iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 8h

Spring life in hottest #NorthJozi. 🌳🌲🌴🌷🌺🌱🪺🕊🌍☀️

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 9h

Getting through 2026 be like . . .

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 11h

🫅🏾📚🤓📖🥵🫖🪺🌍☀️

Temperature for #NorthJozi: 29 ⁰C, the high having been 31⁰C.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 19h

I am not asking you to understand this, merely to accept it as a fact. There are many things in my life that I regret, but this is not one of them. ▫️Paul Auster, 1987 Monday morning in the #LateImperialLibrary: solitude before ribbon cutting across #NorthJozi, 28 ⁰C in spring. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🌳🪺🌍☀️

The cluttered main desk with a twelve years old laptop in the foreground, the 1980s student escritoire with a seven year old lapyop beyond it, and through the glass door, the handmade 1950s table with two pprtable typewriters (one from the 1980s and one from the 1970s). Bookcases with volumes of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname can also be seen in frame.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

Sunday morning after the (light) thunderstorm in #NorthJozi: cocooning in the #LateImperialLibrary. 🌳🪺🌱🌼🌍🌤

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Afternoon storm rolling in from the north across #NorthJozi. 🌳🪺🌱🌩🌍

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

This week's inductees into the #LateImperialLibrary in hottest #NorthJozi (29 ⁰C): the Morrison & Desai (Friday), La Guma, Chomsky et al (Saturday). We are back to reduplicating, but only the best books, and to reread multiple times in different physical copies. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖🥵☕️🪺🌱🌍☀️

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Early Saturday morning in #NorthJozi: the jacarandas are in bloom, birdlife makes the North Garden aurally and visually delightful. Wrestling order (back) from the human chaos. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🌳🪺🌱🌍🌤

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Morning blue sky, afternoon thunderclouds, the unfulfilled promise of rain in #NorthJozi at 31 ⁰C in early spring. 🫅🏾☀️🌳🪺🌱🌍🌥

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Those scientists were right, and summer is still eight or more weeks away . . . Springtime in #NorrhJozi in the Capitolecene? 🥵🌳🪺🌱🌍🌥

Weather indication for #NorthJozi, showing 31 ⁰C at 16h00 on an early October afternoon, spring.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It was the place, and the time of life, that she had wanted and prepared for all her life […] and at last she had it. She wanted no one and nothing else. Whatever else came, or happened here, would be an unwelcome intrusion and distraction. ▪️Anita Desai, 1977 🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🌳🪺🌍☀️

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Peggy warned us against this sort of thing in the MADDADDAM trilogy, but half-literate, underendowed, lousy-lay men with temporary power (and the women who stand by them) always misread warnings as recipes.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Friday morning mood: Show me your motion Tra la la la la Come on show me your motion Tra la la la la la Show me your motion Tra la la la la ▪️Traditional Caribbean children's song

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Nothing more to say No more ace to play ▫️Andersson & Ulvaeus, 1980 Stockholm will Stockholm.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The daily salute from the Imperial Heron, flying westwards across #NorthJozi. 🫅🏾🌳🌱🪺🌼🌍🌤

Heron in flight, seen from below, against the backdrop of a blue sky with a few white clouds.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

One is now so old that an examination book for a university which no longer exists and at which one taught more than a quarter of a century ago falls out of a document box containing materials for an undergraduate course on the history of the novel in English. 🪦

An examination book for the now defunct University of Port Elizabeth dating from the 1990s.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

"This morning we opted for a hansom cab to transport us to the West Garden on the southern slope of the Witwatersrand's Westcliff; unlike yesterday, the seat was secure, but the carriage seemed to be drawn by a sickly mule given the slow progress we made." Springtime in #NorthJozi. 🌳🌱🪺🌼🌍🌤

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

"The brougham which transported us to the West Garden today had a loose back seat; the boon of this was discovering Soames would not be able to secrete one in the hold, even against one's will." #NorthJozi in spring. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖🌳🌱🌼🪺🌍🌥

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Both those platforms should be abolished, but the "professional" one has been polluted by one's age-mates (they are hardly peers) performing banal and verbose versions of the self-help slogans one usually sees printed on discount store cushions.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down. ▫️Elizabeth Strout, 2016

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Dietes iridioides in the West Garden: #NorthJozi in spring. 🌳🌱🌸🌼🪺🌍🌥

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"I understood I would never marry him. It's funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one's past, or one's clothes, but then—a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh."

Quotation from Elizabeth Strout's MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON (2016).

Image is a still from Pedro Almodóvar's DOLOR Y GLORIA (2018) showing Penélope Cruz as Jacinta meeting César Vicente as Eduardo, the painter and carpenter who becomes the object of her son's first desire, and his wife, and saying, "What a pity! So handsome and illiterate!"

