States of Independence, 2025

Today I visited Leicester's "States of Independence" event - crowded as usual with small press publishers and writers (Roy Marshall, Emma Lee, etc). I bought the 2020 and 2021 "Leicester Writes Short Story Prize" Anthologies (a bargain), and "Flash Fusion" (by South Asian Writers) - the pieces I've heard from it so far sounded good.

Sleepy heads

When Italian artists began to imitate classical statues, they copied the blank eyes. On rare occasions a statue’s eyes were closed, not blank. If the figure was in action we had to imagine that their pose showed us their dream. More commonly such statues were lying, or at least their head was sideways, like this sculpture in a village outside Cambridge.

Sophie Cave's "The Floating Heads" (Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow) uses another trope - floating, which is more to do with dreaming, I'd guess.

In painting, the "sleeping lover" is a genre, but that's not what Dali's depicting in "Sleep" - the head looks more like a dirigible that's lost all hope, precariously propped up. In paintings, closed eyes can mean death, but except for crucifixions statues of the dead are rare. I suppose using stone to represent death is too literal.

But couldn’t these figure with eyes closed be blinking? We spend about 2% of our waking life with our eyes closed. Perhaps Venus de Milo was caught in the moment of blinking so we can see her but she can’t see us. Nowadays kids sometimes paint eyes on their eyelids. Eyes, after all, are the windows of the soul. If Michelangelo had known that old statues had painted eyes, would he still have given David sculpted irises?

Vona Groake and Karen Solie

Tonight, taking a detour around the scaffolding in the Great Court, Trinity, I passed the busy Servery to reach the Old Combination Room - a reading by Vona Groake (St Johns writer in residence), Karen Solie (Canadian) and some student poets. Tristram Saunders (Trinity poet in residence) was the compere. A free evening with free wine. About 20 attended, which included the performers. I've read and enjoyed books by the two main poets and liked a lot of the evening's poetry - "fog makes surprising what it does not conceal", etc.

Last Sunday I attended an open-mic in a pub with Carrie Etter guesting. £5 and no free drink. About 40 attended. Maybe the publicity was better, or maybe the chance to read one's poems out is worth paying for. I didn't read but at least half the attendees did.

Character-based stories - trad vs frag

Traditional character-based stories often depend on traditional notions of self and psychology - religious ideas of Soul having morphed into Freudian concepts. Stories reach a climax when the protagonist learns/accepts something of their "true self" after removing repression or discovering/remembering some key event in their past.

Trad writers who write for/about themselves tend to measure success by how well they think they've expressed in words what's inside themselves.

Various 20th century developments have confused the situation -

• Modernism - Kafka, etc
• The trend towards interpersonal methods of growth
• Socialisation (including the effects of social media, role-play, compartmentalisation, etc)
• A distrust of unification and tidiness, and a greater tolerance for neurodivergent PoVs

- all contributing to a more fragmentary concept of self/selves and a consequent change in the character-based story template. Linear plots with epiphanies and happy endings no longer seem to model typical characters. Frag writers who write for/about themselves might measure success by how many Likes and hits one of their online personas get.

I write trad stories, but not very well. When I write frag stories, I'm conscious of omitting the very features that people would like in a trad story. I don't know if my frag stories are any better than the trad ones, but there are more outlets for them in this fragmentary publishing world.

See also

• Literature, depersonalisation and derealisation
• People who need people (a workshop about character)
• Empathy and literature