Within a Sky Full of Earth

A Bloom agradece a todos os que nos contactaram e nos deixaram mensagens de alento e força para continuarmos, para não pararmos de acreditar que vai ser possível.
Vamos ver, precisamos de algum tempo. Vamos esperar esta semana e tentar saber onde está o futuro. Ideias não faltam. É necessário dar-lhes um caminho.
Deixamos algumas referências dos últimos dias:
• A BLOOM NO BAIRRO DO ORIENTE
• NA TRIBUNA DE MACAU
• A ÁGUA NO HOJE MACAU
• AINDA O EDITORIAL DE CARLOS PICASSINOS NO HM
• E NOUTRO BLOG AMIGO

Obrigado a todos!

A good thing to do when you feel disrupt is to cross the Old Bridge on foot. Two kilometers walk. It gives you time to think. It gives just the right balance when a bus crosses the road and you feel on a rope. Trembling.
Many things came to my mind. From going to the streets on protest to making a really amazing event in Macau on the cause of the flood. By the end I was calm and clear. It's better staying like this. And what to expect from the government? I've heard that there's a line of credit. But it's always a loan. You have to pay it back anytime soon. We can ask up to 300.000 patacas and that's almost what we have lost. But then? We can put things up but we got strand to it and we just want to be free. We still have to deal with what was swallowed. The true is that there's was not a sign from the government. Nobody came during these days. The Chief Executive, on the day after, was cutting ribbons on - imagine! - a new power supply that will bring more water to Macau. What a symbolic coincidence.
On the bridge, today morning, lots of sunshine, a nice wind, and the shaking of the public transportation wheels. I realize that we need a bit of time to decide. To see what is the best. To close, finding something else to do. To keep it going or simply to go way from this land of fortune. For good!
AND THE LIGHTS ON THE BRIDGE WERE ON!

Passámos o fim de semana a deitar livros fora. Uma espécie de esponja feita de pasta de papel. Capas moles. Imagens coladas para sempre. Folhas de cinco ou seis páginas. Até se começaram a tecer teorias à volta dos livros. Porque é que uns colavam mais do que os outros. A nossa colecção de autores lusófonos foi toda. Não importa muito se sobrou um ou outro, porque conseguiu nadar até ao cimo de um dos contraplacados das estantes - malditos contraplacados! - e ficar à espera de auxílio. Podem-se ler, é certo, mas as águas, sabe-se lá de onde vêm.
A primeira coisa que notei, logo no primeiro dia, foi o cheiro. Nunca cheirei um morto em decomposição, mas achei que aquele cheiro a papel podre, das águas meio salgadas, completamente impuras, era em tudo semelhante. Livros mortos que, de dia para dia, se iam aprofundando no seu estado pútrido. É difícil contabilizar o que perdemos. Não é só o volume, o objecto e as suas folhas impressas. É todo o processo de construção de uma ideia louca, a de ter uma livraria à nossa medida num território como Macau. Um espaço que fomos construindo. Uma colecção que se foi multiplicando. Porque se à partida apostámos tudo. Tudo o que ganhámos continuámos a apostar. É, Macau é uma verdadeira terra de jogo, nós fomos apostando. Apostando. Apostando... Sem medo, é certo, mas no final aconteceu-nos exactamente o que acontece a todos os viciados do jogo. Perdeu-se!
Os amigos apareceram, recebemos mensagens daqui e dali., para nos dar alento. Sugeriram-nos soluções. Pôr o que restava à venda, o que fizemos. O que restava eram apenas 'meia dúzia' de livros. O cheiro continuava lá, nos livros, as águas que antes passaram por toda a cidade afectada, como um pequeno plano de aniquilação, apesar de se manterem no seu estado húmido, deixaram um rasto de guerra. Pensei, por momentos, que não ia conseguir nunca mais pôr tudo aquilo de pé, não por falta de motivação mas por puro enjoo. Repugnância de livros, se isso existe. É tudo uma questão de sentimento, e isso flutua para trás e para a frente. Na verdade não sabemos bem o que vamos fazer.
E como vieram os amigos, para ajudar, vieram também os que nunca antes tinham vindo, porque ouviram falar que ali se estavam a dar livros. De repente não se percebe muito o que se está a fazer, de que lado se está e, na verdade, tudo deixa de ter importância. No final é tudo papel deitado ao rio.

