Comments (0)

By TNV, January 17, 2011

Sleeping States is the recording and touring name of Markland Starkie, and various friends and collaborators. Markland previously contributed a piece of writing to this website. But the text of The Next Village stayed with him, and a song of that name appeared on his subsequent album, In The Gardens Of The North. Below is a film of Markland performing the song solo as part of the Bandstand Busking series.

This website has not really taken off in the way I’d hoped. Perhaps people were intimidated by the notion of saying something back to Kafka. Perhaps The Next Village is not something that stimulates a lot of people. In any case, most of the people asked to contribute to the site have not done so. And it hasn’t gathered any momentum in terms of unsolicited contributions – there have been very few.

But many have contributed. And I’m happy that this website contains some remarkable pieces of writing, and film, and music and photography. It stands as a small but I think moving testament to the power of the little piece of prose that inspired it.

I am no longer soliciting pieces for the website, and in truth I haven’t been doing so in some time. If contributions come to me in the future I will of course post them. And this website will remain on-line and accessible.

Many thanks to all the contributors, and to all the website’s visitors. Enjoy the music.

P.S. Sleeping States are currently on a short tour of the eastern US. Go and see.

Comments (0)

By TNV, June 23, 2009

As you may have noticed, The Next Village disappeared last week. This was due to an accidental technical catastrophe (I deleted it) which occurred during a complicated software upgrade procedure (I was trying to install the new version of Wordpress). You’ll be glad to hear that I was plunged into a black and terrible despair when I realised what I’d done. It took me a while to remember that all the contributions still exist, on my computer, and were not lost forever. So, fear not, The Next Village will be back.

Mindful of the current political cliché – never waste a good crisis – I’m taking this opportunity to make the site a better looking and more robust kind of thing, and to try and broaden its reach a little. By this I mean simply that I’m taking my time reposting everything, and trying to generate a wider readership by promoting it a little more than I’ve previously done.

I’m going to take a little while redesigning, and then I’ll start reposting all the contributions one by one (maybe one a day or something like that) until we’re bang up to date and rolling again with new stuff – of which there is already an exciting backlog.

Thank you for your patience, especially those of you who have contributed work to the site already.

KR