Within a Sky Full of Earth

Before time, everytime my sista like be the boss of the food.
We stay shopping in Mizuno Superette
and my madda pull the Oreos off the shelf
and my sista already saying, Mommy,
can be the boss of the Oreos?

The worse was when she was the boss
of the sunflower seeds.
She give me and my other sistas
one seed at a time.
We no could eat the meat.
Us had to put um in one pile on one Kleenex.
Then, when we wen' take all the meat
out of the shells and our lips stay all cho cho,
she give us the seeds one at a time
cause my sista, she the boss
of the sunflower seeds.

One time she was the boss
of the Raisinettes.
Us was riding in the back
of my granpa's Bronco down Kaunakakai Wharf.
There she was, passing us one Raisinette at a time.
My mouth was all watery
'cause I like eat um all one time, eh?
So I wen' tell her, Gimme that bag.
And I wen' grab um.
She said, I'ng tell Mommy.
And I said, Go you fuckin' bird killa;
tell Mommy.

She wen' let go the bag.
And I wen' start eating the Raisinetes all one time.
But when I wen' look at her,
I felt kinda bad cause I wen' call her bird killa.
She was boss of the parakeet too, eh,
and she suppose to cover the cage every night.
But one time, she wen' forget.
When us wen' wake up, the bugga was on its back,
legs in the air all stiff.
The bugga was cold.
And I guess the thing that made me feel bad
was I neva think calling her bird killa
would make her feel so bad
that she let go the bag Raisinettes.

But I neva give her back the bag.
I figga what the fuck.
I ain't going suffer eating one Raisinette at a time.
Then beg her for one mo
and I mean one mo
fuckin' candy.
BY LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA

"Boss of the Food" was the introdoctury text that Shirley Lim brougth to us. She read it aloud with all the tones of the little young girl who was supposed to be the voice of this story on the form of a beautiful poem. Lois-Ann Yamanaka is a Japanese American writer from Hawai. She often uses this Hawaiian Pidgin. Somehow shows how your inner voice can be reached on your own special language. And that's what was all about: bringing up your voice as a creative writer.

LIVRARIA “BLOOM” ORGANIZA “WORKSHOP”
Vencedora de dois “American Book Awards”, a escritora asiática Shirley Lim esteve ontem em Macau para falar e ensinar algumas técnicas de escrita criativa.

O antigo albergue da Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Macau foi ontem palco de um “workshop” de escrita criativa liderado pela escritora Shirley Lim, da Malásia e actualmente residente nos Estados Unidos. Durante duas horas, macaenses, portugueses, japoneses e americanos residentes na RAEM trocaram ideias e aprenderam algumas das principais técnicas de escrita criativa.
Depois de uma sessão de relaxamento, os alunos foram desafiados a ir buscar ao “baú das memórias” um cheiro que lhes lembrasse uma situação, sentimento ou vivência marcante. Depois, durante dez minutos, realizou-se um exercício de escrita livre, que Shirley Lim descreve como “um dos mais difíceis, pois requer a abstracção total do ambiente envolvente e da rotina”. O resultado foram alguns textos que poderão um dia dar origem a uma história curta ou até a um romance, “se o autor for persistente neste tipo de trabalho”, explica a escritora. Shirley Lim defende que “ser-se criativo é ter a capacidade de acreditar em si próprio e de aceitar riscos”.
No final da aula, os participantes leram os seus textos e trocaram ideias e Shirley Lim leu alguns poemas da sua autoria e outros resultantes do projecto “Moving Poetry”, que envolveu crianças de Hong Kong. Esta foi uma proposta diferente para uma tarde de sábado que partiu da Livraria “Bloom”.

