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acfick72.bsky.social
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.
🤴🏽📚🤓📖📝🌍
Obsolescent isolate losing hearing & sight in the twilight of this incarnation. No trolls.
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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 9d
Morning in the #LateimperialLibrary: duty calls; noblesse oblige in #NorthJozi.

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Cluttered desks and bookcases on which volumes of nonfiction are alphabetised by author or editor surname, from Timothy Garton Ash on the left through Edward W. Said on the right. Bookcases on which volumes of nonfiction are alphabetised by author or editor surname, from Martin Amis on the lett through Sigmund Freud on the right. Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname, from Raul Nuñez and Joyce Carol Oates through Edgar Allan Poe and Terry Pratchett on the left, and from John McGahern and Patrick McGrath through Henry Miller and Sarah Gertrude Millin on the right. Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname, from Olive Schreiner and André Schwarz-Bart on the left through Edith Wharton and Antonia White on the right.
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
acfick72.bsky.social
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 17
September 23, 2024 at 8:52 AM
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
acfick72.bsky.social
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 16
September 22, 2024 at 5:44 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Today in the food garden on the Witwatersrand ridge north of Johannesburg's city centre.

🌳🌼🌍🌦
Pumpkin flower. Orange nasturtium flower. Yellow nasturtium flower. Small sunflower.
January 31, 2026 at 3:13 PM
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
acfick72.bsky.social
You told me again you preferred handsome men
but for me you would make an exception.
And clenching your fist for the ones like us
who are oppressed by the figures of beauty,
you fixed yourself, and said,
"Well never mind,
we are ugly but we have the music."
▫️Leonard Cohen, 1974
a man wearing a suit and tie is standing in front of a starz logo
Alt: GIF of Tobias Menzies raising his gaze, one eyebrow lifted.
media.tenor.com
April 14, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
archvillain.bsky.social
Take a break. Give yourself a chance to settle mentally apart from the surrounding chaos. Use any expedient means, anything that simply provides a respite. We are all in the dark wood now. Share something that works for you.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7bY...
Robert Palmer ~ Every Kinda People 1978 Soul Purrfection Version
YouTube video by DJDiscoCat
www.youtube.com
January 30, 2026 at 6:45 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Vanessa. ❤️
January 30, 2026 at 6:23 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Friday sunset and moonrise in #NorthJozi: we lock down in the #LateImperialLibrary.

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Sunset to the southwest, the top of the Charlottw Maxeke public hospital on the crest of the Witwatersrand just norrh of the Johannesburg city centre visible in the bottom left corner of the frame. Moon rising to the northeast. Dying sunlight colours cirrus clouds pink. Sofa in front of bookcases on which fiction has been alphabetised by author surname from J. M. Coetzee through E. M. Forster.
January 30, 2026 at 5:21 PM
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
hagenengler.bsky.social
South Africa just declared the Israeli charge d’affaires persona on grata. He has 72 hours to leave the country.
January 30, 2026 at 12:15 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
"Woke up this morning . . ." ☕️

Mood.
Still from THE SOPRANOS (1999-2006) showing James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, sipping espresso at a pavement café in northern New Jersey ("North Jersey").
January 30, 2026 at 5:56 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Late evening tea in the #NonFictionRoom of the #LateImperialLibrary; it is 19 ⁰C at 22h00 in #NorthJozi, which feels unbearable . . .

Tropical nights on the Highveld.

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Cluttered desk with dictionaries and thesauruses, stationery, a printer, knick-knacks, photographs, and beyond it a student desk with a laptop.
January 29, 2026 at 8:14 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
On the arboreous crest of the Witwatersrand in #NorthJozi in high summer.

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Granadilla vine on a metal railing surrounded by lush trees with white roses in the foreground. Three covered vegetable beds in a lush garden. Grey skies above green trees, shrubs, and bushes. Lush green trees against a grey sky.
January 29, 2026 at 6:25 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Thus ends an odd week at the weird end of a strange month in what is already (incredibly!) the second half of the second decade of this century and millennium; has one really been here this long and survived all this and that and so much more? Today's harvest in #NorthJozi.
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Vinho verde, bottle and glass; water, carafe and glass; a pine table in front of bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Jasper Fforde through Philip Hensher. Cape gooseberries (aguaymanto, uvilla, or uchuva) shorn of their calyces. A red bell pepper. Cirrus clouds in a bright blue sky.
January 29, 2026 at 1:41 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
New inductees into the #LateImperialLibrary sourced from a charity sale to support the public library at Sandton (where the horror begins and centres north of #NorthJozi).

