The people two fences over, we suspect, prepare this in bulk once a week, and the chemical clouds of stink waft over across the tree canopy and the leagues between . . . 🤮

Oak leaves in various shades of green, yellow, and brown, as the tree takes on its autumn colours.

Brown oak leaves falle. Into an ever-green border shrub.

Oak branches with leaves in various autumn colours, through which the cloudy sky on a bright day and other trees on the southern slope of the Westcliff of the Witwatersrand can be seen.

Dead oak leaves at the bottom of the ha-ha, the brickwork of which can be seen at the top of the frame.

Autumn leaves, #NorthJozi.

Time for a siesta.

🫅🏾🍂🍁🪾🌳🌲🌍🌤

Well, the usual exit for egg residue can become the entrance, one imagines.

11 purple granadillas on a white plate.

Today's harvest from the smaller vine on the crest of the geological #Witwatersrand 3.5km due north of the Johannesburg city centre and 200m south of the Westcliff.

🌍🌤

Orange flower in the crook of the stem with green protruberances of an otherwise broad-leafed plant.

Passion flower on a granadilla vine.

Yellow pumpkin or gem squash flower.

Yellow, trumpet shaped flower seen from below against a bright blue sky.

Another dry, sunny autumn day in #NorthJozi before the unseasonal rain predicted for the rest of the week.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🍂🌍🌤

Mood.

*Monday, and, looming at the edge of consciousness, what threatens to turn into a cluster headache.

‘After all the horrible things we’ve been through,’ he said to me, ‘if I die of cancer, it will make a bad story’: Siri Hustvedt on losing Paul Auster First there was the double tragedy that tore the family apart – then came a deadly diagnosis. The writer reflects on life after the death of her novelist husband

Read an excerpt from Siri Hustvedt's forthcoming memoir about her life with Paul Auster, Ghost Stories. Book releases on May 5.

www.theguardian.com/books/2026/a...

As an addict, I have a question for the store: given what cinnamon is and how it is harvested, does it not taint the rest of their offerings' "purity"? Or is this sin-taxed cinnamon?

The spice must flow, but not at that price.

Oh, what a circus, oh, what a show . . .
▫️Tim Rice, 1976

The planetary political landscape throughout one's whole life, it sometimes seems.

Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname, from Henry James and James Joyce, through Milan Kundera, Hanif Kureishi, and Andrey Kurkov, to Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, and Primo Levi.

Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname, from Sembene Ousmane and Orhan Pamuk through Pepetela, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Richardson, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie, to José Saramago and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Bookcases on which volumes of nonfiction are alphabetised by author or editor surname, from Kwame Anthony Appiah and Margaret Atwood through Noam Chomsky, Hélène Cixous, Alexander Cockburn, Patrick Cockburn, and J. M. Coetzee, to Teresa de Lauretis, Terry Eagleton, and Umberto Eco. In the foreground is a cluttered desk with dictionaries and thesauruses, bibelots, and framed photographs.

Bookcases on which volumes of nonfiction are alphabetised by author or editor surname, from Alison Jagger and Iris Marion Young through Frederic Jameson, Samuel Johnson, Immanuel Kant, Henri Lefebvre, Livy, John Locke, and Mahmood Mamdani, to Karl Marx, Kobena Mercer, John Stuart Mill, Kate Millett, Pankaj Mishra, Juliet Mitchell, Montaigne, Jacques Mounod, and Franco Moretti.

Most of our history and literature students care nothing for the past and are indifferent to the accretions of poetry and fiction that are our beautiful inheritance. They sign up to the humanities because they lack mathematical or technical talent.
▫️Ian McEwan, 2025

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🍂🌍🌧

Mood, but later in the evening.

Mood.

Sun seen through clouds with patches of blue sky.

A bank of grey clouds above a patch of blue sky.

Clouds banking over the southeast of Johannesburg.

Clouds with patches of blue sky over the folly (on which a pigeon is perched).

Cloudy Sunday morning in #NorthJozi.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🍂🌍🌤

This is a dance off, if you see this repost a dance or you’re eliminated.

🕺🏾🕺🏾🕺🏾

"Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words; discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance." ~ James Baldwin

Bookcases on which fiction is alphabetised by author surname from Andrew Holleran through Barbara Kingsolver. Three empty shelves mark a gap between books.

Dusting and reshelving with tea in the #LateImperialLibrary on a sunny autumn afternoon in #NorthJozi. We are at Barbara Kingsolver, working our way down the alphabet to Rose Zwi.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🍂🌍☀️

This is a dance off. If you see this repost a dance.🕺🏾

One sometimes dreams of speaking languages one does not know when awake . . . and one's dreams occur in a variety of languages (or one remembers them thus). One has woken from dreams and been told one was still sleep-speaking in other languages like Spanish, Italian, Dutch, and German.

If you see this, post a photograph of yourself wearing spectacles.

The trees at the bottom of the garden, on the northern side of the old ha-ha, obscured by raindrops on the window pane.

An old student city map for Utrecht on top of volumes of nonfiction alphabetised by author or editor surname from Ammianus Marcellinus through Karen Armstrong.