Nascida em Malaca, Shirley Lim começou a escrever aos nove anos de idade e aos onze sabia que “queria ser poeta”. Depois de alguns poemas e histórias curtas publicadas na Malásia, partiu para os Estados Unidos. Hoje é professora na Universidade da Califórnia e realiza “workshops” de escrita criativa por todo o mundo, desde Hong Kong à Austrália, Singapura, Malásia. Esta foi a segunda vez que a autora veio à RAEM, depois de, em 2001, ter dado aulas a cerca de 400 crianças na Universidade de Macau.
Entre as obras publicadas de Shirley Lim, encontram-se “Monsoon History”, “Two Dreams”, “Among the White Moon Faces”, “Tilting the Continent” e “Life’s Mysteries”.
[POR PATRÍCIA NEVES • JORNAL TRIBUNA DE MACAU • FOTOS: BLOOMLAND.CN]

A Bloom agradece a: Shirley Lim, Andrew Moody e a todos os participantes; Bambu Sociedade de Artes Ltd., Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Macau, Casa de Portugal em Macau, Jornal Hoje Macau, Jornal Tribuna de Macau e Teledifusão de Macau. A todos o nosso obrigado!

Art for All is celebrating its 1st anniversary at St. Paul’s Fine Art gallery tomorrow, 8th of December, with a cocktail party at 6:30pm. Concurrently more than ten local prominent artists, including Konstantin Bessmertny, James Chu, Bianca Lei, James Wong, José Drummond, Cindy Ng, Ung Vai Meng, Ng Fong Chao, Tong Chong, Kent Ieong and João O, will display their works for rummage sale to raise funds for the art group’s 2009 operation.

Art for All is a non-profit association founded on 8th December 2007 by a group of Macao artists with the aim to promote the contemporary art development of Macao. Supported by the private organization St Paul’s Corner , in December 2007 Art for All moved to Travessa de S. Paulo to open and manage the gallery “St. Paul’s Fine Art” and six artist studios. In 2008 the gallery has already held seven solo and two collective exhibitions of Macao artists showcasing 100-odd art pieces, presenting local artists’ creative outcome in the past year. Furthermore, Art for All has organized artists to participate in large scale international art events such as the “Beijing Art Fair 2008” in September and the “2008 ACAF NY – Asia Contemporary Art Fair New York” in November, striving to promote Macao’s contemporary art overseas.

Apart from the Macao artistic base “St. Paul’s Fine Art”, Art for All sought development beyond the region. In October, it set up the Beijing Art for All Contemporary Art Exchange Center located at the 318 Art Garden in Beijing. Its debut exhibition - the “Macao Contemporary Art Exhibition” featuring 15 Macao artists and 24 representative works - has received wide acclaim from the mainland artistic community. It provides not only a window for introducing Macao artworks to the dynamic art market in Beijing, but also a platform for artistic exchanges, creating opportunities for local artists to develop in the capital.

On the same occasion, Art for All will unveil a commissioned installation work “High Ladder” by João O who is a Master of Art course student at the Barcelona University of Spain. The artist hopes to share his latest creative work with the audience.
[CHECK HERE • ADD THEM TO YOUR FACEBOOK]

That is the name of our Newsletter. The first test issue is out. Check it HERE.

The Michelin Guide is extending its reach into China with a new edition ranking dining destinations in Hong Kong and Macau for the first time.

The French bible of gastronomy featuring 251 restaurants and hotels in the two Chinese cities is Michelin's second guide outside Europe and the U.S. The debut Tokyo edition was published in November 2007, with eight restaurants receiving Michelin's highest three-star rating. Being a best-seller right in the first week.
Michelin awarded 40 stars to 28 restaurants in Hong Kong and Macau, and two venues got the top ranking. Lung King Heen in Hong Kong's Four Seasons Hotel received three stars, while the hotel's French eatery Caprice won two stars. Inspectors also decided Robuchon A Galera at Macau's Lisboa Hotel, owned by casino mogul Stanley Ho, was worthy of Michelin's highest award.
The team of 12 undercover inspectors, including two Chinese, have been in Hong Kong and Macau testing about 1,200 establishments since late 2007, said Michelin Guides Director Jean-Luc Naret. Michelin plans to expand the guide into other parts of China, Mr. Naret told a news conference in Hong Kong.

