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acfick72.bsky.social
AC Fick 📚
@acfick72.bsky.social
1.4K followers 560 following 2.4K posts
Reader; Emperor of Solitude; self-ironising Don of #NorthJozi; Anarchosyndicalist Czar of All Tolstoyan Russian Multiverses; House Fuller-Hallim; Mr Havisham.
🤴🏽📚🤓📖📝☕️🌍
An isolate losing hearing and sight in the twilight of this incarnation. Embracing ennui.
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acfick72.bsky.social
Memories may be beautiful, and yet, what’s too painful to remember . . .
Monochromatic still from THE WAY WE WERE showing Robert Redford in a bulky knit sweater.
November 25, 2025 at 7:32 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Did someone say bulky knit?🧣
Lenny Kravitz wearing a massive knitted scarf.
November 25, 2025 at 7:28 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
🤭
Still from SHAMELESS (UK) showing Rory McCann as the priest, standing in Yvonne’s superette, saying, “God works in mysterious ways.” Fixing a penis but not paralysis? There is New Testament precedent of focusing on ‘the lame’ rather than the impotent, but . . .
November 25, 2025 at 6:31 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Felled by illness. This is definitely not #NorthJozi summer weather. This twenty-third month of 2025 . . . and now it would seem someone has been cocking up the order of the volumes on the shelves of the #LateImperialLibrary.

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The view northwards as rain rolls in (at times in near-horizontal sheets). The trees at the bottom of the garden and the multi-storey art deco building downslope can be seen through the rain-spattered window, but the horizon is obscured by rain.
November 25, 2025 at 8:25 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Many rivers to cross: hamba kahle, Jimmy Cliff (1944-2025).
Jimmy Cliff, 1944-2025.
November 24, 2025 at 12:44 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. […] Forget pity, forget even the dead if you must, but at least fight against the theft of your soul.
▫️Omar El Akkad, 2025
Extracts from ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS by Omar El Akkad (2025) One day the killing will be over, either because the oppressed will have their liberation or because there will be so few left to kill. We will be expected to forget any of it ever happened, to acknowledge it if need be but only in harmless, perfunctory ways. Many of us will, if only as a kind of psychological self-defense. So much lives and dies by the grace of endless forgetting. But so many will remember. We say that, sometimes, when it's our children killed: Remember. And it may seem now like it's someone else's children, but there's no such thing as someone else's children. The problem with fixating on the abyss into which one's opponent has descended while simultaneously digging one's own is that, eventually, it gets too dark to tell the difference.
November 23, 2025 at 9:53 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Indeed. 😔
Film still from Denys Arcand’s LES INVASIONS BARBARES (2003), showing Rémy Girard as Rémy, a history professor dying of cancer in Montreal, saying, “Cretinism does not sink any lower.”
November 23, 2025 at 6:52 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
BAUMGARTNER by Paul Auster; WHAT WE CAN KNOW by Ian McEwan; PAPER BOAT: POEMS by Margaret Atwood; AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS by Flann O'Brien; WILD DEER by Ethelreda Lewis; HOW THE WORLD EATS by Julian Baggini; AZADI by Aundhati Roy; ON FIRE by Naomi Klein; DIFFERENT by Frans de Waal; Sturluson's PROSE EDDA.
Still from Pedro Almodóvar's LA CONCEJALA ANTROPÓFAGA (2009) showing Carmen Machi as the titular character, Chon, a municipal politician in Spain, talking to an unconscious woman whose head is slumped on the table (she has accidentally drunk gazpacho laced with sedatives, and only her hair can be seen); this film has an intertextual relationship with Almodóvar's LOS ABRAZOS ROTOS (2009) in which it features as an unfinished film within the film, which unfinished film references a scene from MUJERES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE NERVIOS (1988). Chon is explaining her sexual fetish for men's feet related to a casual sexual encounter on the street while taking cocaine (a pile of it can be seen on the table in front of her) and says, "Every night, before going to bed, I do a bit of self-criticism."
November 23, 2025 at 6:07 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Sunday evening in the #LateImperialLibrary, contemplating clearing up after the Imperial Lunch in #NorthJozi.

