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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾

@acfick72.bsky.social

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Reader; Emperor of Solitude; self-ironising Don of #NorthJozi; Anarchosyndicalist Czar of All Tolstoyan Russian Multiverses; House Fuller-Hallim; Mr Havisham. 🤴🏽📚🤓📖📝☕️🏉🎾🎞 👨🏽‍🌾🌍 Inept food garden volunteer. No performative online warring.

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 4d

Spring morning, October in #NorthJozi: jacarandas in bloom in the street below the garden of the #LateImperialLibrary.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️👓🌳🍃🌍☀️

Jacaranda trees in bloom form the tree canopy in thr original northern suburbs of Johannesburg on a clear spring morning.

Bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname in room with a sofa and a plain pine table; a cup of coffee, a pair of spectacles, and Hilary Mantel's memoir can be seen on the table. The Calendario Romano hangs on the left of the frame showing a monochromatic photograph of a man in priest's garb wearing a cappello romano in Rome.

Photograph of the main study of the Late Imperial Library showing a very untidy and cluttered large desk, shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname, a portable typewriter, and the Calendario Romano open to October showing an attractkge your man in a priest's garb in front of Roman stonework.

Shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname in the Late Imperial Library, with volumes by Paul Monette, L. M. Montgomery, and Toni Morrison in the foreground, and against the far wall, works by John Updike and Gore Vidal (among others) through the oeuvres of Edmund White, Patrick White, and Colson Whitehead.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 1h

One shall pretend these twenty volumes in three different Germanic languages are the particular ones one intends to read by end November, knowing as one does thirty completely different volumes (some in two Latin languages) in the #LateImperialLibrary may replace them before we reach end-2025. 📚🖋

Twenty books stacked on a dark side table in front of shelves of fiction (only partly visible) on which the volumes have been alphabetised by author surname from Muriel Spark through Christina Stead, Laurence Sterne, and Snorri Sturluson.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 16h

Early morning, looking northwards from the balcony of the #LateImperialLibrary: spring in #NorthJozi.

🫅🏾📖☕️🌳🪻🍃🌍☀️

Jacarandas in bloom, the tallest six storeys high, with the three lift shafts and yellow brickwork of an art deco building and picking up the light of the rising sun.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 1d

'But they're only stories. Made up. Everyone knows it's not real, not the truth.'
From YOU CAN'T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN (1987)

Zoë Wicomb
23 November 1948 - 13 October 2025

📚💙 📚🖋 #BookSky

Post quotation from 'A Trip to the Gifberge', the concluding story in Zoë Wicomb's YOU CAN'T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN (1987).

The image attached to the post shows Wicomb's books on a shelf, in chronological order: 10 copies of YOU XAN'T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN (1987), 4 copies of DAVID'S STORY (2000), 3 copies of PLAYING IN THE LIGHT (2006), 2 copies of THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY (2008), 2 copies of OCTOBER (2014), one copy of STILL LIFE (2020), and horizontally placed on top of the fiction the collection of her essays, RACE, NATION, TRANSLATION: SOUTH AFRICAN ESSAYS 1990-2013 (2018).

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · Nov 5

Lexical vigilance was a matter of mental hygiene: a regular rethinking of words in common use, like cleaning out rotten food from the back of a refrigerator where no one expects food to rot and poison the rest.
▪️Zoë Wicomb, “Another Story”, 1990

Photograph of Zoë Wicomb, wearing a white blouse, white drop-earrings, standing in front of bookcases packed with old brown hardbacks.

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · Sep 18

Choose 20 books that have stayed with you or influenced you. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no reviews, just covers.

#BookSky 💙📚 #Books

#BookChallenge

Day 12

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · Aug 12

"[S]uch is apartheid that, like many whites, many blacks cannot imagine a life that would be neither a black man's life or a white man's life."
▫️Nadine Gordimer, 1959

Historical heartburn, anyone? Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . . .

Extracts from "What is apartheid?" by Nadine Gordimer, published in HOLIDAY in 1959; republished in LIVING IN HOPE AND HISTORY: NOTES FROM OUR CENTURY (1999) and also in TELLING TIMES: WRITING AND LIVING 1950-2008 (2010)

"Hundreds of thousands of white South Africans are concerned only with holding on to white privilege. They believe
that they would rather die holding on to it than give up the smallest part; and I believe they would. They cannot imagine a life that would be neither their life, nor the black man's life, but
another life altogether. How can they imagine freedom, who for years have had to be so vigilant to keep it only to themselves?"

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · Aug 13

We, or, at the least, those of us who live or have lived in South Africa, can never say we were not told.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose . . .