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Copies of Miroslav Krleža's THE RETURN OF PHILIP LATINOWICZ, D.R. Popescu's THE ROYAL HUNT, Peter Carey's 30 DAYS IN SYDNEY (in Greek translation, hardback), John Pilger's A SECRET COUNTRY, Anthony Giddens's CAPITALISM AND MODERN SOCIAL THEORY, Alberto Manguel's edition of SOHO SQUARE III, C.A. Davids's THE BLACKS OF CAPE TOWN, Salman Rushdie's THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE (hardback), and Emma Tennant's BLACK MARINA (hardback). Total cost: R170; MT680, £7.80, €9, CNY75.
January 29, 2026 at 12:22 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Fruits from the office garden today: high summer in #NorthJozi.

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Four purple granadillas. Six raspberries. Black beans in their pods. Two lemons (one green, one yellow).
January 28, 2026 at 3:52 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
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 💙📚 📚🖋

#BookChallenge

Day 15 (revised)
MAX HAVELAAR; OF, DE KOFFIVEILINGEN DER NEDERLANDSCHE HANDEL-MAATSCHAPPY by Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker, 1860) Een van de krachtigste aanklachten tegen het kolonialisme ooit geschreven, stuurde MAX HAVELAAR 'een rilling' door Nederland toen het voor het eerst werd gepubliceerd in 1860. Het vertelt het verhaal van een jonge ambtenaar in het koloniale administratie die in 1856 in aanvaring kwam met zijn regering toen hij ze probeerde te dwingen om kennis te nemen van de barbaarsheid en corruptie in de Nederlandse kolonie Java. Toch is MAX HAVELAAR meer dan een polemisch traktaat of autobiografische roman. Zijn vernieuwende stijl, uitmuntende karakterisering en, bovenal, de vitaliteit en scherpe satire maken het een krachtig literair werk op zich. ------------------------------------ MAX HAVELAAR, OR THE COFFEE AUCTIONS OF THE DUTCH TRADING COMPANY by Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker, 1967 [1860]; translated by Roy Edwards from Dutch) One of the most forceful indictments of colonialism ever written, this novel 'sent a shiver' through the Dutch establishment when it was first published in 1860 and it is still capable of arousing strong emotions. It tells the story of a young civil servant in the colonial administration who, in 1856, clashed head-on with his government when he tried to force them to recognize the barbarity and corruption rife in the Dutch colony of Java. Yet MAX HAVELAAR is more than a polemical tract or autobiographical novel. Its innovative style, superb characterisation and, above all, its vitality and pungent satire make it a powerful literary work in its own right. MAX HAVELAAR is niet alleen de beste roman uit de Nederlandse literatuur; het is ook een roman die na meer dan een eeuw nog steeds actueel is.
January 28, 2026 at 12:19 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
A brief, calming walk around the garden in #NorthJozi before we smile at bureaucrats explaining how ecstatic they are about their can-opening machines and their conveyor belts.

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A pink rose. A yellow gem squash or pumpkin flower. A yellow marigold. A pink hibiscus flower.
January 28, 2026 at 7:20 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Midweek in #NorthJozi, morning in the #LateImperialLibrary — duty is indeed, as Aunt Lydia reminded her charges in the Red Centre, a hard taskmaster. This day of ribbon cutting and smiling at rescue centre puppies shall be powered by coffee.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖📝☕️🗝🚪🌳🌍☀️
Black boots on a parquet floor in front of a cloth-covered sofa backed by bookcases of fiction. Two chairs in a corner flanked bt bookcases of fiction. A wooden bowl of Namibian soapstone hearts and a jar of lavender cuttings on a pine table, in front of bookcases of fiction. A backback on a pine table in front of bookcases of fiction.
January 28, 2026 at 5:58 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Life forms in the volunteer food garden at the office in #NorthJozi.

