A book presentation and conversation between Brian Dillon and Momus.
Monday, June 27 2011
The Swedenborg Society
20-21 Bloomsbury Way
London WC1A 2TH
Two new publications, Sanctuary by Brian Dillon and Solution 214-238: The Book of Japans by Momus, were launched at the Swedenborg Society. Both books are published by Sternberg Press.
Sanctuary is a fiction set in the ruins of a Modernist building on the outskirts of a city in Northern Europe. The structure, a Catholic seminary built in the 1960s and abandoned twenty years later, embodies the failure of certain ambitions: architectural, civic, and spiritual. But it is the site too of a more recent disappearance. A young artist, intent on exploring the complex and its history, has gone missing among the wreckage. Months later his lover visits the place, unsure what she is looking for, and finds herself drawn into the strange nexus of energies and memories that persist there. Sanctuary is a story about what survives - of bodies, ideas, objects and the artistic or literary terms that might describe them - in the wake of catastrophe.
Following the success of The Book of Scotlands, Momus has been commissioned to write another book as part of Inigo Niermann's Solution series. Solution Japan, or The Book of Japans, makes a case for the rehabilitation of the idea of the "far". We live in a time when difference and distance have been eroded and eradicated by globalization, the Internet, and cheap jet travel. The Book of Japans restores a sense of wonder - along with a plethora of imagination-triggering inaccuracies - by taking the reader on a trip not just through space but also time.
Brian Dillon was borin in Dublin in 1969. He is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine and AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Kent. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and a memoir, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005). His writing appears regularly in such publications as frieze, Artforum, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the Wire. He lives in Canterbury.
Momus is the pseudonym of Scottish musician, artist, and writer Nick Currie. Born in Paisley, Scotland, in 1960, he has released twenty albums of pop music on independent labels like 4AD, Creation, and Cherry Red. He writes regularly about art, design, and culture for the New York Times, iD, frieze, Spike, and 032c. In addition to The Book of Scotlands, Momus has published a novel, The Book of Jokes (Dalkey Archive Press, 2009).