Jacinta is empathetic, and goes on to suggest to Eduardo and his wife, Sara Sierra's Conchita, that she would pay for the renovations by having her son Salvador, the future film director, teach the illiterate workman to read.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Far too cold for spring in #NorthJozi, but at least we have flowers in the West Garden. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖🗝🚪🌸🪺🌍🌥

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Sunday sunset with rain clouds gathering, the promise being overnight rain in #NorthJozi. 🌱🪺🌳🌼🌅🌍🌥

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

Should one be a responsible adult or go schnarff the rest of the risotto left over from lunch before the sun has even set? #NorthJozi dilemmas . . . 🤔🍚

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Went to feed the birds in the North Garden, but then the pigeons became a tad Hithcockian, and one's current hairstyle is not Tippi Hedren enough for that kind of running in #NorthJozi on this unseasonably chilly day in October.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"The hardest thing was training the mule to kick the contestants in the head pre-show." ▫️Margaret Pomeranz (on television gameshows)

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

"Because turnips were not carved properly, a ghoul from the other side made an untimely trans-stygian journey to appear on 'Question Time' last night, mumming and guising in a nausea inducing performance." Pace Baudrillard, this simulation is worse than whatever the real thing might once have been.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Friday morning, spring in #NorthJozi; too cold to swim (14 ⁰C), but the birdsong and wing flapping in the North Garden are delightful. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🪺🌍⛅️

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

That one knows who these people are is a source of concern; knowledge of US "reality TV" celebrities (sic) is akin to microplastics in brain tissue . . .

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"On the press tour you will have to say 'lingam' . . . a lot."

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Use a gif, pic, or vid to share how you are feeling today. 🖤

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Name a film with real "autumn" vibes, that ISN'T a horror movie. 🍂🍁🎃

Still from Todd Haynes's FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002) with Dennis Haysbert and Julianne Moore against the backdrop of a forest in autumn.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Oh, how this film takes one back to that spring moment in Amanda Kottler's Psychology 3 lecture in the R. W. James Lecture Theatre on the slopes of Devil's Peak, now that one finds oneself in the autumn of one's life . . . 🍂

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Mood. "I know somewhat too much; and from this knowledge, once one has been infected, there seems to be no recovering. I ought never to have taken my lantern to see what was going on […] On the other hand, there was no way, once I had picked up the lantern, for me to put it down again."

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

If someone dies in October do not sweep the house for three days or the rest of you will go. Also do not step on a boy's head for the devil will enter your ears like music. ▫️Sexton 1975 Dit is die maand Oktober: die kokewiet is uit; Boomsingertjies en kriekies die hoor jy orals fluit ▫️Leipoldt 1911

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The only possible cosmopolitanism, far removed from [current] pathetic sectarianism, is evident and possible through the postnational retrieval of the worldly cultures that exist now and with contemporary forces but with historical references to pre-modern imperial domains. ▪️Hamid Dabashi, 2016

Quotations from Hamid Dabashi's IRAN WITHOUT BORDERS: TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF THE POSTCOLONIAL NATION (Verso, 2016).

In destabilizing the stubborn residues of Eurocentricism, even (or particularly) among the most critical thinkers of our time, we need actively and persistently to retrieve the repressed, denied, or forgotten cosmopolitan worldliness of other worlds – from Asia to Africa to Latin America – all actively hidden deep beneath the violently domesticated master trope of "the West".

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Fortunately, like those high school Geography lessons, unless you make an effort, these come up only once a day. 🙃

Still from XXY (2007) showing Germán Palacios as Ramiro, a surgeon from Argentina, looking with a tiny bit of amused surprise at someone off screen, in the kitchen of his wife's friend who is married to a marine biologist and living outside a Uruguayan fishing village.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The subjects of the WC cubicle are free to fetch their weather back, because their gift of rain is appreciated, but not these European autumn temperatures, not for the Highveld in spring.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

All imperial engagements abroad for the day are cancelled because of inclement weather. The Autocrat Incarnate shall remain ensconced in the #LateImperialLibrary as rain lashes #NorthJozi with single digit temperatures. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪❄️🌍🌧

Panel showing the weather for Johannesburg, currently 8 ⁰C (feels like 4 ⁰C) with an expected daytime high of 11 ⁰C and rain throughout the day. And it is September, spring in the southern hemisphere.

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Time to revisit the genius of Norman Lear and Louise Lasser and see if we can also see that waxy yellow build-up on MARY HARTMAN, MARY HARTMAN (1976-1977).

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AC Fick 📚 @acfick72.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Unseasonably cold, wet weather in #NorthJozi after a hot day with thunderstorms. This cold snap reminds one of autumn days in Amsterdam and Utrecht, and as one has declared before, on days like this one misses those hirsute Turks on Albert Cuypstraat and their Kismet Eetcafe delights. 🫅🏾📚🤓📖🗝🥗🥙🚪🌍🌧

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