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acfick72.bsky.social
AC Fick 📚
@acfick72.bsky.social
1.4K followers 560 following 2.5K posts
Reader; Emperor of Solitude; self-ironising Don of #NorthJozi; Anarchosyndicalist Czar of All Tolstoyan Russian Multiverses; House Fuller-Hallim; Mr Havisham.
🤴🏽📚🤓📖📝☕️🌍
An obsolescent isolate losing hearing and sight in the twilight of this incarnation.
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acfick72.bsky.social
AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 1d
[I]t must be becoming increasingly clear to some, at least, that all of us are standing in the same deep shadow, a shadow which can only be lifted by human courage and honor.
▪️James Baldwin, 1972

On December fourth
water spurts out of the mouse.
▫️Anne Sexton, 1975

🫅🏾📚🤓📖💻🫖☕️🗝🚪🌳🌍
Photograph of Fiction Room A of the Late Imperial Library, showing the Calendario Romano on the left open to December, the picture a photograph of a dark-haired young man dressed as a priest holding a copy of LA VIE DI ROMA to his chest; on the rigbt, a table covered with a khaki cloth, a teapot and mug, a bowl of fruit, and shelves stacked with volumes of fiction alphabetised by author surname. A view into the Nonfiction Room of the Late Imperial Library, with a copy of the Calendario Romano hanging on the left open to December with a photograph of a young blond man in priest's garb in front of stonework, and on the right shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname, and a cluttered desk. An upright student desk from the 1980s with a Yugoslavia made Olivetti typewriter, a laptop, stationery and bibelots, and shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from J.K. Galbraith through Owen Jones. A cluttered desk with laptop, stationery, a printer, bibelots, dictionaries and thesauruses, a tablet, and beyond it a glimpse of the upright student desk from the previous photograph.
acfick72.bsky.social
Watching television programmes and podcasts in which interviewees proudly claim to be graduates of elitist education organisations, one often thinks, "This person went to [that] university? They passed? They got the diploma? What happened?"

📺🎓🫣😱
a woman wearing a blue jacket and silver earrings
Alt: GIF from THE GOOD FIGHT showing Delroy Lindo and Audra McDonald exhanging a look to share their mutual bafflement.
media.tenor.com
December 2, 2025 at 3:42 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Another day of online meetings with urban (and suburban and rural) youths: "who's zooming who", indeed, pace Aretha . . .

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Staring into the camera for another Zoom meeting, trying to maintain a blank expression.
December 2, 2025 at 7:06 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: X*.

(*Approaching the end of the first Monday of the twenty-fourth month of the year.)
December 1, 2025 at 6:43 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
December in #NorthJozi begins with an afternoon hailstorm.

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Hail falling into the garden; the swimming pool is surrounded by trees abd horizontal streak show the combination of rain and hail.
December 1, 2025 at 2:39 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Thus the Annual Cull Of [Some] Duplicates begins in the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi; we are at "G" in fiction; we are also purging those writers who (for various reasons) will not need rereading before one shuffles oneself off this mortal coil.

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9 piles of books on the floor, about to be cleared from Fiction Room A of the Late Imperial Library in North Jozi.
December 1, 2025 at 12:29 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
[I]t must be becoming increasingly clear to some, at least, that all of us are standing in the same deep shadow, a shadow which can only be lifted by human courage and honor.
▪️James Baldwin, 1972

