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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.
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An isolate losing hearing and sight in the twilight of this incarnation. Embracing ennui.
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acfick72.bsky.social
Life imitates Almodóvar . . .
November 29, 2025 at 8:53 AM
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
acfick72.bsky.social
Yes. One is re-reading the Canongate edition.
The cover of the Canongate hardback edition of Omar El Akkad's ONE DAY, EVERYONE WILL HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AGAINST THIS (2025).
November 28, 2025 at 1:19 PM
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
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 . . .

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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
One recalls Ms Liné from Almodóvar's LABERINTO DE PASIONES (1982) and LA LEY DEL DESEO (1987). In the latter she plays young Antonio Banderas's mother, but in the former she is Princess Toraya, divorced from the Emperor of Tiran, cruising in drag to seduce her queer stepson Riza Nero (Imanol Arias).
Still from LABERINTO DE PASIONES (1982) showing Helga Liné in her gybaecologist's office, assessing her level of fertility, wearing a turban, a lamé dress, and jewels. Still from LABERINTO DE PASIONES (1982) showing Helga Liné as Princess Toraya in drag cruising the gay nightlife in Madrid, looking for her queer stepson in order to have sex with him and become pregnant with an heir for Tiran, the country run by her former husband, the emperor. Still from LABERINTO DE PASIONES (1982) showing Helga Liné as Princess Toraya at the Madrid airport, wearing a fur stola, a checked jacket, and a har, asking Agustín Almodóvar for something. Still from LABERINTO DE PASIONES (1982) showing Helga Liné as Princess Toraya at rhe Madrid airport being upstaged by the members of an all-women band posing for photographs for a journalist.
November 28, 2025 at 8:25 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
📺
November 26, 2025 at 9:20 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
🎞️
November 26, 2025 at 8:57 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
🎞️
November 26, 2025 at 8:55 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
It’s a forty seconds long disappointment session . . . ⚰️🪦
November 26, 2025 at 8:34 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Mood: IV.

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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
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