Sam Byers
@sambyers
Author of Idiopathy, Perfidious Albion, and Come Join Our Disease
I’m not sure but I think the tree has regrown. See here in colour - they look like the tree’s own leaves.
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.
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.
“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.”
Unless one habitually reads an entire book straight through without so much as a comfort break, doesn’t all reading involve “self-serialising”?
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.
Looking to “bring stories to life” with “expressive options”? Thanks to the power of AI you too can now horrifically over expose your photographs.
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.
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.
Well that’s pretty comprehensive. Was there a meeting about this at which everyone agreed the new consensus.
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.
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.
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.
Finally watched The Color of Pomegranates - now haunted and obsessed by its remarkable, singular imagery and dreamlike rhythm.
“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.
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.
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.