Sam Jordison writes up my reading at The Wapping Project for The Guardian (not online; 25th Feb):

“I confess here tonight, before the company, there must be something very wrong with me. I want to parade my inadequacies before an audience. There’s something very wrong with me.”

So said Lars Iyer to the crowd shivering before him in the beautiful – but very cold – gallery space in East London’s Wapping Project, where he was launching his (excellent) new novel Dogma. He went on:

“What kind of person even confesses like this? A masochist! And not even the interesting kind who likes being whipped. A particularly boring kind of masochist, with feeble, pathetic little auto-critiques.”

Such self-recrimination will be familiar to readers of Lars Iyer’s novels. In them the narrator (also called Lars, and just like the author, an academic phliosopher based at Newcastle University) is forever musing over his own short comings. And when he isn’t doing so, his friend, named W., does it for him, comparing him, among other things to a “sad ape locked up with his faeces”, and “a harbinger”, a sign of “the End”.

There has been much speculation about whether this acerbic character is based on a flesh and blood person and now Iyer provided a definitive answer. W. is indeed real. In fact, he even wanted to come and witness the launch of Dogma,  but was too busy.

Yet even if W. couldn’t make an appearance, he remains a constant influence in Iyer’s life. Only this week, the author told us, W. tried to carry out an “intervention” and force him to apply himself to his academic work more rigorously. “He wanted me to mend my ways,” he explained. “He said, ‘you are a disgrace to philosophy. The way you parade yourself on facebook is disgusting.’”

It’s to be hoped that W. doesn’t also read Iyer’s twitter stream, for there, the author admitted: “I’ve put up five tweets today advertising this event. My God. It’s come to this. I have no soul. I’m my own marketeer.” He blamed Thatcher and neo-liberalism for this urge to hawk his own ego, but most of all, he blamed himself: “I disgust myself and the problem is that I enjoy disgusting myself.”