A Tinygogo bibliography

For the new year, I want to share some of the books that have helped inform my sense of mission with this site. I share these as an overview. Later I hope to explore some of the books below (and others) in more depth.

There are numerous how-to books on saunas and hot tubs. Most fall into the garden variety "home-improvement" category such as the Ortho and Sunset series of books. These have scintillating titles such as: Sunset Ideas for Hot Tubs, Spas and Home Saunas and Spas: Planning, Selecting and Installing. 

Still there are a few that stand out for their insight and vision, reading that informs us of the deeper meaning for enthusiast bathing. These are the books that I occasionally revisit for reference and rediscovery.

I hope what I share below will inspire you to seek and create some quality bathing in 2016. 

Let's start with five:

Cathedrals of the Flesh, Alexia Brue

Such a good read! Alexia Brue considers the possibility of opening her own Turkish Hammam in New York City. In order to properly appreciate this potential huge investment, she does a world tour, making careful study of the bathing customs of various countries by experiencing them for herself. (Her writing style reveals a certain wry joy for the weird and awkward that I particularly love.) Cathedrals is a travelogue written around the subject of indulgent pleasure seeking via bathing. What else is there to life?

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Sweat, Mikkel Aaland

This is an indispensable book that explores the world of sweat bathing. It's important because it is one of the first books that provided information on sweat bathing from around the world. It's a great mix of well-researched material with some fun travel writing and personal story telling. Sweat, really gets the credit for being one of the first works that explores the shared commonalities of sweat bathing in numerous different cultures around the world. 

The title says it all. Just as Carl Sagan (coincidently working around the same time Sweat was written) integrated up-to-date scientific information from a wide array of sources to show us the "big picture" of how we fit into the universe, Mikkel Aaland synthesized diverse cultural and historical knowledge to tell us an important story: sweat bathing is a common reoccurring theme with how humans have traditionally cleaned themselves, communed socially and reconnected to being alive and human. We've just lost sight of these traditions in our culture of quick-and-easy morning showers. 

Mikkel has been covered earlier here at Tinygogo. He is responsible for the Perfect Sweat Summit which took place at Archimedes Banya in San Francisco.

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Getting Wet, Adventures in the Japanese Bath, Eric Talmadge

This book focuses exclusively on the Japanese national passion for bathing: ofuro, onsens and sentos (wood hot tubs/baths, hot springs and public bath houses) and other related bathing activities. Eric Talmadge is an Associated Press reporter based in Japan. He's lived there for a number of years now and really knows and loves sharing Japanese culture. As with Cathedrals of the Flesh, exploration of Japanese bathing culture becomes a great travelogue where we learn more about the country through amusing personal stories. 

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Undesigning the Bath, Leonard Koren

If bathing were a political movement, this would be my Little Red Book. It is my bathing manifesto. It's is out of print but worth tracking down. If anyone is considering building their own bath or sauna retreat, Undesigning the Bath is essential primary reading. Inside there are no "how-to's" but instead important philosophical conceptions on the aesthetics of the bathing space and how such spaces can become environments for deep reflection and satisfaction.

Leonard Koren was a speaker at the Perfect Sweat Summit. He is probably best known for being the founder/publisher/editor of Wet Magazine.

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The Sauna Book, Tom Johnson and Tim Miller

I don't know much about this book's background or the authors. Way back in the 1970s it probably competed for bookstore shelf space with Mikkel Aaland's Sweat as the book for do-it-yourselfers building their own backyard or basement saunas.

Like Sweat it's out of print and getting harder to find. Also like Sweat, it goes deeper into sauna background, health and history. But primarily it provides good solid information on how to build a sauna. It's remains one of the better books for DIY sauna building. This book was indispensable when my brother and I built our backwoods wood-fired sauna in the 1990s in Alaska.
 

Anaïs Nin's hammam visit

Here at work we have a community book shelf, a place where residents can share books for others to read. Today I noticed that there was a complete collection of Anaïs Nin's diaries. What?! Didn't she write erotica? Maybe that would be inappropriate to have in a public space. Better take a look and see. I randomly opened up Volume V and started reading. It was a boring paragraph mentioning Henry and a book store. Hmm, not prurient enough. Let's try Volume II 1934-1939. Again, randomly opening the book, there was still no NSFW, but I was utterly surprised by the first thing my eyes landed upon. Anaïs describes a visit to a Moroccan hammam, a public bath house, while on a visit to the city of Fez (Fes). Page 77:

"I met the Arab Women walk to their baths. They went there always in groups, and carrying a change of clothes in a basket over their heads. They walked veiled and laughing, showing only their eyes and the hennaed tips of their hands holding their veils. Their full white skirts and heavily embroidered belts made them heavy and full-looking, like the pillows they like to sit on. It was heavy flesh moving in white robes, nourished on sweets and inertia, on passive watches behind grilled windows. This was one of their few moments of liberty, one of the few times they appeared in the street. They walked in groups with their servants, children, and bundles of fresh clothes, laughing and talking, and dragging their feet in embroidered mules. 

