Achilles Micawber
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achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Achilles Micawber
@achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
2.3K followers 6.1K following 2.8K posts
Runner. Reader. Music and history. Poetry. Shakespeare. Film. Tweets in English and German.

Currently listening to a lot of music from 1977 and 1978.
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achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
The final lines of W. S. Merwin's "Thanks".
with the animals dying around us taking our feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you thank you we are saying and waving dark though it is
November 27, 2025 at 7:46 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
This by Wendell Berry counts among my faves, stunning in its simplicity.

"The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings."
It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.
November 27, 2025 at 12:15 AM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
An album that gets better with time. I loved it back then but the synths keep hitting harder.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen
November 23, 2025 at 6:11 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Seamus Heaney - Scaffolding

#smallpoemsunday
Masons, when they start upon a building, Are careful to test out the scaffolding; Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points, Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints. And yet all this comes down when the job’s done, Showing off walls of sure and solid stone. So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be Old bridges breaking between you and me, Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall, Confident that we have built our wall.
November 23, 2025 at 2:52 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
The way Lady Moiraine is introduced when she first appears in The Wheel of Time. Love at first sight. 😍

#TheWheelOfTime #RobertJordan
When he had heard she called Nynaeve child, he had pictured her as old, but she was not. At least, he could not put any age to her at all. At first he thought she was as young as Nynaeve, but the longer he looked the more he thought she was older than that. There was a maturity about her large, dark eyes, a hint of knowing that no one could have gotten young. For an instant he thought those eyes were deep pools about to swallow him up. It was plain why Mat and Ewin named her a lady from a gleeman’s tale, too. She held herself with a grace and air of command that made him feel awkward and stumble-footed. She was barely tall enough to come up to his chest, but her presence was such that her height seemed the proper one, and he felt ungainly in his tallness. Altogether she was like no one he had ever seen before. The wide hood of her cloak framed her face and dark hair, hanging in soft ringlets. He had never seen a grown woman with her hair unbraided; every girl in the Two Rivers waited eagerly for the Women’s Circle of her village to say she was old enough to wear a braid. Her clothes were just as strange. Her cloak was sky-blue velvet, with thick silver embroidery, leaves and vines and flowers, all along the edges. Her dress gleamed faintly as she moved, a darker blue than the cloak, and slashed with cream. A necklace of heavy gold links hung around her neck, while another gold chain, delicate and fastened in her hair, supported a small, sparkling blue stone in the middle of her forehead. A wide belt of woven gold encircled her waist, and on the second finger of her left hand was a gold ring in the shape of a serpent biting its own tail. He had certainly never seen a ring like that, though he recognized the Great Serpent, an even older symbol for eternity than the Wheel of Time. Fancier than any feastday clothes, Ewin had said, and he was right. No one ever dressed like that in the Two Rivers. Not ever.
November 22, 2025 at 3:44 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Sometimes it's better not to say anything at all.

~Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Waiting for You
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Waiting for You
November 11, 2025 at 7:47 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Today's album in the car.

Fleetwood Mac - Tusk

It's always Tusk.
Fleetwood Mac - Tusk
November 11, 2025 at 1:21 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Post a non-religious photo you think of as holy
Miroslav Klose with a massive header.
November 10, 2025 at 7:06 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Today's album in the car:

Low - Things We Lost in the Fire
Low - Things We Lost in the Fire
November 10, 2025 at 5:54 AM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
First listen, for some reason...
2 many dj's - As Heard On Radio Soulwax Pt. 2
November 6, 2025 at 7:32 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Music on my way to work. <3
Sharon Van Etten - Are We There <3
November 4, 2025 at 7:31 AM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Yehuda Amichai's "A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention", translated by Assia Gutman.

One of my favourite final lines.
They amputated Your thighs off my hips. As far as I'm concerned They are all surgeons. All of them. They dismantle us Each from the other. As far as I'm concerned They are all engineers. All of them. A pity. We were such a good And loving invention. An aeroplane made from a man and wife. Wings and everything. We hovered a little above the earth. We even flew a little.
November 3, 2025 at 10:41 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
God how I love this band. This track is a showstopper.
Prefab Sprout - Jesse James Bolero
November 3, 2025 at 7:26 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
When I see a couple of kids...

~Philip Larkin - High Windows
When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That’ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
November 1, 2025 at 10:19 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Missed the big moment. Happy 40 million Bluesky users day!
October 31, 2025 at 12:33 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
I don't think this happened before in my chess playing. I'm the player on the right. No inaccuracies, mistakes, misses or blunders in a 20-move-game 🤩
Chess accuracy 93.7, Game Rating 1750
October 22, 2025 at 4:19 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
"Stop scrolling and post two characters who bring you happiness."
Doc Brown und Marty, obvsly.
October 22, 2025 at 1:25 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
A work of genius.
A frog stylized as Obama's Hope poster but instead the poster says "Hop".
October 20, 2025 at 6:31 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Louise Glück - Firstborn

A poem that slowly reveals its meaning. I think.
FIRSTBORN The weeks go by. I shelve them, They are all the same, like peeled soup cans ... Beans sour in their pot. I watch the lone onion Floating like Ophelia, caked with grease: You listless, fidget with the spoon. What now? You miss my care? Your yard ripens To a ward of roses, like a year ago when staff nuns Wheeled me down the aisle ... You couldn't look. I saw Converted love, your son, Drooling under glass, starving ... We are eating well. Today my meatman turns his trained knife On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.
October 17, 2025 at 7:26 AM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Haven't listened to this very soothing album in a while.
Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go
October 16, 2025 at 8:23 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
The motherlode has arrived.
Louise Glück's Poems 1962-2012
October 16, 2025 at 3:49 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
40 million Bluesky users soon-ish.
Bluesky User Count 39,625,971 from bsky-users.theo.io
October 16, 2025 at 9:31 AM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Found this contemporary New Yorker review of Magnolia, which describes the film as “a kind of mad crackup derby” and speaks of some actors’ “tremendous arialike moments” (Moore, Cruise, Reilly). I like that thought.
MAGNOLIA-In Paul Thomas Anderson's new movie, the characters break down, fall apart, and denounce themselves and others. "Magnolia" consists of multiple vignettes set in the San Fernando Valley, but since there's no common theme, the picture becomes a kind of mad crackup derby. Much of the material is earnest Arthur Miller-type stuff about how we can't escape the past, we can't escape the evil we've done, we all need to be truthful with one another, and so on. The ideas are banal, but Anderson (“Boogie Nights'') plays each sequence in real time and cuts among them with remarkable fluency, and the actors have some tremendous arialike moments-especially Julianne Moore as an adulterous young wife, John C. Reilly as an angelic cop looking for love, and Tom Cruise as some sort of sex guru who hosts a cable-TV show called "Seduce and Destroy." With Jason Robards, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and William H. Macy.-D.D. (12/20/99) (Cinema I, Lincoln Square, Union Square.)
October 13, 2025 at 2:18 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Unreal album. Perfect late night listening.
Wipers - Youth of America
October 12, 2025 at 10:04 PM
achillesthe2nd.bsky.social
Listening to the entirety of this over the holidays.
William Sieghart - The Poetry Pharmacy (audiobook)
October 10, 2025 at 3:29 PM