#LateImperialLibrary
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acfick72.bsky.social
Juggling schedules and managing the imperial diary to conduct 4 interviews each day next week . . . One is depleted. Time to unplug the computer and restore one's spirit to the usual imperiousness with some reading in the #LateImperialLibrary in rainy and stormy #NorthJozi . . .

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Upright student desk with Yugoslav made Olivetti typewriter (1989), bibelots, prints, photographs, and shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname, from Edward Gibbon through Nadine Gordimer, and from Elizabeth Grosz through Eric Hobsbawm. Antares typewriter, mini zen garden, potted plants and toy brick mugs holding stationery on a handmade 1952 geained wood table, backed by a white brick wall and the bottom of windows showing trees at the bottom of the garden. Cluttered main desk with bibelots, stationery, photographs, mobiles, printer, and dictionaries and thesauruses; laptops have been removed and put away. Shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Stephen Donaldson and Fyodor Dostoyevsky through Nadine Gordimer and Günther Grass.
November 7, 2025 at 2:08 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
"But baby, it's [not even going to be] cold outside" (pace Frank Loesser, 1944); so, noblesse oblige, one shall go abroad to smile at babies and ask complete acquaintances, "So what is it you do?"

Morning in the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi before a day of duty.

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Portable typewriter, mini zen garden, toy brick mugs holding stationery, a reading stand, and potted plants on a table handmade by my father in 1952, and a view into the garden showing trees through windows above a brick wall painted white. Simple pine table in front of bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Willa Cather through Ernest Gaines. Bowls of fruit, a straw hat, and a pair of spectacles can be seen on the table; also in frame, a handwoven basket from eSwatini, and on the far side, a sofa at the windows blocked by navy curtains. Work desk with laptop, printer, dictionaries, stationery, CDs, DVDs, bibelots, surrounded by bookcases of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from Tim Dolin and Jonathan Dollimore through Josephus and James Joyce. Back of the workdesk from the previous photograph surrounded by bookcases of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from Jonathan Lethem and Gideon Levy through Bertrand Russell and Richard Russo.
November 5, 2025 at 4:23 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
I am too old
to learn the names
of the new killers
This one here
looks tired and attractive
devoted, professorial
He looks a lot like me
when I was teaching
[…]
the hopelessly insane
▫️Leonard Cohen, 2006

Thus we begin November in the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi.

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View into a room lined with books (volumes of fiction alphabetised by author surname, and the ones in frame are from Willa Cather through F. Scott Fitzgerald), a table with two fruit bowls, and a Calendario Romano in the foreground open to November, showing a man dressed as a priest reading a copy of El Pais as light streams in through a window behind him to his right. View into a room lined with books (shelves holding nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname, the volumes that can be seen from Teresa de Lauretis through Todd Gitlin), two cluttered desks, and in the foreground, a copy of the Calendario Romano open to November, showing a very young man dressed as a priest inside a tiled room with a sculpture in a recess in the wall next to a large wooden door behind him. View of two cluttered desks with laptop, typewriter, printer, dictionaries, and bibelots, surrounnded by bookcaaes of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from John Kenneth Galbraith and Eduardo Galeano through Pankaj Mishra and Franco Moretti. View of cluttered desk with dictionaries, CDs, DVDs, stationery, and bibelots, surrounded by bookcases (nonfiction shelved alphabetically by author or editor surname: on the left from Tillie Olsen to Bertrand Russell; in the middle from Theodore W. Allen through Gena Corea; and on the right from Richard Dawkins through Cécile Fabre).
November 1, 2025 at 8:35 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Your Hair Is White
You Have Breasts
And A Gut
Over Your Belt
You Are No Longer A Boy,
Or Even A Man
But A Sense Of Gratitude
Enlivens Every Move
You Make
▫️Leonard Cohen, "A Life of Errands", BOOK OF LONGING (2006)

Friday night tea in the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi.