Four twenty year old Albert Heijn orange juice bottles with the word "Versgeperst" stamped on them along with the "ah" logo, behind which are a sofa covered with an orange cloth, and bookcases of fiction.

Opposing pages of J. M. Coetzee's DAGBOEK VAN EEN SLECHT JAAR (2007) dealing with English usage.

De onseizoensgebonden regenachtige weer doet denken aan het wonen onder twee Italiaanse scheikundigen op het Domplein in Utrecht, het lezen van Deleuze en Guattari onder auspiciën van Rosi Braidotti, en het reizen naar Amsterdam voor allerlei Turkse lekkernijen op de Albert Cuypstraat.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🍂🌍🌧

Oh, these neighbours are unrelentingly déclassé. We suspect they are ferrying their equally vulgarly moneyed pals to the racing track and the air strip in the borderlands of the awful north for a weekend of white mischief à la WESTGATE (1981-1985).

Olivetti Lettera 31 on a cloth-covered 1950s handmade table, backed by a framed photograph, a reading stand, a jar of coins, a vase of orchid petals, a potted plant, a mini-zen garden, coffee grounds, and a stack of LRBs on top of a stack of Paris Reviews.

A cluttered main desk with bibelots, dictionaries and thesauruses, a printer, and framed photographs. Behind it is a 1980s pupil's escritoire with a laptop, framed photographs, a desk lamp, and bibelots. Linjng the room are bookcases on which volumes of nonfiction are alphabetised by author or editor surname from J. M. Coetzee and Umberto Eco through Immanuel Kant and Naomi Klein.

The swimming pool surrounded by trees, and beyond it, the stones from the old ha-ha and the picket fence separating the garden from the boundary road to the north.

The view towards the northern horizon under heavy cloud cover. On the right, the construction cranes and high rises of Roaebank, in the centre, between the first and second lift shafts of the art deco building downslope, the towers of Sandton City and the Leonardo, and to the right, between the second and third lift shafts, the vulgar developments in the veld of Midrand obscured by mist.

Clearing correspondence ahead of some reading and scribbling in the #LateImperialLibrary as i vicini moralmente deformi, intellettualmente vuoti e politicamente ripugnanti befoul this autumnal #NorthJozi morning with their helicopter.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🌍🍂☁️

Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname from Imraan Coovadia to Nadine Gordimer.

Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname from Toni Morrison through Vladimir Nabokov (on the right), and from Will Self through Patrick White (facing the observer).

Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname from Margaret Atwood through Peter Carey.

Bookcases on which volumes of fiction are alphabetised by author surname from Richard Hughes to Ursula K. Le Guin.

Here,
in the room of my life
the objects keep changing.
[…]
However, nothing is just what it seems to be.
My objects dream and wear new costumes,
compelled to, it seems, by all the words in my hands
and the sea that bangs in my throat.
▫️Anne Sexton 1975

Night in the #LateImperialLibrary.

🫅🏾📚🤓📖🗝🚪🍂🌍🌘

Blue sky and some cirrus clouds over trees shifting into autumn colours and foliage. The top of the Hillbrow Tower can be seen in the dip towards the left of the frame.

Blue sky and cirrus clouds with trees assuming autumn foliage.

The sun dipping in the western sky, seen from the southern ramparts of the West Cliff of the geological Witwatersrand 3.5km directly north of the Johannesburg city centre.

Cirrus clouds in a blue sky over Johannesburg.

The afternoon marking the end of a week of imperial duties in #NorthJozi.

Time to schnarff the chocolate pudding and wonder whose head has to be off . . .

🫅🏾🌳🍃🍁🍂🌍☀️

Red hibiscus flower in full bloom.

Tamarillos at various stages of ripening with a lemon tree in the background.

Several purple granadillas on the vine.

Green granadillas and a passion flower on the same vine as the riper granadillas in the previous photograph.

The fecundity of autumn in #NorthJozi always surprises and delights.

🌳🍃🍁🍂🍅🌺🌍☀️

Photograph of the account holder in front of a set of bookcases on which volumes of nonfiction have been alphabetised by author or editor surnane from Mike Nicol and Nietzsche, through Orhan Pamuk, Ilan Pappé, and Octavio Paz, to Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Bertrand Russell, Oliver Sacks, and Edward W. Said.

Io sono io. Il carattere è destino. La Storia è Dio. Risentimento, risentimento, risentimento.
▫️J. M. Coetzee, 1977

🫅🏾📚🤓📖☕️🗝🚪🍂🌍🌘

Goobye, Ruby Tuesday . . .

Mood.

James - Laid (Version 3) YouTube video by JamesVEVO

Caught your hand inside the till
Slammed your fingers in the drawer
Fought with kitchen knives and skewers
Dressed me up in women's clothes
Messed around with gender roles
Line my eyes and call me pretty
▫️Tim Booth, Larry Gott, & Jim Glennie (1993)

Ah, twenty years old.

youtu.be/0trh9Y598fM?...

"But bachelor number two is only less right-wing than bachelor number one. These are the options? Welcome to the desert of the Surreal."

😒