Freakishly Clean

I recently moved into a new apartment in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of cleaning to be done. Naturally, instead of doing it, I’ve taken to having long conversations with myself about the nature and history of cleaning.

Retired UCLA championship basketball coach John Wooden gave a great TED talk in which he asserts that keeping things neat and clean is a key to success in any aspect of life. He’s not speaking metaphorically; me means actual, physical cleanliness, and he leaves its connection to success implicit, which is, after all, the whole point.

Barbara Erenreich wrote elegantly, if someone critically, of the house-cleaning industry in her autobiographical exploration of working-class life, Nickel And Dimed. Erenreich worked for a franchised cleaning company that did not allow her to use water, and required her to clean on her hands and knees as a way of demonstrating to the customers that real work was being done (when the opposite was true). Read the rest of this entry »