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Mug of tea with an abstract bird design printed on it, on a pine table next to a wooden bowl with two oranges, a red ceramic bowl of apples and pears, a tablet resting upright on a stand made of plastic toy blocks, all in front of bookcases of fiction alpbabetised by authors surname from Bernardine Evaristo and Nuruddin Farah through Richard Hakluyt and Radclyffe Hall. Bookcases arranged at right angles, holding fiction alphabetised by author surname from Willa Cather and Miguel de Cervantes through Umberto Eco and George Eliot. A collection of LP albums are stacked on the wooden floor between the bookcases, supporting a framed Roy Lichtenstein print from the museum shop of the Louisiana in Copenhagen. Two shelves on two bookcases, fiction alphabetised by author surname, from Djuna Barnes and Julian Barnes through Elizabeth Bowen and Paul Bowles. Two shelves on two bookcases, fiction alphabetised by author surname, from Ray Bradbury and E.R. Braithwaite through Samuel Butler and A.S. Byatt.
October 31, 2025 at 8:27 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Friday in the #LateImperialLibrary, on a chilly, damp spring morning in #NorthJozi.

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Cluttered main desk with laptop, dictionaries and thesauruses, thotchkes, and stationery, surrounded by bookcases of nonfiction from Regis Debray and Teresa de Lauretis on the left through Jenny Hartley and John Hartley on the right Bookcases of fiction alphabetiased by author surname from Sadeq Hedyat and Heinrich Heine on the left through Halldór Laxness and Camara Laye on the right. Damp garden around a swimming pool in the morning light. Pigeons in flight against a cloudy sky.
October 31, 2025 at 6:34 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
It is 1 am in #NorthJozi, rain outside, strong winds, and here in the #LateImperialLibrary one is both exhausted and wide awake . . . 😵‍💫😵
Staring Into Space Leo Pap GIF
Alt: GIF of Giancarlo Esposito as Leo Pap in KALEIDOSCOPE, lying on his back on a bed, his head propped up by pillows, staring bleakly into the middle distance.
media.tenor.com
October 30, 2025 at 11:08 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Sunday afternoon tea in the #LateImperialLibrary listening to Yo-Yo Ma as rain clouds gather over #NorthJozi.

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Grey clouds to the north in Johannesburg just north of the crest of the geological Witwatersrand; bottles on a window sill. A wall of bookcases with fiction alphabetised by author surname from Margaret Atwood through Aldo Busi. Bookcases along left and right walls, and two bookcases in the middle of the room, all packed with fiction alphabetised by author surname; on the right from Pat Barker through André Brink; in the centre from A.S. Byatt througg Willa Cather; on the left Daša Drndić through Tariq Goddard. Bookcases along a wall with fiction alphabetised by author surname, from Rachel Cusk through George Gissing.
October 26, 2025 at 1:55 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
On the balcony of the #LateImperialLibrary, having the second Sunday morning coffee—espresso by the mug—digging further into Hesse, enjoying the birdsong and the warm breeze ahead of the thunderstorms forecast for #NorthJozi for the week.

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A handmade 1950s table serving as a desk, with Hermann Hesse's DEMIAN (1919), a mug of espresso, a portable typewriter, some potted plants, a reading stand, a mini zen garden, and two red plastic toy brick mugs holding stationery. Jacarandas in bloom at the bottom of the garden can be seen through the north-facing windows.
October 26, 2025 at 7:34 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Afternoon tea and cataloguing in the #LateImperialLibrary on a sunny day in #NorthJozi (29 ⁰C; contemplating an Edwardian bathe in the pool later on).

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Laptop on a cluttered desk, two mugs of tea, a printer, and through the door onto the balcony, bright sunlight onto potted chilli plants.
October 25, 2025 at 12:23 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
One went to buy food in #NorthJozi, but then the people from the pop-up bookshop were back, as one had hoped they would be, and one found these (the Leonard Cohen in the young adult section) new inductees into the #LateImperialLibrary . . .