On December fourth
water spurts out of the mouse.
▫️Anne Sexton, 1975

🫅🏾📚🤓📖💻🫖☕️🗝🚪🌳🌍
Photograph of Fiction Room A of the Late Imperial Library, showing the Calendario Romano on the left open to December, the picture a photograph of a dark-haired young man dressed as a priest holding a copy of LA VIE DI ROMA to his chest; on the rigbt, a table covered with a khaki cloth, a teapot and mug, a bowl of fruit, and shelves stacked with volumes of fiction alphabetised by author surname. A view into the Nonfiction Room of the Late Imperial Library, with a copy of the Calendario Romano hanging on the left open to December with a photograph of a young blond man in priest's garb in front of stonework, and on the right shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname, and a cluttered desk. An upright student desk from the 1980s with a Yugoslavia made Olivetti typewriter, a laptop, stationery and bibelots, and shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from J.K. Galbraith through Owen Jones. A cluttered desk with laptop, stationery, a printer, bibelots, dictionaries and thesauruses, a tablet, and beyond it a glimpse of the upright student desk from the previous photograph.
December 1, 2025 at 10:07 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
The machine swallows life and spits out convenience.
▪️Omar El Akkad, 2025
Extract and quotation from ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS by Omar El Akkad (Canongate, 2025) Whatever late capitalism is, it seems to be careening into this embrace of growth by negation. Through that prism, it's hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real human beings might be celebrated with a straight face as something approximating humanness. Under this ordering, it is not some corporation's increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else's increasing tolerance for worse.
December 1, 2025 at 6:58 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: IX.
November 29, 2025 at 8:24 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: VIII.
November 29, 2025 at 3:58 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: VII.
a man in a black sweater stands in a doorway
Alt: GIF of Tobias Menzies wearing a black jumper, behind a door with stained glass insets, shaking hia head and shutting the door.
media.tenor.com
November 29, 2025 at 2:07 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Ik ben ik. Karakter is noodlot. Geschiedenis is G-d. Gepikeerd, altijd maar gepikeerd.
▫️J.M. Coetzee, 1977 [1976]
Portrait of the non-artist on the brink of 53, feeling as if he may as well be 303, an anachronism, vestigial at best in these odd times among these odd people.
November 28, 2025 at 8:16 PM
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
groundup.org.za
A gag order against Open Secrets was overturned in the Western Cape High Court on Thursday afternoon by Judge Nathan Erasmus.

Read groundup.org.za/article/gag-... by Liezl Human
Gag order against Open Secrets lifted
Case brought by Integrated Convoy Protection, which sells armoured vehicles to UAE, dismissed
groundup.org.za
November 28, 2025 at 7:32 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.
▪️Omar El Akkad, 2025
Extracts from ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS by Omar El Akkad (Canongate, 2025). Colonialism demands history begin past the point of colonization precisely because, under those narrative conditions, the colonist's every action is necessarily one of self-defense. The story begins not when the wagons arrive, but only after they are circled. In this telling, fear is the exclusive property of only one people, and the notion that the occupied might fear the doing of their occupier is as fantastical as the notion that barbarians might be afraid of the gate. Any population on whom this asymmetry is imposed will always be the instigators, the cause of what is and, simultaneously the justification for what will be. The savage outside does, the civilized center must respond.
November 28, 2025 at 1:10 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: VI.
a man with a beard is making a funny face while wearing a black shirt .
Alt: GIF of Idris Elba looking both exasperated and disdainful.
media.tenor.com
November 28, 2025 at 11:35 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Rainy end of November in #NorthJozi; remaining cloistered in the #LateImperialLibrary, clearing correspondence and plotting how to close off this 23rd month of the year . . .

🫅🏾📚🤓📖💻🗃☕️🗝🚪🌍🌧
Looking into the nonfiction room of the Late Imperial Library, the dictionariea and thesauruses seen from the opposite side (their spines facing away from the viewer) among bibelots and stationery, and bookcases on which the volumes are alphabetised by author or editor surname. Through a door on the right of the frame, a short bookcase with volumes of fiction similarly organised can be seen in another room. A view of the main desk in the nonfiction room of the Late Imperial Library, with dictionaries and thesauruses, thotchkes and stationery, a printer, and a desklamp, surrounded by bookcases on which the volumes have been alphabetised by author or editor surname. A door in the middle of the frame leads onto a north-facing balcony. Volumes of fiction on various shelves and bookcases surround a table covered with a white cloth on which two bowls of fruit and a red mug of tea can be seen. Two sets of shelves arranged perpendicularly; on the left volumes of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname, from Susan Sontag through Gore Vidal and Oscar Wilde; on the right anthologies of poetry similarly arranged, from Anna Akhmatova through Chaucer to Rustum Kozain.
November 28, 2025 at 9:29 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: V.
November 27, 2025 at 7:45 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Books got from a donation sale in support of the Sandton public library (a block over from where the G20 summit was held last weekend) for R20 each (MT 74.46 or €1 or PRC ¥8.25 or P16.41).

