“WRITE A SENTENCE AS CLEAN AS A BONE”

Writer James Baldwin would have turned 94 yesterday if he was still alive. 

I've often turned to him for writing advice, he was very good at providing it via the countless interviews with him over the years.

He has taught me to 'use every experience':

"One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. 

"Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.

-from “Autobiographical Notes,” in the Collected Essays from Library of America

*

I took the photo last night while waiting for my bus in Darling Street, after my extremely good value chicken vindaloo curry at the Eastern Food Bazaar nearby. 

The main focus of my photo is the masterpiece of art deco building on the corner of Darling and Parliament streets: the Old Mutual Building (officially The Mutual Building). 

The building (take a look at these photos) "is often used often for movie shoots and now fully converted into an apartment block, known as Mutual Heights, rather than as corporate offices (it’s like stepping into a little piece of New York)."

The original design of the building, according to Wikipedia, "is attributed to Louw & Louw (Cape Town architects), working with Fred Glennie (best known at the time as a mentor to architectural students) – Mr Glennie is personally credited with most of the detailed work but Ivan Mitford-Barberton was also involved with some internal details as well as with the external granite decorations."

Then, when home, I gratefully crashed into bed and finished the last (increasingly bleak) pages of Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky.

Twentieth Century gangrene

Travel writer Paul Theroux in his introduction to Paul Bowles: Travels -
[Paul Bowles] was handsome and hard to impress, watchful, solitary, and knew his own mind, his mood of acceptance, even of fatalism, made him an ideal traveller. He was not much of a gastronome - as his fiction shows, the disgusting meal (fur in the rabbit stew) interested him much more than haute cuisine. He was passionate bout landscape and it's effects on the traveller, as "The Baptism
of Solitude" demonstrated, he was fascinated by the moods of the sky; and he was animated by the grotesque, wherever its misshapen form can be found.... Contemptuous of what passes for progress or technology, he speaks in one of these pieces about Columbo being afflicted with the "Twentieth Century's gangrene," by which he means modernity.
[Photo: Nelson Manda statue in Mandela Square, Sandton]

Bowled over

Ever since researching my trip in 2006 to Morocco I've wanted to get my hands on the writing and life of Paul Bowles. He lived in Tangier for most of his life, dying there in 1999, and writing up until his end.
Friday saw me buy his Travels: collected writings, 1950 - 1993 at Exclusive Books in Mandela Square, which I've dipped into through the weekend.
At dusk yesterday I cruised two bookshops in Melville looking for more of his work, but only coming up with a 1985 collection of his short stories, Midnight Mass.
Books, I believe, always arrive just when they should. Thank you.