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A lizard sunning on some bricks under a granadilla vine next to Jerusalem artichokes, sunflowers, pumpkin vines, and a raspberry plant. Granadillas on a vine. Three pink hibiscus flowers. Two hadada ibis birds foraging around a tree.
January 27, 2026 at 6:24 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
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 14 (repost)
WHITE WRITING: ON THE CULTURE OF LETTERS IN SOUTH AFRICA by J. M. Coetzee (1988) J.M. Coetzee, one of the most distinguished novelists of our time, offers here his first book-length work of criticism. In seven vigorous essays, Coetzee discusses the literary genres and works of major white authors from South Africa in the years before World War II. Describing the early narratives of exploration and travel, the melancholy pastoral novels, the landscape poetry obsessed with barrenness and emptiness, he paints a picture of a developing literature trying uneasily to appropriate through the imagination a corner of Africa for the white man. Coetzee explores a wide range of works in both English and Afrikaans, including writing from defenders of racism (Sarah Gertrude Millin) and a conservative, agrarian order (Pauline Smith and C.M. van den Heever) and from critics of the reigning dispensation (Olive Schreiner and Alan Paton). White writing of this period, he suggests, has as its goal the creation of a mythology to underpin colonial occupation of a resistant land. It characterizes native South Africans as primitive in their thought patterns, idle in their behaviour. It depicts South Africa as a prehistoric, empty landscape on which lie dotted the farms of white pioneers, models of heroic îndependence. Coetzee's analyses, enriched by cross-cultural comparisons between South African responses to issues of the day and the responses of Europeans and Americans, illuminate not only the literature of white South Africans but essential elements of their character as well.
January 27, 2026 at 5:36 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
What was it for, really? Simply to add to his papers, his contribution to what already existed? As pointless […] as adding one more grain of sand to a shore where the ocean washed up more with every wave.
▪️Anita Desai, 2004

📚💙 #BookSky 📚🖋
Extracts from THE ZIGZAG WAY by Anita Desai (2004) There they sat, worrying – she could see how they worried – about their research papers, their dissertations, their careers their little pining lives. […] They reminded her of the mineros searching in desperation for less and less productive veins of gold, or the missionaries who infiltrated everywhere in search of souls to collect for the Lord. Now these souls had to be collected for another institution, the university.
January 27, 2026 at 4:41 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
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 13

(repost)
Two editions of James Baldwin's ANOTHER COUNTRY (1962): on the left the Michael Collins first UK edition hardback from 1963 reproducing the original Dial Press US cover designed by Paul Bacon, and on the right the Penguin paperback from 1990 featuring a monochromatic photograph of a Black jazz saxophonist seen through wisps of cigarette smoke taken by Herman Leonard.
January 26, 2026 at 6:18 PM
Reposted by AC Fick 📚
acfick72.bsky.social
Genuine democracy requires citizens of any state to reject those institutions that are inherently unjust and do not serve their interests. Genuine democracy also needs an informed citizenry able to engage seriously with politics.
▪️Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies, 2004

