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I am appearing with Kjersti Skomsvold at a 'fiction discussion' at the Town Hall Theatre Galway as part of the Cúirt International Festival of Literature this coming Wednesday (25 April at 6.30-8.00pm). Tickets priced €8 and €6 (available at the venue and at http://www.tht.ie.)

Declan Rooney, of the Galway Independent interviews me alongside Kjersti Skomsvold, in anticipation of our appearance at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, held next week.

The current issue of the Times Literary Supplement (not online) has a very interesting review of Dogma by Toby Lichtig.

I took my camera with me – which was the cause of another scene with Ludwig. We were getting on perfectly amicably – when I left him for a moment to take a photo. And when I overtook him again he was silent and sulky. I walked on with him in silence for half an hour, and then asked him what was the matter. I seems my keenness to take that photo had disgusted him – ‘like a man who can think of nothing – when walking – but how the country would do for a golf course’. I had a long talk with him about it, and eventually we made up again. He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself … I only hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no exaggeration to sat he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.

Ludwig was horribly depressed all evening. He has been working terribly hard of late – which may be the cause of it. He talked again tonight about his death – that he was not really afraid to die – but yet frightfully worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted. It all hangs on his absolutely morbid and mad conviction that he is going to die soon – there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can’t help – for he is mad. It is a hopelessly pathetic business – he is clearly having a miserable time of it.

He is morbidly afraid that he may die before he has put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has written out all his other work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the world and of some use to the science of Logic. He has written a lot already – and Russell has promised to publish his work if he were to die – but he is sure that what he has already written is not sufficiently well put, so as absolutely to make plain his real methods of thought etc – which of course are of more value than his definite results. He is always saying he is certain he will die within four years – but today it was two months.

Excerpts from the diary of David Pinsent, Wittgenstein's close friend, with whom he travelled to Norway in 1913. Pinsent, with whom Wittgenstein was in love, died during World War One.

 

[…] all one has really is the posture of lament. Left with neither joy nor sorry, all that remains are the repetitions of gloom and palliative consolations; namely, for W. and Lars, drink and conversation while slouched over a bar. What I find interesting about this repetition, in light of Iyer’s manifesto concerning literature, is that it occurs purely for the enjoyment of others. We, the mostly university educated, some of  us vaguely professorial, derive the sort of pleasure these repetitions are patently designed in the book to avoid.

Very interesting review of Dogma by Brad Johnson at An und für sich.

Rather than, say, foregrounding the constructed and unstable nature of reality through unreliable narration and winking gestures toward the fictiveness of the text, Iyer’s self-deprecating presence in the story makes his prose more direct and his satire more poignantly pathetic.

Fascinating review of Spurious and Dogma by Saelan Twerdy at The New Inquiry.

Even death eludes them: not only the "sweetness" of the white-bearded Bhishma's timely death, but also the resounding, heroic/anti-heroic death of an Ian Curtis or even one modelled on the bathos-ridden suicide of Bruno in Stroszek that we might have been expecting from the chicken à la Herzog that was proffered at the beginning of the book …

Being in Lieu reflects on Dogma.

… the pain is deeper now, the desperation more acute, the catastrophe more imminent.

Paul Bowes reviews Dogma at Amazon.co.uk.

A festival celebrating Robert Walser in Newcastle. All events free.

I am contributing to the following events:

Tues. 20/03 1– 2.30pm
BIOGRAPHY AND LEGACY on Culture Lab Radio
A radio discussion on the role of madness in art and artistic legacy, with Laura Cull, Tess Denman-Cleaver, Gabriele Heller and Lars Iyer.
Tune in at http://culturelabradio.ncl.ac.uk/
Culture Lab, Newcastle University, Grand Assembly Rooms, Kingʼs Walk, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, Tel: 0191 246 4607

Fri. 23/03 4.30-7pm
FERNE NÄHE / DISTANT CLOSENESS at Cuture Lab
A talk by Reto Sorg about Robert Frankʼs exhibition Ferne Nähe /Distant Closeness at the Robert Walser Zentrum, Bern March 2012.
Followed by a panel discussion with Jo Catling, Lars Iyer, Daniel Medin, Daniele Pantano, Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams about Walserʼs unique
legacy.

If modernism is underpinned by a sense of having arrived too late, Lars and W. are seemingly too late to have even arrived – to have genuinely occurred – at all. Even their despair is disembodied and secondhand, a dim echo of someone else’s hopeless struggle for authenticity. Their self-consciousness renders every gesture a cliché, every histrionic expression of despair a redundant parody of a continental tradition that remains out of reach, laughing down at them from on high. Whereas Kafka had despair and meaninglessness, W. and Lars – two Brods cut adrift without a leader – have only idiocy.

from Danny S Byrne's interesting review of Dogma at Ready, Steady, Book.

It is never early enough for W. (who believes things started going downhill in the mid-Neolithic); but neither is it ever late enough. Just as the end keeps on ending endlessly, the novel itself keeps on beginning inexorably. In the paradoxical incipit of Grammars of Creation, George Steiner declares that "We have no more beginnings": here, we have nothing but beginnings, but it comes to the same thing really.

from another interesting review: Andrew Gallix on Dogma for Bookslut.

Iyer implies that a better or “older” world, where literature could still exist, would be one where his own writing couldn’t. The presumption here is that Spurious and its sequel are “signs of the times,” and thus that books can still sum up the epoch in which they’re written: surely a “literary” aim, if ever there was one. Perhaps Iyer’s is a literary project par excellence. Presenting his novels as symptoms or symbols, he slightly uncritically slips into sync with one of W.’s dictums in Dogma: “always write as though your ideas were world-historical.”

from the great David Winters' review of Dogma for The Rumpus.

The irony is that the reality of W.'s and Lars' despair is palliated as it is affirmed and actualised. Writing alone opens a space in which a cure becomes possible, but only if despair is acknowledged. Dogma saturates despair with despair with disingenuous charm; a sly disavowal of despair.

The great Steve Mitchelmore reviews Dogma.