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Cluttered desk with laptop, dictionaries and thesauruses, bibelots, books, and notebook. Second desk with typewriter, laptop, bibelots, photographs, and volumes of nonfiction from Edward Gibbon through Richard Hoggart. Shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname; on the left Karl Marx to Czesław Miłosz, and poetry in the corner from Fleur Adcock to Edward Lear; facing the viewer, from Helen Nabasuta Mugambi and Tuzyline Jita Allan through Bertrand Russell and Richard Russo. A grained wooden table with portable typewriter, potted ficus, bowl, photgraph, and the collected works of Jane Austen and Oscar Wilde in large format hardback.
November 23, 2025 at 5:13 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
🧠🧼🧽🚿
Still from Pedro Almodóvar’s LA CONCEJALA ANTROPÓFAGA (2009) showing Carmen Machi as Chon, the titular character, saying, “I’m sick of everything”. Still from Sidney Lumet’s NETWORK (1976) showing Peter Finch as Howard Beale, the deranged anchorman, saying ‘You’ve gotta say “I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!”’ Still from Paul Thomas Anderson’s THERE WILL BE BLOOD (2007) showing Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel Plainview saying, “There are times when I look at people and I see nothing worth liking.” Still from the BBC’s CRANFORD (2007) showing Eileen Atkins as Deborah Jenkyns saying, “We will repair to our rooms and consume our fruit in solitude.”
November 22, 2025 at 3:20 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
🤮😵‍💫😵☠️⚰️🪦
Still from MINE VAGANTI showing Alessandro Preziosi as Antonio Cantone, saying, “I’m sorry for all of you.”
November 22, 2025 at 3:04 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Just when it seemed the political and media institutions of the United States could not get weirder or more debased and debasing . . . Someone wrote about who doing what to whom after they did what? In a mainstream outlet? Why? Why?!

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Still from BIG BANG THEORY showing Regina King as Janine Davis, the HR officer, staring at her laptop, saying, “Oh, come on.” Still from THE SOPRANOS showing Nancy Marchand as Livia Soprano, saying, “I don’t know that world.” Still from FRIDA showing Valeria Golino as Lupe Marín saying, “I mean, look at this! What the hell is this?” Still from MUJERES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE NERVIOS, showing Juliet Serrano as Lucía, wearing a 1960s pink Chanel suit, being accosted by three uniformed Spanish policemen, one holding the pistol she discharged in the airport, saying, “Take me back to the clinic. That’s where I live.”
November 22, 2025 at 2:55 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
The storm breaks, rolling over from the south.

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Cumulonimbus clouds on the northern horizon over Sandton, where the G20 summit is beinng held. Dark clouds roll in fromnthe south, seen here above the lift shafts of the art deco building downslope. Thunderclouds directly overhead, grey. Rain and hail hitting the windows obscuring the trees south of the Late Imperial Library. Traffic jamming south of the Late Imperial Library as the rain and hail pelt down.
November 22, 2025 at 1:50 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
North, south, east, west: Saturday before the afternoon summer storm breaks over #NorthJozi.

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Cumulonimbus clouds to the south with the top of the Hillbrow tower just visible at the bottom of the frame towards the right. Clear blue sky to the north over the lift shafts of the neighbouring building downslope from the ridge of the Witwatersrand formation north of the Johannesburg city centre. The sky to the west over Johannesburg. Clouds in the sky to the east.
November 22, 2025 at 1:41 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Saturday morning, re-shelving at Gordimer, working through to Hardy, but all this will have to be redone before the end of 2025 to (re)integrate the books read in the past year.

