; I am the Imelda Marcos of sensible shoes. She dislikes and fears dogs; my toes are – at this moment – being licked clean by Daisy & Bruno, the beloved barking spaniels. My mother can identify the warp, weft and provenance of any Oriental carpet from across the room; moths eat my carpets, and mock me. My mother can immolate herself on the altar of historically correct wallpaper and fabric; while I can only expatiate on varieties of early Christian martyrdom. My mother can- and frequently does – use the word fenestration with a straight face.

But to return to the trait considered so offensive by John Waters. Another example of how my mother and I differ: our bathroom reading material. Her downstairs bathroom offers an impressive selection of theoretically humorous books, among them, The Darwin Awards; Age Doesn’t Matter Unless you are a Cheese; Does a Lobsterman Wear Pants?; Bread Any Good Nooks Lately?; Pogo; Treasury of Atrocious Puns; Uppity Women of the Renaissance; Outhouses by Famous Architects.

Whereas our downstairs bathroom contains our collection of etiquette books, which could hardly be referred to as humorous, nothing being more serious than proper behavior. Some gems of the collection are:
Manners for Millions, by Sophie Hadida
Perfect Behavior, A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in All Social Crises*, by Donald Ogden Stewart (1922)
Children are People and Ideal Parents are Comrades, by Emily Post (1940)
Society Small Talk or What to Say and When to Say it, by A Member of the Aristocracy
Poise and How to Attain It, by D. Starke (1916), in the MENTAL EFFICIENCY Series
Hints on Etiquette and Usages of the Society with a Glance at Bad Habits, By anonymous in 1834
As well as Etiquette guides by Emily Post, Charlotte Ford, Miss Manners and the editors of Vogue.

*In which we learn: “A bachelor, accompanied by a young unmarried woman, when stepping accidentally into an open coal or sewer hole, removes his hat and gloves as inconspicuously as possible. It is never correct for young people of either “sex” to push older ladies in front of swiftly approaching motor vehicles or street cars. A young man, if run over by an automobile driven by a strange lady, should lie perfectly still (unless dead) until an introduction can be arranged; the person driving the car usually speaks first.”

How different could we be? The fact that in my parents’ third floor bathroom – the one formerly used by my brothers – you can find every copy of MAD Magazine from 1960 through 1980, and that in my kids’ bathroom you can find every MAD Magazine from 1984 through 2000, in no way points to a similarity between my mother and me. No, it is simply that we have both raised children with excellent taste in journalism.

Or could it be that I have been mistaken in thinking myself a radical departure from my mother’s mold? Could it be that, recognizing I could never aspire to her elegance, glamor, poise and decorating savvy, and in order to spare myself comparisons in which I would inevitably fall short, I proclaimed myself to be an altogether other type of fish?

What is permissible? & Little Blue Book #556

I’ve seen a lot of human/canine interactions and many unexpected things on the aqueduct: fucking bunnies, a proposal (Marry Me Joel) a drug dealer’s pit bull, a porn star’s mother, a lost and possibly rabid skunk, a very short man with a metal detector, families not speaking to each other, terror and longing. But I have never before seen a butterfly net.
Today I saw a man with a net. And I couldn’t help myself. I asked him what it was for? I didn’t think it was necessarily for butterflies because it feels (to me) early for butterflies and also because I am under the impression that butterfly collecting has gone the way of stamp collecting (lamentable). Though in the case of butterflies, this is not because of email but because Science values experimental biology more than classification these days.
He said he was out to catch butterflies.
I said, Are there any this early?
And he said, Yes, the cabbage whites. [Pieris rapae; nonnative in North America, considered a pest on cabbages]
I stopped there.

I wanted to ask why he wanted to catch cabbage whites and what he planned to do with them, and if he had an existing collection of dead butterflies pinned to heavy pieces of paper and shedding their dusty flecks of color.
But I didn’t, unsure of what is permissible. How much is it permissible to ask a stranger questions that may or may not turn out to be personal?
I was troubled enough to consult Emily Post’s Blue Book of Social Usage and other volumes of Etiquette. As many of you know - and have had occasion to consult - I have several of these, including Miss Manners, Charlotte Ford, Manners for Millions & Society Small Talk , in the downstairs powder room.
Though happy to address such important issues as eating artichokes, afternoon tea, chaperons, chambermaids, forks (8 index entries), uniforms for servants, eating squab and jelly, Emily says nothing at all about nosy questions, or impertinent questions, or rude questions or when a perfectly reasonable question is nosy, rude or impertinent, and when it is not.
Which, frankly, is the kind of help I could use.

And I was wrong about it being early, at least it’s not early for Cabbage Whites, it is never early for Cabbage Whites.


And what am I to make of the hidden makeshift room about 20 yards from my short cut down from Draper park to the aqueduct. Someone, or some ones, have laid out a square floor, about 12’ x 12’ of interlocking green plastic, and on top of it at one end is a red molded plastic picnic table and seats, and on the opposite end are two tires placed symmetrically. In fact seen from above the tires could look like eyes and the red picnic table like a mouth (not smiling though, grim, serious) on a green face. No nose though.

Not that this has anything to do with a butterfly net on the aqueduct, but since I brought up etiquette, I would like to share a tidbit I just read in Hints on Etiquette (Little Blue Book #556) by Esther Floyd, who was a vegetarian but most avowedly not a naturist: “Without food we die. Without clothes we were better dead.”
She also has harsh words to say about “little finger crookers”.