Se tivéssemos arrumado os livros de outra maneira teríamos poupado todo o Boris Vian, mas teríamos perdido o Samuel Beckett. É como nos aviões, ir atrás ou à frente, nunca se sabe qual é a parte que arde primeiro.

Thank you to those who have been calling us, with nice and friendly words offering help!
Our request is that you all continue to believe in us and keep visiting us and ordering @ Bloom Yellow.

We really appreciate!

Meanwhile, the ordinary and everyday mix with comedy, tragedy, historical fact and magical realism, and the reader is hurried through a portrayal of events without time to tell truth from illusion. Rushdie's achievement is his ability to illuminate a very nonfictional global-scale conflict through a fictional narrative graced at every turn by the finest art of compelling and witty storytelling. Like his title character, Shalimar, Rushdie keeps you turning the pages with his breathtaking high-wire act.
AMAZON REVIEW

The sewers belch me up
The heavens spit me out
From ethers tragic I am born again
And now I'm with you now
Inside your world of wow
To move in desires made of deadly pretends
Till the end times begin
BILLY CORGAN

This is the expression of our disaster. It's still hard to tell. Could be like every vanished book would resemble the weight of an imaginary being that lost its own life. Do books die? They don't, but for sure they stop whispering. They stop being there, watching us and keeping us safe. It's painful to count them. To write their names on our list of casualties. I was there and I know it.
Bloom started slowly, with a few books. As we were selling them and sending them to other homes we were buying more. More and more. Until there wouldn't be more space. The exquisite space of Bloom Red was crowded with books, like a train on the rush hour. They squeezed themselves up and down. Shouting to each others. Telling their own stories. Puhskin's The Queen of Spades was always getting a voice on Dostoievsky's The Gambler. Or On the Road drifting some other tale to tell to Marguerite Duras' The Sailor from Gibraltar. On the Sea!
Fuck! It's hard to breathe now. They were all gone!
THIS EVENING WE LEFT THE LIGHT OF THE LOGO AT OUR DOOR ON. IT MEANS THAT WE'RE STILL THERE. WE STILL HAVE A LIGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF SOMETHING ELSE! LIKE A CANDLE IT GIVES US HOPE...

BLOOM RED WILL BE CLOSED UNTILL FURTHER NOTICE. THANK YOU!
WE'LL KEEP BREATHING AT BLOOM YELLOW!

And suddenly the dream is over. You wake up in a new reality and there's no other way as to face it just like it is. This was Bloom Red today morning, a place of disintegration. A ground zero on our own scale but in the same way unbelievable.
What is this? Where are we now? It took ages to get to this point, struggling from back and forth to bring books and a different life to this city and have them as our trueness. As our own veins, our flesh and blood. It was our passion from many months. It still is. Difficult to go by, as are books a difficult subject to make your own life subsist. Sometimes we failed, but it was on failure that we could open our doors. Learning.
From the back of the night the dawn brought us one meter water high inside our shop. We're it couldn't exist. Books don't burn and cannot swim. They have drown themselves on their own voices. Can you hear a story underwater? I guess not.
Who's to blame? Probably ourselves. Probably nobody. Where to go now? Even having faced it when we saw it we are still on that point when you wake up from the dream and see a world you haven't met before. It's the same, we know it, but the picture touched us much differently, goes directly to the heart, and we still couldn't print it out.
First we have to clean the mess, then we'll see. Bloom will not survive on its own. We'll need resources that it never had. We'll not give up. We'll go until the last station.
[MORE ON THE FLOOD]

But it wasn’t what Saramago was doing that I already could do (albeit on a smaller, less Nobel Prize worthy way) that made reading Blindness so educational. It was a certain, very, to my mind, unSaramago-like quality to this novel that makes it both Saramago’s best novel and the one that opened an until-then locked door for me. The thing that makes Blindness so great isn’t just the writing (by which I mean the language, the way the sentences (even in translation) unfold in perfect rhythm, the sharpness of the insights, the brilliance of all sorts of small technical choices (like not giving any of the characters proper names), which is so mindbogglingly good, but the gripping, unrelenting nature of the novel’s plot.