The guide, which will go on sale tomorrow, Friday the 5th of December, is published in both Chinese and English. Bloom will have it available at Bloom Yellow in St. Lazarus' Albergue and more close to you at Ou Mun Café, just on the heart of town, on the corner of Senado Square.

• NEWS ABOUT MICHELIN GUIDE HONG KONG AND MACAU
• OU MUN CAFÉ AT LONELY PLANET

This is the event that will mark the return of Bloom to activity. We've been closed in both Red and Yellow during these past weeks. Flood came and we were gone. We can announce now that Bloom Red will be closed for good. We will not be part of the same square anymore, we will say goodbye to the Chinese Temple just in front. But the good news is that we're opening a new place soon near the center of Macau. But that will come in the near future and we will tell when time comes. This is now.
Shirley Lim is an awarded Asian American writer and will be in Macau for an afternoon at Bloom Yellow in St. Lazarus Albergue. The event will bring together a Creative Writing Class followed by a Lecture on Shirley's career of multi-ethnic discipline across the immeasurable world of Literature. A freedom where there's no language and no identity but an entirety mix of tones and voices. Shirley Lim is just an illustration of the diversity and quest for that exceptional accent.
Born in Malacca, Malaysia, into a life of poverty, deprivation, and abandonment in a culture that, at that time, rarely recognised girls as individuals, Lim had a pretty unhappy childhood. Reading was a huge solace, retreat, and escape. Scorned by teachers for her love of English over her "native" tongue. Her first poem was published in the Malacca Times when she was ten. By the age of eleven, she knew that she wanted to be a a poet.
These are just the first lines of a story. You should come for every bit of it. Will be on this coming Saturday, 6th of December, at 4 pm. Don't miss it.
As we have limited seats available you should send us an email to reserve your place.
[DOWNLOAD THE FLYER HERE OR CLICK ON THE IMAGE]

Levei-me a constatar que determinados meus gostos,
por mim sempre escolhidos a dedo e a preceito,
foram por ele vividos através de uma maneira que se limitou a ser.

Os meus gostos por tantas coisas
que ele gosta
e não encontro, porque não consigo, em mais nem menos ninguém.

Com as suas mãos,
soube trabalhar na perfeição
de quem conhece a sua arte,
o barro desse momento revelador
dessa rara recriação de um acontecimento.

Lá longe,
apesar de titular de um bilhete interrupto dessa distância,
dei por mim,
a moldar a sua hipotética felicidade,
que poderia um dia vir a sentir nossa,
de um modo infeliz.
sempre de um modo infeliz.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim was born in Malacca, Malaysia, came over to the United States as a Fulbright and Wien International Scholar in 1969, and completed her Ph.D. in British and American Literature at Brandeis University in 1973. She has published two critical studies, Nationalism and Literature: Writing in English from the Philippines and Singapore (1993) and Writing South East/Asia in English: Against the Grain (1994), and has edited/co-edited many critical volumes, including Reading the Literatures of Asian America; Approaches to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior; Transnational Asia Pacific; and Power, Race and Gender in Academe; and three special issues of journals, Ariel (2001) on microstates, Tulsa Studies, on transnational feminism, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, on contemporary Asian American literature. Her work has appeared in journals such as New Literary History, Feminist Studies, Signs, MELUS, ARIEL, New Literatures Review, World Englishes, and American Studies International. She edited/co-edited Asian American Literature; Tilting the Continent: An Anthology of South-east Asian American Writing; and The Forbidden Stitch: An Asian American Women's Anthology which received the 1990 American Book Award. Among her honors, Lim has received the UCSB Faculty Research Lecture Award (2002) and the Chair Professorship of English at the University of Hong Kong (1999 to 2001), as well as the University of Western Australia Distinguished Lecturer award, Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer award, and t J.T. Stewart Hedgebrook award. She has served as chair of Women’s Studies and is currently professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Lim is also recognized as a creative writer. Her first collection of poems, Crossing the Peninsula (1980), received the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. She has also published four volumes of poetry: No Man's Grove (1985); Modern Secrets (1989); Monsoon History (1994), which is a retrospective selection of her work; and What the Fortune Teller Didn't Say (1998). Bill Moyers featured Lim for a PBS special on American poetry, "Fooling with Words" in 1999, and again on the program “Now” in February 2002. She is also the author of three books of short stories and a memoir, Among the White Moon Faces (1996), which received the 1997 American Book Award for non-fiction. Her first novel, Joss and Gold (Feminist Press, 2001), has been welcomed by Rey Chow as an “elegantly crafted tale that places Lim among the most imaginative and dexterous storytellers writing in the English language today.” Her second novel, Sister Swing, appeared in March 2006, and her children’s novel. Princess Shawl, was published in March 2008.
• SHIRLEY LIM ON WIKIPEDIA

