Within a Sky Full of Earth

I was looking for a quiet place to die. Someone recommended Brooklyn, and so the next morning I traveled down there from Westchester to scope out the terrain. I hadn't been back in fifty-six years, and I remembered nothing. My parents had moved out of the city when I was three, but I instinctively found myself returning to the neighborhood where we had lived, crawling home like some wounded dog to the place of my birth. A local real estate agent ushered me around to six or seven brownstone flats, and by the end of the afternoon I had rented a two-bedroom garden apartment on First Street, just half a block away from Prospect Park. I had no idea who my neighbors were, and I didn't care. They all worked at nine-to-five jobs, none of them had any children, and therefore the building would be relatively silent. More than anything else, that was what I craved. A silent end to my sad and ridiculous life.The house in Bronxville was already under contract, and once the closing took place at the end of the month, money wasn't going to be a problem.
THE BROOKLYN FOLLIES BY PAUL AUSTER

At Bloom we like more food books than food itself. These type of books come in various forms and flavors. They spread their virulent fragrance around the walls infecting the other volumes and conquering the small world we live in.
In a triumphant return to the short story, the form in which she made her extraordinary debut with There Are Jews in My House, Lara Vapnyar gives us a delightful new collection in which food and love intersect, along with their overlapping pleasures, frustrations, and deep associations in the lives of her unforgettable characters.
From “Broccoli” to “Borscht” to “Puffed Rice and Meatballs,” each of these new stories invites us into the uniquely captivating private worlds of Vapnyar’s Eastern European émigrés. There’s Nina, a recent arrival from Russia, for whom the colorful abundance of the vegetable markets in New York represents her own fresh hopes and dreams... Luda and Milena, who battle over a widower in their English class with competing recipes for cheese puffs, spinach pies, and meatballs... Sergey, who finds more comfort in the borscht made by a paid female companion than in her sexual ministrations. Each of the women and men who inhabit these witty, tender, and beautifully observed stories needs and longs for the taste and smell of home, wherever – and with whomever – hat may turn out to be.
Russian in its wit and in many of its rich details, but American in its insistence on the quest for personal happiness, however provisional and however high the cost, Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love masterfully illuminates a very particular facet of desire with entirely charming results.
Published by Pantheon, an imprint of Random House US, with whom we are in honey moon since we opened, this is the perfect book to start with when you want to complete your most deep desire towards your favorite ingredient. Well, whatever. Soon, that's what we hope, we'll push Random House books better into Bloom. We'll keep you informed.

Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love, by Lara Vapnyar
Pantheon • Short Stories • Hardcover • June 2008

One day there is life... and then, suddenly, it happens there is death.
[FROM THE START OF THE FIRST PAGE]

The Invention of Solitude is the debut work of Paul Auster, a memoir published in 1982. The book is divided into two parts, Portrait of an Invisible Man, which concerns the sudden death of Auster's father, and The Book of Memory, in which Auster delivers his personal opinions concerning subjects such as coincidence, fate, and solitude, subjects that have become trademarks of Auster's works.

Portrait of an Invisible Man
The first part of the book is about Auster's father, a man barely present to his son, is the subject of this memoir/meditation. "Invisible to others, and most likely invisible to himself as well". Auster reconstructs his father's life from artifacts left behind after his sudden but quiet death.

The Book of Memory
The second part of the book comes across as more of a critical essay concerning many of the themes found in Auster's works: the order of events, absurdism, chance. Although The Book of Memory is slightly less autobiographical than Portrait of an Invisible Man, it is also a personal account of opinions and contains references to his life.

Memory as a place, as a building, as a sequence of columns, cornices, porticoes. The body inside the mind, as if we were moving around in there, going from one place to the next, and the sound of our footsteps as we walk, moving from one place to the next.
[THE INVENTION OF SOLITUDE, PAGE 82]

The Invention of Solitude, by Paul Auster
FABER & FABER • HARDBACK & PAPERBACK • 192 PAGES • PUBLICATION DATE 1982

But from today we have something else: Beirut, the name of 21-year-old Santa Fé native Zach Condon's band.

While it may sound like an entire Balkan orchestra playing modern songs as mournful ballads and upbeat marches, Beirut’s first album, Gulag Orkestar, is largely the work of Zach Condon, and was almost completely recorded at home. Horns, violins, cellos, ukuleles, mandolins, glockenspiels, drums, tambourines, congas, organs, pianos, clarinets and accordions (no guitars on this album!) all build and break the melodies under Condon’s deep-voiced crooner vocals, swaying to the Eastern European beats that sound like they’re being brought to you by a 12-member ensemble.