Two bits of advice (one fairly obvious and arguably useless, the other better all around) for writers, by way of conclusion. First, it’s not a bad idea to read writers that write like you, only better. Second, when you find yourself trying to write in a way you’ve never written before, avoid the urge to simultaneously stop doing what you already do well. This urge is understandable, informed as it is by both the desire to not be accused of repeating oneself and the dream of being the object of that most coveted double negative, “There’s seemingly nothing Writer X can’t do!” Starting from scratch, in regards to style, technique, etc., is asking for trouble, if you ask me. Instead, go from strength to strength. You can thank me (and Jose Saramago) later.
[TODD HASAK-LOWY IS A WRITER AND LITERARY CRITIC WHO WAS BROUGHT BY MARK SARVAS ON THE ELEGANT VARIATION - A PIECE IN THREE PARTS]

Blindness, by José Saramago • VINTAGE • AVAILABLE AT BLOOM
• READ THE WHOLE PIECE HERE.

In early 1939, Detective Comics' success with the seminal superhero Superman in Action Comics prompted editors to scramble for more such heroes. In response, Bob Kane conceived "the Bat-Man". Kane said his influences for the character included actor Douglas Fairbanks' movie portrayal of the swashbuckler Zorro, Leonardo Da Vinci's diagram of the ornithopter, a flying machine with huge bat-like wings; and the 1930 film The Bat Whispers, based on Mary Rinehart's mystery novel The Circular Staircase.

Bill Finger joined Bob Kane's nascent studio in 1938. An aspiring writer and part-time shoe salesperson, he had met Kane at a party, and Kane later offered him a job ghost writing the strips Rusty and Clip Carson. That was what he recalled:

Kane had an idea for a character called 'Batman', and he'd like me to see the drawings. I went over to Kane's, and he had drawn a character who looked very much like Superman with kind of... reddish tights, I believe, with boots... no gloves, no gauntlets... with a small domino mask, swinging on a rope. He had two stiff wings that were sticking out, looking like bat wings. And under it was a big sign... BATMAN.

Finger said he offered such suggestions as giving the character a cowl and scalloped cape instead of wings; adding gloves; leaving the mask's eyeholes blank to connote mystery; and removing the bright red sections of the original costume, suggesting instead a gray-and-black color scheme. Finger additionally said his suggestions were influenced by Lee Falk's The Phantom, a syndicated newspaper comic strip character with which Kane was familiar as well. Finger, who said he also devised the character's civilian name, Bruce Wayne, wrote the first Batman story, while Kane provided art. Kane, who had already submitted the proposal for Batman at DC and held a contract, is the only person given official company credit for Batman's creation. Comics historian Ron Goulart, in Comic Book Encyclopedia, refers to Batman as the "creation of artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger"
[SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA]

In collaboration with the University of Hong Kong and an initiative of Bloom * Creative Network, the Macanese architect Carlos Marreiros will be at the Faculty of Architecture for an open lecture. Titled "Tracing Lines Between Two Worlds" the lecture will flow on the intercultural way of life of this region of the world – Macau, where East and West melted through time, generating its specific and fascinating Architectural Culture. This lecture, which is based on the lines between two worlds, will provide a specific learning experience for the participants regarding Architecture of the East and the West – the similarities and the differences and the boundaries between the universes of reality and imagination, which the Macanese architect is a good example, on its diversity and miscegenation.

DETAILS
Date/Time: 26/09/2008 18:30-20:00
Venue: Room 419, Knowles Building, The University of Hong Kong
Language: English
Registration is not required.
Further information, please visit this website.
Any enquiries feel free to contact the Faculty of Architecture by email.

I've seen it everywhere. I've heard stories of people that constantly die. By every second. On TV, on newspapers. On bold letters. Death is epidemic, is the disease of being alive. Even if I didn't ever see a dead body. My relatives that passed on I could only be by their closed wooden boxes. And it was a safe matter. Not saw them.
But. As I keep living. This is my true being and until then. Until the bold letters come upon me. I'm immortal. And immortality is what keeps me alive.