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Empty space on a bookshelves with packed bookcases of fiction next to it, all volumes alphabetised by author surname and ordered by date within each writer's oeuvre. Genet through Haggard on the shelves facing the viewer, a glimpse of Fowles through Fuentes on the left, and in the passage on the right, Amis through Atwood.
November 22, 2025 at 7:56 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Time for some late night shelving in the #LateImperialLibrary — keeping the local apocalypse at bay with Sisyphean alphabetising . . .

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Shelf space after some reorganising.
November 21, 2025 at 8:38 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
I came at her work askance, through the terrible medium of children's television. I have kept a Swedish banknote for 20 years because she is on it (as is the literary creation through whom I first encountered her name).
Photograph of a Swedish 20 kronor note from 2005 featuring Nobel literature laureate Selma Lagerlöf wearing a feathered hat and fur. The back of the note from the previous image showing the protagonist of Lagerlöf's most famous creation, Nils Holgersson, on the back of a domesticated goose flying over a pastoral Scandinavian landscape in formation with wild geese. Hardback copies of Selma Lagerlöf's novel about Nils Holgersson's adventures. Still from the 1980 Japanese television cartoon showing Nils on the back of the domestic goose, Martin, as Smirre the fox lunges at them.
November 21, 2025 at 4:46 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Afternoon thunderstorm with hail breaks over #NorthJozi, and pigeons take flight . . . while multiple helicopters ferry summit attendees back and forth across the city.

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Pigeons in flight above the lift shafts of the art deco building north of the Late Imperial Library. Pigeons rushing to roost as thunder rolls in from the west. Window pane marked by rain drops. Hail stones hit the outside sill of the balcony.
November 21, 2025 at 1:21 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Translation is the game of making explicit many things while covering some others with a mantle of discreet elegance.
▫️Mariana Dimópulos, 2025

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Two opposing pages from VAN MAN TOT MAN by Olive Schreiner and J.M. Coetzee (translated from FROM MAN TO MAN by Peter Bergsma and Anna Helmers-Dieleman, 2025). Main post quotation from SPEAKING IN TONGUES by J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos (2025).
November 21, 2025 at 10:08 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Can there ever be enough coffee? 🤦🏽‍♂️☕️🌍☀️
Small mug of coffee in front of two moka pots and cans and a jar of beans.
November 21, 2025 at 9:16 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Friday morning in the #LateImperialLibrary: this year feels like it is just about to enter its twenty-third month.

🫅🏾📚🤓☕️🗝🚪🌳🌍☀️
Bottom half of a large moka pot. Table with typewriter on a north-facing balcony in the Late Imperial Library, overlooking the garden. The garden and swimming pool. Tree tops at the bottom of the garden, and the art deco building to the north, downslope.
November 21, 2025 at 7:10 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
"I'm sorry to interrupt your conversation, but we are experiencing violent storm conditions in the asteroid belt at this time. We may lose this valuable, deep space communication link. Please, be as brief as possible. Thank you."
▫️Richard Anthony Hewson, "Clouds Across the Moon", 1985
10 November 2025, Cape Town, South Africa. The call is definitely coming from inside the house.
November 20, 2025 at 7:07 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Today's harvest. 🌶🍅
Bird's eye chillies and two cherry tomatoes on a 1952 built grained wooden table.
November 20, 2025 at 4:05 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Thursday afternoon in the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi: rain is forecast, and much correspondence with one's subjects must still be done by imperious (sic) hand. Today the House of Fuller-Hallim celebrates the Heiress Apparent's age of majority.

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Cluttered main desk in the Nonfiction Room of the Late Imperial Library, moving towards week-, month-, and year end, with laptop, printer, tablets, dictionaries and thesauruses, bibelots, and notebooks and books. Secondary, 1980s upright student desk with typewriter and laptop, bibelots, photographs, and shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from Edward Gibbon through Eva Hoffmann. Shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author surname from Al Alvarez, Ifi Amadiume, and Samir Amin through Zillah R. Eisenstein, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Elphick. Shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from Pico Iyer and C.L.R. James through Sheila Rowbotham and Arundhati Roy.
November 20, 2025 at 12:06 PM