Rainy day sale in #NorthJozi.

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From left to right: (1) top row: copies of Richard Wright's AMERICAN HUNGER (paperback), Maya Angelou's RAINBOW IN THE CLOUD (hb) and SINGIN' AND SWINGIN' AND GETTIN' MERRY LIKE CHRISTMAS (pb), George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM (2 copies); (2) bottom row: Peter Wilhelm's LM AND OTHER STORIES (hb sans dust jacket), Don DeLillo's WHITE NOISE (pb), Richard Wright's BLACK BOY (pb), and a copy of STAFFRIDER magazine (Vol. 7 No. 2, 1988). The two volumes of THE READER'S DIGEST GREAT ENCYCLOPAEDIC DICTIONARY, bought out of nostalgia as we had a copy of this at home in my 1970s childhood.
November 27, 2025 at 4:24 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
A friend occasionally asks for the recipe of something one would recently have cooked, and then one always has to make up the steps and ingredients from (mis)memory as one does not cook following or taking inspiration from recipes . . .

👨🏾‍🍳🤷🏾‍♂️🫣📝🍲🥗🥧🥂
a bald man wearing a grey sweater is making a face
Alt: GIF of Ainsley Harriott mugging for the camera.
media.tenor.com
November 26, 2025 at 9:41 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: IV.

🤴🏽📚🤓📖
November 26, 2025 at 7:38 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Without empathy we risk the breakdown of relationships, we become capable of hurting others, and we can cause conflict. With empathy we have a resource to resolve conflict, increase community cohesion, and dissolve another person's pain.
▫️Simon Baron-Cohen, 2011
Extracts from THE SCIENCE OF EVIL: ON EMPATHY AND THE ORIGINS OF CRUELTY by Simon Baron-Cohen (2011) Empathy is a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with a neighbor. I hope you have been persuaded that this resource is a better way to resolve problems than the alternatives (such as guns, laws, or religion). And unlike the arms industry, which costs trillions of dollars to maintain, or the prison industry and legal system, which cost millions of dollars to keep oiled, empathy is free. And unlike religion, empathy cannot by definition oppress anyone.
November 26, 2025 at 4:36 PM
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
oliver48.bsky.social
via Anti-Reform
November 26, 2025 at 9:16 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: III.
a man says it 's not a great time in front of a hbo logo
Alt: GIF from TASK (2025) of Mark Ruffalo saying "It's not a great time".
media.tenor.com
November 25, 2025 at 8:49 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
☎️
Still from THE SOPRANOS showing James Gandolfini as Tony, on the telephone, saying, “More is lost by indecision than wrong decision.” Still from DALLAS showing Larry Hagman as J.R. Ewing on the telephone at the foot of the Southfork stairwell, saying, “I know, I know.”
November 25, 2025 at 7:25 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: II.
a close up of a man 's face with the netflix logo in the corner
Alt: GIF from KALEIDOSCOPE in which Giancarlo Esposito as Leo Pap, saying "Next" as he walks through a room.
media.tenor.com
November 25, 2025 at 6:55 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: I.
a woman wearing a black jacket and a pearl necklace is standing in front of a wall .
Alt: GIF from THE COLBYS showing Stephanie Beacham as Sable Colby wearing a black fur coat and elaborate jewels on.her ears and neck, her lips parted in surprise, then changing her expression to one of judgement and pursing her lips.
media.tenor.com
November 25, 2025 at 5:19 PM