I followed them. When they entered at the mosaic-covered building near the mosque, I entered with them. The first room was very large and square, all of stone, with stone benches, and rugs on the floor. Here the women laid down their bundles and began undressing. This was a long ceremony, for they wore so many skirts, and several blouses, and belts which looked like bandages, so much white muslin, linen, cotton to unroll, unfold, and fold again on the bench. Then there were bracelets to take off, earrings, anklets, and then the long black hair to unwind from th eribbons tressed into the hair. So much white cotton fallen on the floor, a field of white petals, leaves, lace, shed by the full-fleshed women, and as I looked at them I felt they could never be really naked, that all this they wore must cling to them forever, grow with their bodies. I was already undressed and waiting, standing, as I would not sit naked on the stone bench. They were waiting for the children to be undressed by the African maids, waiting for the maids to get undressed. 

An old woman was waiting for us, a completely shriveled old woman with only one eye. Her breast were two long empty gourds hanging almost to the middle of her stomach. She wore a sackcloth around her waist. She gave me a little approving tap on the shoulder and smiled. She pointed to my finger nails and talked but I could not undertand, and I smiled.

She opened the door to the steam room, another very large square room all of grey stone. But here there were no benches. All the women were sitting on the floor. The old woman filled pails of water from one of the fountains and occasionally poured one over their heads, after they had finished sopaing themselves. The steam filled the room. The women sat on the flor, took their children between their knees and scrubbed them. Then the old woman threw a pail of water over them. This water flowed all around us, and it was dirty. We sat in ribulets of soapy, dirty water, The women did not hurry. They used the soap, then a piece of pumice stone, and then they began to use depilatories with great care and concentration. All of them were enormous. The flesh billowed, curved, folded in tremendous heavy waves. They seemed to be sitting on pillows of flesh of all colors, from the pale Northern Arab skin to the African. I was amazed that they could lift such heavy arms to comb their long hair. I had come to look at them, because the beauty of their absolutely beautiful faces, enourmous, jeweled eyes, straight noble flawless skins, and always a royal bearing. The faces had a quality of statuary rather than painting, because the lines were so pure and clear. I sat in admiration of their faces, and then I noticed that they looked at me. They sat in groups, looking at me and smiling. They mimicked that I should wash my hair and face. I could not explain that I was hurrying through the ritual because I did not like sitting in the darkening waters. They offered me the pumice stone after using it thoroughly all over their ponderous bodies. I tried it but it scratched my face. The Arab women's skin was tougher. The women chatted in circles while washing themselves and their children. I could not bring myself to wash my face with the soap they all used for their feet and armpits. They laughed at what they must have thought was a European woman who did not know the rules of cleanliness.

They wanted me also to pull out superfluous eyebrows, hair under the arms, and to shave my pubic hair. I finally slipped away to the next room where pails of cooler water were thrown over me. 

I wanted to see the Arab women clothed again, concealed in yards of white cotton. Such beautiful heads had risen out of these mountains of flesh, heads of incredible perfection, dazzling eyes heavily fringed, sensual features. Sometimes moss-green eyes in dark sienna skins, sometimes coal-black eyes in pale moonlit skins, and always the long heavy black hair, the undulating tresses. But these heads rose from formless masses of flesh, heaving like plants in the sea, swelling, swaying, falling, the breast like sea anemones, floating, the stomachs of perpetually pregnant women, the legs like pillows, the backs like cushions, the hips with furrows like a mattress.

They were all watching me, with friendly nodding of their heads, commenting on my figure. By counting on their fingers they asked was I adolescent? I had no fat on me. I must be a girl. They came around me and we compared skin colors. They seemed amazed by my waist. They could enclose it in their two hands. They wanted to wash my hair. They soaped my face with tenderness. They touched me and talked with volubility. The old woman came with two pails and threw them over me. I was ready to leave, but the Arab women transmitted messages of all kinds with their eyes, smiles, talk. The old woman led me to the third room, which was cooler, and threw cold water over me, and then led me back to the dressing room."

 So maybe there's less to say about the hammam and more about Anaïs's unique perspective on what she was seeing. Oh, the world is so sensual! Nevertheless I figured it was worth sharing.