Condon was a straight-A student until he dropped out of high school at the age of 16 to travel Europe in a drunken haze, cavorting and partying with the locals wherever he ended up. It was during one of these evenings that he was first exposed to Balkan gypsy music (notably including the Boban Markovic Orchestra), blasting from the upstairs apartment. Condon went upstairs to see what exactly he was hearing, and ended up staying up all night with the Serbian artists, going through albums country by country, note for note. The Gulag Orkestar is the direct result of what he learned that night.

Most of the tracks on Gulag Orkestar were recorded on Pro Tools while skipping school in Albuquerque, but this past winter, Condon moved to Brooklyn and booked time at Sea Side Studios in Park Slope. He was joined by Jeremy Barnes and Heather Trost of A Hawk and A Hacksaw, who added percussion over what was originally done with drum machines, and some beautiful violin overlays. The resulting record sounds like a Neutral Milk Hotel from behind The Iron Curtain, a glorious and emotional sweep of music both shocking in its emotional content as well as the astounding logistical feat of this having all been pulled off.
[INFO TAKEN FROM BEIRUT'S 4AD SITE]

Hope you like the next song, and also the video, is a BLOOM TV gift for you. Have a gorgeous day! Here it is: Elephant's Gun by Beirut.
[THEIR OFFICIAL WEBSITE]

When Walt Whitman published his first edition of Leaves of Grass on or around the fourth day of July in 1855, he believed he was embarking on a personal literary journey of national significance. Setting out to define the American experience, Whitman consciously hoped to answer Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1843 essay, "The Poet," which called for a truly original national poet, one who would sing of the new country in a new voice. The undertaking required unlimited optimism, especially considering the fact that Whitman had published only a small handful of poems prior to 1855; however, Whitman felt confident that the time was ripe and that the people would embrace him. This optimism and confidence resulted largely from his awareness of the tremendous changes in the American literary world that had taken place during his lifetime.

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things, at all hours of the day;
The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme—myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme:
The similitudes of the past, and those of the future;
The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings—on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river;
The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;
The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;
The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high;
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
FROM CROSSING BROOKLYN FERRY / Leaves of Grass • 1900

One advantage of living in Brooklyn was that Whitman saw many of the famous people of the day when they visited nearby New York City. Thus he saw President Andrew Jackson and Marquis de Lafayette. In what was one of Whitman's favorite childhood stories Marquis de Lafayette visited New York and, selecting the six-year-old Walt from the crowd, lifted him up and carried him. Whitman came to view this event as a kind of laying on of hands: the French hero of the American Revolution anointing the future poet of democracy in the energetic city of immigrants where the nation was being invented day by day.
[IMAGE: Steel engraving by Samuel Hollyer from a lost daguerreotype by Gabriel Harrison]

IF YOU RUN YOU CAN STILL GET ONE COPY OF Leaves of Grass AT BLOOM!

Julia Rothman is our first name on this section. She's an illustrator - should I say artist? - who lives most of the time in Brooklyn where she landed up her office. She stuns the world with beauty creations: illustrations, patterns, graphic design, etc. Like the Midas King, everything she touches produces fortune and gold. Check her work closely and then tell us what you think.

She holds up another site named Books By Its Cover and as the name goes it's a set of collected books that have been put online, a wide selection of genres but most of all they share the same aspect: the illustrations found on its pages, not just the cover but the whole book inside. The object. This is one example by Miyuki Yoshida the title of the book is Paper Folding for Pop-Up followed by what Julia wrote about it, so you can shape the site:

I was in Chicago last weekend visiting my Also partners Matt and Jenny, who also happen to be my best friends. They know exactly what I like and took me on a little excursion to this amazing architectural bookstore, Prairie Avenue Bookshop. Apparently it’s Chicago’s largest design bookstore. It was really big but most of it was full of architecture books which don’t really interest me as much. They did have a small section devoted to design books which is where Jenny found me this book. It’s a book that teaches you how to make interesting pop-ups. Some of them are really simple, a few cuts and folds. Others are ridiculous. The book was really hard to photograph with one hand holding the book open and one holding the camera, so these pictures don’t do it justice. I feel in love with it immediately- a book of blank pages that fold open to reveal a burst of popping color. I splurged on this book ($60), since I was on vacation and since I justified the purchase with the idea that one day this book would come in handy. I don’t know when I will make a pop-up book but when I do it will be so easy- this book comes with a cd full of templates. I also thought it would be hard to find elsewhere since it’s another PIE book. But I found you can get it here.

In 2002 Jenny Volvovski (a great designer), Matt Lamothe (a great animator) and Julia founded a company named Also, that's Brooklyn yes, right on the 3rd Avenue, where the world starts. Julia likes milkshakes, books and long walks with her dog Rudy. Send her your regards here.