Stephen Mooney

I have posted my review of this on my blog, The Itinerant Librarian. Click (or copy paste to your browser) the link below to read it in full.

Link to review: http://itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2014/03/what-time-is-it-its-half-past-dan...… (mere)

The Decline of the English Cottage. Men having sex in public toilets, except it's less about the physical act (there isn't really a lot of actual sex in this book), more about the literary activity that surrounds it: writing on cubicle walls, message board posts, dirty emails. At one point the writer leaves an invitation with his email address in several toilets, and we're shown a selection of the replies received - some are extended exchanges, but whether any actual physical contact occurs remains an open question. (The scattered snatches of lyrics from dance hits, which at first just look like mood music, behave similarly: the words are not really the important thing in those records, but they are the element you can record in a poem.) And then there's the way the public impacts on the private: the widespread closing of public toilets reducing the space for this activity (physical or literary), the increase in surveillance making it harder. (Lezlie Lowe's recent book No Place to Go deals with the reduction in public convenience provision from a more socially conventional angle.) But the role of surveillance is always ambivalent: nobody wants to be filmed by CCTV while using a toilet, but part of the appeal of sex in public is the thought that one could be caught (without that you may as well be in bed). And the presence of surveillance is never certain: one section of the book is a letter written to TV Licensing. The writer has been contacted because they have bought a television but own no license for it. He replies that the TV was not for himself but bought as a gift, and objects that the details of what he assumed was a private purchase have been shared for the benefit of Big Government - the letter is angry, but you wonder if he isn't getting some illicit thrill from writing it. I'm not sure about the lengthy analysis of the film I, Robot that crops up in the second half of the book - it seems dry and unwelcome. But that, too, adds to the collage of textures and registers, a formal notice (Now Wash Your Hands) among so much graffiti.… (mere)