Sam Byers

@sambyers

Author of Idiopathy, Perfidious Albion, and Come Join Our Disease

381 Following893 Followers644 Posts

Bluesky

Is this your profile?Claim it and sambyers.dirty.social is yours.Claim profile

Sam Byers@sambyers· 8d

I’m not sure but I think the tree has regrown. See here in colour - they look like the tree’s own leaves.

Sam Byers@sambyers· 8d

The joy of running the same route twice a week is being able to watch these things change. Here’s the tree in winter when it first went down.

Sam Byers@sambyers· 8d

Incredible the life in this downed tree.

Sam Byers@sambyers· 19d

Earlier this week I said that ending rough sleeping was near the top of my political wish list. Fixing social care so that people don’t have to struggle without support, and don’t have to make sacrifices to pay for that support, is probably at the very top. If the Times have this right, it’s huge.

Sam Byers@sambyers· 21d

No no you don’t understand: the pollution was *protecting* us.

A headline from The Telegraph stating that recent heatwaves in Britain “are being driven by cleaner skies after pollution was stripped from the atmosphere.”

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jun 22

My co-worker: a small demon who loves to sunbathe.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jun 17

The yacht couple have called for calm, just FYI.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jun 14

“When you're young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn't, it stands still. We're the ones that move.”

Bob Dylan, 85
The best thing about being 80 is that you outlive the clocks that have been chasing you. It's freedom from that lie that anything was ever under control. You don't chase the parade anymore. You're an old king from some vanished country. You're harder to program. You're not rushing to become anything and you're not haunted by things that you did. You're haunted by how little of it really mattered in the way you thought it would.

Bob Dylan, 85
The worst thing about being 80 is that you still want to say yes to everything, but the world moves without asking. The old fire in your heart still tells you to do this and that, but your body says we already did it. Also, nothing surprises you. It sounds like a luxury but it's not, and also you've run out of illusions. People treat you like either you've solved something or you've lost something, and you haven't. You see lite repeating itself everywhere.
The really worst part about being 80 is that you find, at last, you've got an
understanding of something that might have altered everything in the past, had it come at a time when something could still be altered. When you're young you think that time moves forward. At 80 you know that it doesn't, it stands still. We're the ones that move.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jun 6

Perfection.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jun 2

Unless one habitually reads an entire book straight through without so much as a comfort break, doesn’t all reading involve “self-serialising”?

Extract from a guardian article about reading the classics which recommends “self-serialising” ie reading a chapter at a time in order to “replicate the experience of reading Victorian classics in the serialised form in which they were originally published.”

Sam Byers@sambyers· May 31

Hemsby, Norfolk.

Sam Byers@sambyers· May 23

Will Self is currently writing one of the best regular politics and culture columns you’re likely to read, and for reasons that remain a mystery doing so exclusively on Facebook and X. This week he has weighed in on the AI writing crisis, and his thoughts are typically piercing and brilliant.

The web has become a realm of disavowal. Human beings enter it in order not to become more fully themselves but less so. They use it to evade embodiment, evade continuity, evade consequence. That literary institutions proved so permeable to this environment demonstrates not merely incompetence but philosophical exhaustion. Publishing ceased to believe sufficiently in literature to defend the conditions under which literature remains possible.

To write with genuine style requires embodiment plus all the linguistic capacities already approximated statistically by the machine. It requires the encoding of lived temporality into symbolic form capable of being… [tea break]…reanimated by another embodied consciousness at a later historical moment. Once one understands the complexity of this operation, one also understands how fragile literary civilisation truly is.

$The scale of the crisis is therefore monumental. The Granta affair is not simply an embarrassing editorial oversight. It is the first genuinely literary manifestation of a much larger civilisational fracture: institutions charged with preserving style can no longer reliably recognise it.$

Sam Byers@sambyers· May 19

Genuine question: what exactly are we all doing.

Sam Byers@sambyers· May 15

Looking to “bring stories to life” with “expressive options”? Thanks to the power of AI you too can now horrifically over expose your photographs.

Sam Byers@sambyers· May 6

Maybe AI’s most useful contribution to humanity will prove to be the efficiency with which it exposes the most lazy and credulous among us.

Sam Byers@sambyers· May 2

What I am really struggling to conceptualise, as someone who actually *wants* to vote Green, is not just the extraordinarily poisonous views of some its candidates, but the staggeringly weak response of the party when those views are exposed.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Apr 2

A response on Reddit.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Apr 2

Jesus wept.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Mar 27

Dropping by to see the big guys.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Feb 7

Well that’s pretty comprehensive. Was there a meeting about this at which everyone agreed the new consensus.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Feb 2

Co-working arrangements.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jan 27

If not Gould then it has to be this, in my view.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jan 19

Enjoying this a lot more than when I saw it performed - a staging I found infuriatingly distracting and often muddled - but still the pleasures of Zender’s fussy, overly literal interpretation ultimately elude me. Winterreise doesn’t need sound effects. Nor passages barked through a megaphone.

Hans Zender’s orchestrated version of Schubert’s Winterreise, performed by Allan Clayton and the Aurora Ochestra.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Jan 10

Huge, visionary, cosmic, quaint, quotidian, at times almost completely static, filled with moments of dazzling radiance that come bursting forth from passages of heavy dullness that test the patience. Feel very strongly that Celibidache’s Bruckner contains all life within it.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Dec 23

Disappointed not to find an official release of its fabulous soundtrack but I think at least some of it can be found on this album.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Dec 23

Finally watched The Color of Pomegranates - now haunted and obsessed by its remarkable, singular imagery and dreamlike rhythm.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Dec 20

Radiant day for a run. Sun is shining, dung is steaming.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Dec 16

“Birds don’t sing songs of glory” Following my interest in Sean Nós singing, @seventydys.bsky.social prompted me to watch the mesmerising Song of Granite - a gorgeous film on every level, and a fascinating, sideways take on the often clumsy biopic form. Will be rewatching just for the singing.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Dec 5

LD Deutsch, quoting Marie-Louise Von Franz, notes that whenever we encounter the unknown, we fill it with the archetypal, the best example being old sailors’ maps, on which unexplored stretches of water are illustrated with mermaids and sea monsters.

Screenshot of a Joe Rogan interview, in which he says that Jesus could return in the form of an AI, which would mimic the virgin birth.

Sam Byers@sambyers· Nov 14

Hidden behind a piano, only actually visible for fleeting moments when he stood up to assure everyone he was there, but sounding wonderful, playing a beautiful, bluesy set ending with Every Grain of Sand. Fantastic.