After I finished the book (a couple days later, which for me is fast), I started trying to make sense of what made it such a powerful reading experience. What I quickly realized was that Blindness isn’t just a great book in some necessarily meaningless objective sense. I know people who did not dig it at all. Rather, it was a great, nearly perfect book for me at that moment, because it had all the elements of the kind of fiction I most liked. But it had more, too. And as much as this might seem like it contradicts all the reader vs. writer/scholar stuff I posited in my opening, this “more” that Blindness has showed me how to write a novel.

I first decided to read Saramago after a fellow writer told me (online, of all places) that my writing style reminded him of Saramago. I figured, well, I ought to see who this Saramago guy is. And the similarities between the voice in my debut story collection and that of Saramago’s narrator—highly authoritative, deeply analytical, long-winded and given to seemingly endless asides—were hard to miss. So I read Saramago from that first sentence the way you read a writer whose style and technique, however impressive and overall unmatchable, makes sense all in all. Because there are writers (Faulkner is my best example) who you read and admire, but whose writing so mysterious and off-the-charts good that you can’t write for weeks after your encounter. Even though I was humbled by Saramago’s writing, I felt like I got him right away.
[TODD HASAK-LOWY IS A WRITER AND LITERARY CRITIC WHO WAS BROUGHT BY MARK SARVAS ON THE ELEGANT VARIATION - A PIECE IN THREE PARTS]

Blindness, by José Saramago • VINTAGE • AVAILABLE AT BLOOM

BLOOM TV:
• Saramago at the end of his first screening of the movie Blindness.
• Fernando Meireles, the director of Blindness, talks about his experience.
• The Theatrical Trailer of Blindness.

A exposição "Desenhos de Escritores" abriu no Museu Colecção Berardo, inaugurada no dia 1 de Setembro, e traz a obra gráfica de cerca de uma centena de autores consagrados, desde George Sand e Antonin Artaud a William Burroughs e Günter Grass.

Resultado de uma colaboração com o Institut Mémoires de L´Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), em França, e o Musée D´Ixelles (Bélgica), a exposição será complementada com obras dos escritores-desenhadores portugueses Almada Negreiros, Mário Cesariny e Ana Hatherly, indicou à Agência Lusa fonte do Museu Berardo.
Esta exposição inédita reúne uma grande diversidade de escritores que também desenham, de George Sand a Bernard Heidsieck, do romantismo à poesia sonora, passando pelos surrealistas, até à "beat generation", representada, por exemplo, por Jack Kerouac e William Burroughs.
Em "Desenhos de Escritores" poderão ser vistos desde pequenos esboços que cobrem o rodapé de um manuscrito, como no caso de Stendhal, até desenhos que cobrem páginas inteiras, como Victor Hugo, que criou imagens fantasmagóricas, ou Baudelaire, mais dado às caricaturas.
Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Charles Cros, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Valéry, Max Jacob, Antonin Artaud, Jean Follain, Jacques Audiberti, Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes, Michel Butor, Jean Tardieu, Christian Dotremont, entre outros escritores, são ilustrados ou ilustram-se a si próprios exibindo uma linguagem artística menos conhecida do público.
"Desenhos de Escritores" prolonga-se até 2 de Novembro, com entrada livre.
[FONTE: LUSA] [MAIS INFORMAÇÃO AQUI - PDF]
• O destaque e reportagem no EL PAIS (em espanhol)

Recently published and available at Bloom Yellow is the quarterly issue of ARTICHOKE, the official magazine of the Design Institute of Australia. Interesting, relevant and sometimes controversial, ARTICHOKE communicates good design and the discussion of design issues to industry professionals and a broader audience of design aware consumers.
ARTICHOKE covers interior architecture and design, textile design, product design, exhibition design and graphic design, and provides designers with news and information on current trends and projects, and is published four times a year.
ARTICHOKE is endorsed by the Design Institute of Australia (DIA) and the Australian Institute of Architects.
See some sample print pages here and come to Bloom to buy it, we can tell you is worth every dime spent. Good photos, good design, good texts and a beautiful piece of printing material.

ARTICHOKE MAGAZINE • AVAILABLE AT BLOOM NOW!