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P.G. Wodehouse's BLANDINGS CASTLE AND ELSEWHERE, two copies of Ama Ata Aidoo's OUR SISTER KILLJOY, Slavoj Žižek's TOO LATE TO AWAKEN, Simone de Beauvoir's THE PRIME OF LIFE, and Leonard Cohen's BOOK OF LONGING.
October 25, 2025 at 9:22 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Morning in the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi: one should be studious, but ribbons need cutting and sailing vessels need launching in the great world out there. Noblesse oblige.

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Cluttered main desk with laptop, dictiknaries, stationery, and bibelots. Work space at 1989s student desk with Yugoslav made Olivetti typewriter, Lego bookshop model, photographs and prints, among other tchotchkes, below a shelf and next to bookcase of non-fiction alphabetised by (primary) author or editor surname. Cloth covered table on north facong balcony with Antares Capri typewriter, potted plants, plastic brick mugs decorated with figurines, a mug of coffee, a reading stand, and a mini zen garden. The trees in the garden below can be seen through the windows at the top of the frame. Laptop on a pine table with an open notebook, pens, and a set of keys; in the background, shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname from John Fowles through Mohsin Hamid, and on the far right of the frame, from Soazig Aaron through Margaret Atwood.
October 23, 2025 at 4:23 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
I may be mad
I may be blind
I may be viciously unkind
But I can still read what you're thinking
▫️Annie Lennox, 1992

At night in the rooms of the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi.

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Bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Georges Simenon through Leo Tolstoy and Edith Wharton to Colson Whitehead. Bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Pepetela through Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie to David Sedaris. Bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Siri Hustvedt through Henry James and Franz Kafka and Elias Khoury to Ursula K. Le Guin. Bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname from Margaret Atwood through Jane Austen and Paul Auster to Octavia E. Butler and A.S. Byatt (with a glimpse of Willa Cather and Miguel de Cervantes).
October 22, 2025 at 8:29 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
A selection of life-altering books beloved or enjoyed by The Emperor of Solitude across the decades of a long life and in the many incarnations of the #LateImperialLibrary.

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📚💙 📚🖋 904
THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA by Hanif Kureishi (1990) "My name is Karim Amir, and I am an Englishman born and bred, almost. I am often considered to be a funny kind of Englishman, a new breed as it were, having emerged from two old histories. But I don't care – Englishman I am (though not proud of it), from the South London suburbs and going somewhere. Perhaps it is the odd mixture of continents and blood, of here and there, of belonging and not, that makes me restless and easily bored. Or perhaps it was being brought up in the suburbs that did it. Anyway, why search the inner room when it's enough to say that I was looking for trouble, any kind of movement, action and sexual interest I could find, because things were so gloomy, so slow and heavy, in our family, I don't know why. Quite frankly, it was all getting me down and I was ready for anything. Then one day everything changed. In the morning things were one way and by bedtime another. I was seventeen." The hero of Hanif Kureishi's debut novel is a dreamy teenager, of indeterminate sexual preference, who is desperate to escape the drear clutches of suburban South London and taste all the forbidden fruits which the 1970s seem to offer. Karim's own family provide him with some unusual examples of rebellion against the norm – from his philandering, yoga-loving father Haroon to his fiery cousin Jamila, who is being pressed into an arranged marriage. But it is Charlie, the aspirant-rock-star son of Haroon's mistress, who really fires Karim's imagination – not to mention his loins. And it's the unlikely opportunity of a life in the theatre which enables Karim to win the sort of attention he has been craving – albeit with some rude and raucous results.
October 22, 2025 at 2:43 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Rendered supine at the office by seasonal malaise (roof repair industrial drilling at the #LateImperialLibrary in another part of #NorthJozi rendered home bed rest impossible), we take comfort in the (re)production of Life's benign forms.