Extract from Njabulo S. Ndebele, "A home for intimacy", Mail & Guardian (26 April 1996). Republished as "Home for Intimacy" in A WRITING LIFE: CELEBRATING NADINE GORDIMER edited by Andries Walter Oliphant (1998).

"Intimacy! A dangerous word which has the capacity to imply banality or profundity. Yet when we gave up the AK-47 for the
discourse f negotiation, we opted for intimacy. In the choice between negotiation and revolutionary violence we opted for feelings and the intellect. We committed ourselves to posing questions and researching them for solutions. We opted for complexity, ambiguity, and nuance. It is here that we will develop
new political meanings and values. It is here that we will find new homes. It is here that we come to terms with the disturbing truth that both friends and enemies of yesterday can no longer be taken for granted. The heroes of the revolution may reveal distressing flaws, while the devils of repression may become disturbingly lovable."

https://mg.co.za/article/1996-04-26-a-home-for-intimacy/

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · Aug 13

My friends from college they're all married now
They have their houses and their lawns
They have their silent noons
Tearful nights, angry dawns
Their children hate them for the things they're not
They hate themselves for what they are
And yet they drink, they laugh
▫️Jacob Brackman, 1970

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · Apr 23

Yo conozco distritos en que los jóvenes se prosternan ante los libros y besan con barbarie las páginas, pero no saben descifrar una sola letra […] sospecho que la especie humana – la única – está por extinguirse y que la Biblioteca perdurará
▫️Jorge Luis Borges, 1941

#WorldBookDay 📚💙

Two shelves of plays: several individual volumes of Shakespeare plays, along with several boxed sets and copies of the complete worls, alongside Beckett, John Webster, Harold Pinter, Sam Shepard, Gore Vidal, and Angela Carter.

Quote above translated:
"I know districts where young people prostrate themselves before books and kiss the pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter [...] I suspect that the human species – the only one – is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure".

Two shelves kf plays and poetry, with volumes by Shakespeare, Rilke, Plath Spenswe, Soyinka, Wordsworth, Whitmam, Yeats, and Alice Walker.

Fiction on three bookcases, with the focus on multiple copies of Cervantes's DON QUIXOTE.

Volumes of poetry on two shelves from Fleur Adcock, Anna Akhmatova, Ariosto, Atwood, Elizabeth Bishop.

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 4d

The trees in the garden of the #LateImperialLibrary and on the street taking on full spring foliage in #NorthJozi.

🌳🍃🌍🌥

Palm tree with oranve fronds and broad leafed-tree.

Broad-leafed tree with woody branches visible.

Broad-leafed trees with variegated colouring on the street.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 4d

Spring morning, October in #NorthJozi: jacarandas in bloom in the street below the garden of the #LateImperialLibrary.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️👓🌳🍃🌍☀️

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 5d

"O City of Gold, much is forgiven every time I return to your messy heart. You are my Bluebeard, and I cleave myself unto your potholed, faithless streets."

Home, again, and not a moment too soon.

The Johannesburg skyline seen from the westbound M2 south of the city centre.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 5d

Fear of commitment lies behind the fear of writing […] What is worst, what is most wretched, is being almost ready to write.
▫️Hilary Mantel, 2023 [2009]

#BookSky 📚💙 📚🖋

Extracts from A MEMOIR OF MY FORMER SELF: A LIFE IN WRITING by Hilary Mantel (2023).

Main post taken from "Persons from Purlock", originally published in 'The Guardian', 2009.

Extract in the image taken from "On the One Hand", originally published in 'The Guardian', 2007.

"Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths. It multiplies ambiguity. It's about the particular, which suggests the general: about inner meaning, seen with the inner eye, always glimpsed, always vanishing, always more or less baffling, and scuffled on to the page hesitantly, furtively, or transgressively, by night and with the wrong hand."

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 5d

And then when one finds out her political views . . . one may wish one misread those and so one assumes, charitably, the Norwegians may have as well. But then, looking at their sovereign wealth fund and its ties, this may be an Orwellian name for the award.

a kitchen with a stainless steel refrigerator that has a picture of a man on it

Alt: GIF of a tall man walking to a chair in a kitchen with a stainless steel refrigerator, sitting down to read a newspaper, then looking directly at the viewer with an expression of being unimpressed.

media.tenor.com

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 5d

It is always so intriguing at how persistent and sadly obvious such creatures are, the sort od damaged psyche willing to spend so much time and energy on futile, joyless hatred . . . Pathos, and bathos.