Deixar de amar alguém leva, como ninguém nos precisa de "aconselhar", o seu tempo,

capaz de fundar, em forma de cidades,
questões sem resposta concreta,
motoras da procura do intricado acesso
com sabor a uma nova liberdade.

Nesse compasso,
dianteiro da relatividade do tempo,
fui automaticamente inscrita num dos árduos cursos que a vida, a dado momento, se encarregou de me dar a conhecer.

De nome Reavaliação,
composto pelo número de frases,
conscientes,
rápidas,
letais e
renovadas da inconsciência que é o estado de graça de seM-ti-(r).

vago.
doloroso.
triste.
ambíguo.
perturbador.

um dia destes

pode ser um dia

destes dias que passam depressa.

Manuel Alvarez Bravo was one of the foremost practitioners of visual arts in the twentieth century. Manuel Alvarez Bravo, the first major retrospective of his eighty-year career, showcases hundreds of iconic photographs and unveils more than twenty previously unpublished images. Featuring landscapes, still lifes, rural and urban scenes, religious and vernacular subjects, as well as portraits of luminaries such as Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Carlos Fuentes, and Octavio Paz, the work is chronologically arranged and richly varied. Three illuminating essays reveal the poetry of Bravo's photographs—from his use of light and form to his fascination with dreams and his preoccupation with death. This definitive monograph is a powerful tribute to Mexico's most distinguished photographer.
Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902-2002) received his first camera in 1923 and would go on to become Mexico's most celebrated photographer.

Photopoetry, Manuel Alvarez Bravo
CHRONICLE BOOKS • 320 PAGES • 350 DUOTONE PHOTOGRAPHS • HARDCOVER • OCT 2008
{soon at Bloom}

Perguntaram-me pelo Escritor. Eu, ao que parecia difícil, porque me encontrava distraído, respondi:
- Sentei-o!
Sim, é essa a verdade, sentei-o, ao Escritor; uma mesa quadrada, com dois lugares de restaurante de cada lado. Uma ligeira brisa quente que com os seus odores espreitava da zona da cozinha. Perguntaram-lhe se vinha sozinho, onde estava a namorada; riram-se, as duas mulheres do restaurante, e quando elas já estavam quase a coçar as barrigas, com o que parecia ser uma grande anedota, ele disse:
- Sim, estou sozinho!
Disse-o noutra língua que não conhece como devia conhecer. Disse-o nas palavras que sabia dizer, que não eram muitas. Talvez cinquenta, talvez mais. Os óculos escuros abandonados na mesa, o bule de chá a chegar de imediato. Sentou-se com as costas direitas virado para o vidro que o separava da rua e, sem perder mais tempo, começou a prever o futuro imediato olhando para a ementa.
Mas o interrogatório prosseguiu. Não chegava o começo da história, não chegava uma alusão do ambiente, as luzes frias, o cheiro da comida, era preciso mais.
- E depois? - continuaram eles.
Não eram polícias, nem agentes da autoridade. Na realidade não se ouvia ninguém. A meu ver, eram apenas leitores. Ávidos leitores da obra prima que se estava a escrever. E não pediam menos do que isso. Para quê perder tempo se na verdade não é uma obra prima, se é uma porcaria qualquer?
O Escritor, acima de todos os outros problemas que tinha, que sobrariam das páginas da enciclopédia da sua vida, se ela existisse, tinha um grave dilema com o qual se debatia no seu dia-a-dia. O problema grave do Escritor, que encobria todas as outras acções que prefaziam a sua existência, era que ele não escrevia.