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Extract from AMERICAN DREAM, GLOBAL NIGHTMARE by Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies (2004: 21) Law 1: Fear is essential 'Be afraid, be very afraid' is the American condition. To live in America is to be beset by fear, anxiety and insecurity, to be surrounded by potential harm, enemies and evil intent. And the wolf has always been at the door. A nation of optimists is the more usual self-representation of America. Repetitively, Hollywood films conclude with a resolution, a rescue, and the winners ride off into the sunset or snuggle into a warm embrace that reassures us they will live happily ever after. The formulaic ending, however, is necessary because the plot, the narrative, is founded on and propelled by fear and anxiety, the dark essential underpinning of the American condition. For America fear is an original, natural condition, the inescapable birth rite (and birth right), the inherited condition of a fragile existence that must constantly be defended. Without fear there is no America; constant recourse to fear is the motivating force that determines its actions and reactions. Extract from AMERICAN DREAM, GLOBAL NIGHTMARE by Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies (2004: 22) Law 3: Ignorance is bliss The greatest of all myths in the mythologising national empire of America is that of American exceptionalism. America, goes the theme, is different. Different because it was consciously created to be a departure from all that was wrong with the Old World, to be a fresh start for humanity in a virgin land. The ideology of America is the paradox of the will to individual freedom in the most nationalist of nation states. Because its ideology created a perfect union with a model structure of government, America was blessed and spared the ills and pains of the rest of the world. Further, the enterprise of free citizens in a rich and spacious land of abundance made America a land of opportunity and wealth for all, the American Dream. The constant reiteration of this mantra running through American self-description and firmly embedded in the American psyche achieves the wonders of ignorance. America is honest about neither its own history nor [that of] the rest of the world. The strength of belief in American exceptionalism becomes a rationale for ignorance about the outside world and for discounting what others have to say about America. It is the great insulating ethos, the ultimate reason to glory in ignorance. Extract from AMERICAN DREAM, GLOBAL NIGHTMARE by Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies (2004: 25) Law 9: War is a necessity America projects itself as a bastion of peace, a haven of democracy and concord. But the reality is radically different from the self-perception. America emerged from a war, consolidated and built the nation through war, expanded and emerged as an empire through war, and now maintains its global hegemony through war. Even before 9/11, it had waged war on over half the nations of the globe. Its economy is a war economy. Its science and technology is deeply entrenched in the military machine. It sustains and runs the most formidable war machine in history. The images and metaphors of war permeate every aspect of American society and culture – in films, television programmes, video games, fashion, children's toys, social programmes and political rhetoric. An alliance of neo-conservative ideologues, free-market right-wingers and evangelical Christians is now waging war against the social contract, the inner-city poor, pro-choice women, gays, big government and the constitutional separation between religion and the state, secular reason and religious beliefs. And to top it all we have the notion of preventive, pre-emptive war, the translation of the early-19th-century Monroe Doctrine of America's right to unchallenged secure dominance in its hemisphere into a neo-conservative policy for global domination. For America war is a necessity, for war has become its reason to be. Extract from AMERICAN DREAM, GLOBAL NIGHTMARE by Ziauddin Sardar & Merryl Wyn Davies (2004: 258) The world itself needs to be rescued from American hegemony. War, markets, entertainment, the basic ingredients of American imperialism, are relentlessly imposed on the rest of the world on the arrogant assumption that what is good for America is good for the whole of humanity. This is, of course, another way of saying that American tradition and history are universal narratives applicable across all time and space – what we have called Law 10 of American mythology. It is all done in the name of freedom and democracy. But the more loudly America praises 'freedom and democracy', the more it violates the basic freedom and democratic aspirations of developing countries. For America, 'freedom' is simply a word invoked to justify its imperial ambition and sanctify itself and its mythology. 'The most dangerous forms of tyranny', writes Benjamin Barber, 'are those that are advanced under the banner of freedom.'
June 24, 2025 at 2:28 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
The temperature in #NorthJozi has hit 33 ⁰C (a friend in Adelaide reports 43 ⁰C), thus it is too hot to read anything new, so we reread Atwood's SURFACING (1972) in the #LateImperialLibrary while we await the delivery of ice.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖📝🧊🗝🚪🥵🌍🌥
Books piled on a table in a room in which the walls are lined with bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname. Back of a cluttered desk in a room in which the walls are lined with bookcases on which volumes of nonfiction are alphabetised by author or editor surname. A room in which the walls are lined with bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname. A room in which the walls are lined with bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surnam, and tote bags dangle from a door handle.
January 25, 2026 at 1:36 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
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 (repost)
Zoë Wicomb's YOU CAN'T GET LOST IN CAPE TOWN (1987). Six editions, from top left to bottom right: Virago 1987 paperback; Virago 1996 paperback reprint; Feminist Press at CUNY 2000 hardback without dustjacket; Feminist Press at CUBY 2000 paperback; Feminist Press at CUNY 2000 African Classics paperback edition; Random House Umuzi 2008 South African revised paperback edition).
January 25, 2026 at 7:48 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Zondagochtend in de #LateImperialLibrary begint met een koffie verkeerd; het kan vandaag in #NorthJozi zo heet worden als 29 ⁰C.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖📝☕️🗝🚪🥵🌍🌥
A cup of coffee with milk next to books, keys, capsules, a wooden bowl of soapstone hearts, a tablet device and a stick on incense on a plain pine table. There are bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname, a sofa, and some director's chairs in the room, and sunlight is reflected on the parquet floor.
January 25, 2026 at 7:03 AM