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Bird of paradise / strelitzia flower. Pink hibiscus flower and buds. White rose. Violet-coloured flowers.
October 22, 2025 at 8:16 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
A selection of life-altering books beloved or enjoyed by The Emperor of Solitude across the decades of a long life and in the many incarnations of the #LateImperialLibrary.

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📚💙 📚💡 903
THE ALGEBRA OF INFINITE JUSTICE by Arundhati Roy (2001) In her Booker Prize-winning THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS (1997), Arundhati Roy turned a compassionate but unrelenting eye on one family's world in India. In this book she lavishes the same fierce humanity on the unfolding future of India – and the world itself. In the essays of this spirited polemic, she takes on the great illusions of India's progress: the massive dam projects that were supposed to haul this sprawling subcontinent into the modern age – but which instead have displaced untold millions – and the detonation of India's first nuclear bomb. She also explores the politics of writing, the systematic incitement of religious hatred, and the cost of 'development' driven by profit – challenging the idea that only 'experts' can speak out on such urgent matters as nuclear threats, the human toll of the privatization of India's power supply by US companies like Enron, the rise of bloody, extremist Hindu nationalism, and the construction of monumental dams. For those who have been mesmerized by Roy's vision of India, here are sketches, traced in fire, of its topsy-turvy society, where the lives of the many are sacrificed for the comforts of the few.
October 21, 2025 at 5:51 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
A selection of life-altering books beloved or enjoyed by The Emperor of Solitude across the decades of a long life and in the many incarnations of the #LateImperialLibrary.

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📚💙 📚🖋 902
BAUMGARTNER'S BOMBAY by Anita Desai (1988) A man without family or country, Baumgartner has spent his life as an outsider, accepting but as unacceptable in Bombay now as he was in Hitler's Berlin half a century before. Alone now among his tarnished trophies, Baumgartner and his memories provide us with a portrait of loneliness and alienation, love and courage – combining to create one of Anita Desai's most powerful novels.
October 20, 2025 at 4:11 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
A selection of life-altering books beloved or enjoyed by The Emperor of Solitude across the decades of a long life and in the many incarnations of the #LateImperialLibrary.

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📚💙 📚🖋 901
JASMINE by Bharati Mukherjee (1990) When Jasmine Vijh is suddenly widowed at seventeen, she seems fated to a future of quiet isolation in a small Indian village. But, voracious for life, she flees to America. Six years on she has become Jane Ripplemeyer, resident of Iowa, married to a middle-aged banker and adoptive mother of a Vietnamese refugee. Jasmine's odyssey through America, rippling with energy and daring, reflects Mukherjee's preoccupation with the fractured lives of exiles and immigrants caught up in a painful yet exhilarating cross-cultural metamorphosis. In this uncompromising novel that draws on all the strengths of the award-winning THE MIDDLEMAN AND OTHER STORIES and carries them to a new level of perception and intensity, Bharati Mukherjee has given us a heroine 'greedy with wants and reckless with hope' – and leaves us breathless with surprise. Cover design by the Senate.
October 20, 2025 at 5:37 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
A selection of life-altering books beloved or enjoyed by The Emperor of Solitude across the decades of a long life and in the many incarnations of the #LateImperialLibrary.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖📝🗝🚪🌳🌍

📚💙 📚🖋 900
LIVES OF GIRLS AND WOMEN: A NOVEL by Alice Munro (1971) The only novel from Alice Munro is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women – her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her mother's boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood. All along she remains a wise, witty observer and recorder of truths in small-town life. The result is a powerful, moving, and humorous demonstration of Alice Munro's unparalleled awareness of the lives of girls and women.
October 19, 2025 at 6:23 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Sunday morning tea with Patrick White and birdsong on the balcony of the #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi; there is rain in the offing.