Image of a hand holding a spray can with a label facing the viewer which reads, in all capitals, "Troll spray. Designed to remove unwanted trolls from message boards."

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Martin Shaw @thebooksdesk.bsky.social · 5d

“Devices are not dangerous for literature.
People can be dangerous for literature.
People, for example, who do not read.”
— László Krasznahorkai

[h/t Vince Czyz)

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 5d

Morning flight in the heart of the heart of the country: birds in a (and the) Free State.

🐦🍃🌍☀️

The bright disk of the sun in a blue sky flecked with cirrus clouds over Mangaung, the capital of the Free State Province of South Africa. Mangaung is also the seat of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the Republic of South Africa, the second highest judicial chamber (the Constitutional Court is the top court in the land).

Birds in morning flight against a blue sky over Mangaung, also known as Bloemfontein, the "City of Roses".

Birds flying under a blue sky over Mangaung with the bright disc of the sun flaring into the right side of the image.

Cirrus clouds against a blue sky above a koppie (rocky ourcropping) in Mangaung in South Africa's landlocked Free State Province.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 5d

😒

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 6d

Like most people in the world, then as well as now, we grew up between shouting and silence. Some of us made up our own minds, others had their minds made up for them.
▪️Arundhati Roy, 2025

#BookSky 📚🖋 📚💙

Extracts in the main post and the image from MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME by Arundhati Roy (2025).

"If I could understand myself better, I'd probably understand a lot more about the world and certainly about my country, in which so many people seem to revere their persecutors and appear grateful to be subjugated and told what to do, what to wear, what to eat and how to think. There is something knotty here, something puzzling about the human condition in all of this. But maybe it's best to leave some things un-understood, mysterious. I'm all for the unclimbed mountain. The unconquered moon. I'm weary of endless theories and explanations. I think I have begun to prefer descriptions.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 6d

To quote the calendars from Nelson Mandela's prison cells: "ANOTHER SUNNY DAY IN SOUTH AFRICA".

🌳🌷🍃🐦🌍☀️

Blue sky with birds over Manguang, the capital of the landlocked Free State province of South Africa.

Morning sun over the city with a rocky hill beyond the rooftops of blocks of flats in Mangaung, Free State.

Rocky hills in Mangaung—one of them is Naval Hill.

Naval Hill and a statue of Nelson Mandela, fist aloft, next to the radio mast, under a clear blue sky.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 7d

In the heart of the country, pace J.M. Coetzee, but #Mangaung a.k.a. #Bloemfontein, the "City of Roses", capital of the landlocked Free State Province neighbouring the Kingdom of Lesotho, was the home of the writer Karel Schoeman.

🌳🌷🍃🌍☀️

View of Naval Hill in Bloemfontein/Mangaung under a clear blue sky.

Sunlight bursting into frame with a clear blue sky over Bloemfontein/Mangaung in the Free State Province of South Africa.

Trees and sandstone buildings in the city centre of Bleomfontein/Mangaung.

Mangaung/Bloemfontein on a sunny morning in spring.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 8d

Landing in the heart of the country, #Mangaung . . .

🌅🛬🌍

The sunset over the Free State province of South Africa.

AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 8d

Apparently there were rain storms in our absence, and now the jacarandas are blooming in springtime across #NorthJozi.

🍃🌳🪻🪺🌍🌤

Jacaranda trees blossoming at the northern edge of the garden, downslope, above the four storey high tree canopy, and beyond them, the art deco building nextdoor with its lift towers rising beneath a lightly clouded sky.

The swimming pool surrounded by trees and bushes taking on their spring foliage and blooms.

Bkue sky over Johannesburg's original northern suburbs.

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 9d

The sky at the end of the day across #NorthJozi, rain falling along the western horizon. Home, again.

🌦🌍

A view west towards the Northcliff of the crest of the geological Witwatersrand, rain falling from and sunlight streaming through the clouds.

Clouds amover the old northern suburbs of Johannesburg.

The view eastwards of clouds in a blue sky in the late afternoon in Johannesburg, in the Gauteng Province of South Africa.

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AC Fick 📚🏉🎾🎞👨🏾‍🏫👨🏾‍🌾 @acfick72.bsky.social · 9d

One spent six days at the coast and came back with these. Now to prepare one's imperious personage for the imperial tour of the heart of the country which begins tomorrow; one begins to see why those Saxe-Coburg-Gotha cousins want to be remunerated for gadding about and cutting ribbons.
🧳🚕🛫🛬🚕🛁🛏🛁🧳🚕🛫🛬

Books piled on a pine table im front of bookcases in Fiction Room A of the Late Imperial Library.