durante alguns meses trabalhei na Bloom.
das experiências mais gratificantes que tive até então em Macau.

Li livros, vendi livros, conversei sobre livros.
durante várias tardes.

Parei, pensei e reflecti as minhas melhores decisões.
sempre no meio de muitos livros lidos, vendidos e conversados.

E todos esses momentos guardarei no fundo do coração.

a loucura de, fizesse o que fizesse, cumprir a minha obrigação de ler, vender e conversar sobre livros.
de saber que os meus domingos não podiam ser de outra maneira.
de conhecer pessoas que nunca teria tido oportunidade de conhecer, de outra cultura diferente da minha,
e que me visitavam regularmente para lerem, venderem e conversarem sobre livros.

E com algum pesar concluí que as pessoas que (mais) precisavam de ler são as que leêm (menos).
Porque temem, a meu ver, conflitos interiores.
motivados pela força que um livro pode ter.

e espero que um dia com as minhas mãos volte a mexer, cheirar, invadir e habitar dentro das palavras de Lobo Antunes.
que para além de meu psicólogo,
porque sabe que eu com comprimidos não vou lá,
me devolve pelo silêncio, sempre o silêncio que ecoa dentro do meu prazer.

Temos estado afastados deste espaço. Atravessámos uma espécie de deserto. Um deserto de tempo onde nada mais existe. Preparamos o nosso regresso. Aqui dentro e lá fora. E as novidades vão ser boas e muitas, e vão cair como uma bomba! A bomba Bloom!

Nós na nossa vida, levamos a vida a procurar janelas em paredes que não as há, temos medo de as abrir e portas em paredes que sabemos que não as há. E acabamos por viver como as viúvas pobres com 2 assoalhadas com serventia de cozinha. E temos imensos quartos que nunca entramos.
ANTÓNIO LOBO ANTUNES

...para fazer algo assim!

It's obvious that something is going to change and life will be for the better. When you have a smarter person driving, the wheel turns with greater directions and the tiny road ahead becomes a horizon full of opportunities, with endless fields to grow. Here or there the clock and the heart are beating in the same way. We're on the same machine, an engine to make a better world!
[BLOOGGING WITHIN THE AIR OF THE CITY - USING: BLOGWRITER LITE and iPHONE]

Obama is close to a big win in USA. According to CNN's latest projections, Obama has 207 electoral votes and McCain has 135. There were projections that Obama will win Ohio, a key battleground state with 20 electoral votes. No Republican has won the White House without winning Ohio. Going into the election, polls showed Obama with a 3-point lead there. All the country is on the move and close to a state jubilation. It's all for the coutry but is also all for the world. What the admisnistration Bush did along these years will be hard to account. The damage is beyond repair and the action will start from scratch. Nothing better to start and do it neat. It's not just the President, from the Senate to the states the republicans will have a huge loss. We know that most of the time ideas drown on politics, but we're hopeful of a change. It's a revolution!
Bloom is happy for the world!

Macau Society for the Protection of Animals (ANIMA) invites you to November's Adoption Day. It will happen this coming Saturday at their shelter in Coloane. Bloomland wants to join this effort in the name of animals. Best friends of man.
Do show up to support dogs and cats of Macau! Thank you!
CHECK THE INFO HERE or CLICK ON THE IMAGE.