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Cloth covered table with open notebook, pen, two plastic brick mugs used as containers for stationery, a small zen garden, two potted plants, a mug of tea, a wooden drawing board, a steel reading stand, and a tablet. Jacarandas in full bloom and the yellow brick of the art deco building downslope can be seen through the north-facing windows.
October 19, 2025 at 9:35 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Heading into the sixth hour of this power outage across #NorthJozi – failing infrastructure, poor maintenance, municipal maladministration and corruption, private and corporate overconsumption – in the #LateImperialLibrary we read on through this inconsequential, bourgeois mini-apocalypse.

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View from the sofa of bookcases with fiction alphabetised by author surname; on the right, from A.S. Byatt through Italo Calvino and Peter Carey to Lewis Carroll and Angela Carter; on the left from Mia Couto through Fred D'Aguiar and Don DeLillo to the Marquis de Sade, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, E.L. Doctorow, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Roddy Doyle. Jacarandas in bloom behind (and above) green trees at the bottom of the garden, and the lift shafts of the art deco building downslope to the north. The swimming pool surrounded by trees in the morning light; rose bushes can be seen in the lower left quadrant of the image. Scatterings of clouds in a blue sky on a breezy day in Johannesburg's old northern suburbs, just north of the crest of the geological Witwatersrand north of the city centre.
October 17, 2025 at 8:23 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
One shall pretend these twenty volumes in three different Germanic languages are the particular ones one intends to read by end November, knowing as one does thirty completely different volumes (some in two Latin languages) in the #LateImperialLibrary may replace them before we reach end-2025. 📚🖋
Twenty books stacked on a dark side table in front of shelves of fiction (only partly visible) on which the volumes have been alphabetised by author surname from Muriel Spark through Christina Stead, Laurence Sterne, and Snorri Sturluson.
October 15, 2025 at 7:40 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Early morning, looking northwards from the balcony of the #LateImperialLibrary: spring in #NorthJozi.

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Jacarandas in bloom, the tallest six storeys high, with the three lift shafts and yellow brickwork of an art deco building and picking up the light of the rising sun.
October 15, 2025 at 4:16 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
The trees in the garden of the #LateImperialLibrary and on the street taking on full spring foliage in #NorthJozi.

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Broad-leafed tree with flowers. Palm tree with oranve fronds and broad leafed-tree. Broad-leafed tree with woody branches visible. Broad-leafed trees with variegated colouring on the street.
October 11, 2025 at 3:51 PM
acfick72.bsky.social
Spring morning, October in #NorthJozi: jacarandas in bloom in the street below the garden of the #LateImperialLibrary.

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Jacaranda trees in bloom form the tree canopy in thr original northern suburbs of Johannesburg on a clear spring morning. Bookcases of fiction alphabetised by author surname in room with a sofa and a plain pine table; a cup of coffee, a pair of spectacles, and Hilary Mantel's memoir can be seen on the table. The Calendario Romano hangs on the left of the frame showing a monochromatic photograph of a man in priest's garb wearing a cappello romano in Rome. Photograph of the main study of the Late Imperial Library showing a very untidy and cluttered large desk, shelves of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname, a portable typewriter, and the Calendario Romano open to October showing an attractkge your man in a priest's garb in front of Roman stonework. Shelves of fiction alphabetised by author surname in the Late Imperial Library, with volumes by Paul Monette, L. M. Montgomery, and Toni Morrison in the foreground, and against the far wall, works by John Updike and Gore Vidal (among others) through the oeuvres of Edmund White, Patrick White, and Colson Whitehead.
October 11, 2025 at 5:24 AM
acfick72.bsky.social
Het is gearriveerd. De Heiress Apparent organiseerde haar trawanten om deze de evenaar te laten oversteken voor opname in de #LateImperialLibrary in #NorthJozi.

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Copies of Herman Hesse's DEMIAN and VAN MAN TOT MAN by Olive Schreiner & J.M. Coetzee.
September 24, 2025 at 4:44 PM