Within a Sky Full of Earth

MOLESKINE DIARIES 2009
Moleskine keeps exploring more layouts to support your creativity and time management. This year new layouts for the exquisite diaries of the Italian brand. Moleskine has introduced two completely new layouts: Weekly Diary Vertical and Monthly Notebook
A complete diary collection now. 19 different styles, including the previous three most popular layouts: Daily Diary, Weekly Diary Horizontal and Weekly Notebook
Moleskine diaries are available in 3 cover styles: Hard Black cover, Hard Red cover and Soft Black cover; and 3 sizes: Pocket, Large and Extra Large.
Sleek design with unmatched attention to details, the diary that evolved from a legendary notebook, with the same quality features as the Moleskine notebooks.
Moleskine Asia designed a microsite to help you choose your Moleskine diary, click the image on the left or ENTER HERE.
Afterward come back here and order from us all your choices throwing us an email. Thank you!
BLOOM IS THE DISTRIBUTOR OF MOLESKINE DIARIES AND NOTEBOOKS IN MACAU

Slightly near Rua do Campo, there's a low flow of a web signal you can catch if you're lucky enough and if the gadget you're using has a wide open mouth. It comes like the wind, no passwords, no special adjustments to enter. It's right on the corner of Cafe E.S.KIMO, a franchisable local brand of places spread around the city and its overshadowed islands. Sometimes WIFI is just around the block and you don't need to squeeze yourself to get in. Stand there and breath it.
We're on the street blogging. People passing and the wheels of the traffic clashing on the tarmac. It's Saturday morning in Macau. Bloom is waiting for spots to grow and build the most Beauty Fool place in town. Stay tuned!
TOOLS USED: BLOGWRITER LITE [software] and iPHONE [hardware]

If you go up to the Se Cathedral and turn left, going down through Travessa do Bispo, towards S. Domingos Street, just on the middle, there's a hairdresser called 'Base Hair Culture'. Just hang there on the door, you can seat at the window outside, and you'll find another free hotspot. By the way, go inside and use their services. They do it very well and Man, the owner, who had learned his metier in Paris, the land of coiffures, is a great guy to be with, you can chat with him all along and discuss the meaningful wonders of Macau and the world. And believe me, you are in good hands.
Cheers!

On the road it's very easy to blog. You just need to get to a wireless hot spot and start working your ditches. I'm just finishing my espresso on a Cafe near Senado Square. It's Ou Mun, a Portuguese coffee shop, on the small alley upwards to the Se Cathedral. Once inside ask them for the password access. It's free!
CTM, the local internet provider, offers different WIFIs around the city, but you have to pay for it and slash into a more complex process to get online. We'll track down here, places where you can tune up the web to your mobile device for free. We use iPhone, there's nothing better for it. Have a nice day!
USING: BLOGWRITER LITE and iPHONE [photos and text]

A BLOOM NO TELEJORNAL
São ainda as cheias na Bloomland. Foi assim que aconteceu, dois dias após o dia fatídico das inundações na baixa da cidade, a TDM esteve no Largo do Pagode do Bazar para registar os pormenores da situação. Da noite para o dia a água deixou um rasto de irrealidade levando quase todos os alicerces da nossa livraria, ou seja, os livros, para além de avultados estragos nas instalações e no equipamento. Desde então até agora pouco mudou, a ajuda prometida pelo governo local, uma linha de crétido sem juros, ainda não chegou. Já está uma semana fora do tempo e sem isso não vamos poder voltar a respirar. Fazemos projectos de eventuais mudanças e sonhamos acordados com visões fantásticas. Sim, a sorrir pela possibilidade do que pode vir. De todo, é uma mudança radical que põe tudo em questão, não importa se é um milagre ou não.
A REPORTAGEM DE LINA FERREIRA / APRESENTAÇÃO DE VITOR REBELO © TDM / CANAL PORTUGUÊS

• QUALIDADE NORMAL (mais rápido)
• MELHOR DEFINIÇÃO (mais lento)

The Centre for Creative Industries is opening a photographic exhibition by Nuno Soares, a Portuguese architect and urban planner based in Macau. At Bloom we're congratulating Nuno for this event and inviting you to attend the opening AWAITING - Reflection on Urban Voids, tomorrow, Friday the 24th, at 6:00 pm. Don't miss it!
The Centre for Creative Industries is located at the Macao Cultural Center.

AFA presents "Monumentum Pro", a new exhibition of works by Konstantin Bessmertny, curated by Amelia Johnson.

"Monumentum Pro" further develops themes from Konstantin Bessmertny's series "Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice" which was created for the 52nd Venice Biennale. The paintings and sculptures comprising Konstantin Bessmentny's "Monumentum Pro" meaning " monument for…" intriguingly allude to the Latin verb monere – to warn, to advise, to remind from which monumentum is derived. Employing Konstantin Bessmertny's idiosyncratic characters and distinctive technique, the works appear to be part monument and part morality tale, their tantalizing warnings, whimsical commemorations and cautionary narratives appearing to form visual declensions of monere.

Konstantin Bessmertny is one of the most distinguished artists working in Asia today. His technical mastery, achieved after seven years of studying Fine Art in the grand academies of the former soviet union, combined with his detailed knowledge on a wide-range of subjects including literature, music, history and politics lend to his work an intelligence and a credibility that is rarely witnessed in contemporary art. Konstantin Bessmertny's work is utterly unique, employing humour and candour in depictions so subtle and gentle that they require revisiting time and time again to uncover all that they have to offer. Never formulaic or predictable, Bessmertny uses his work as a means of exploring and experimenting with new ideas, finding inspiration in the bizarrest of places and creating work that continues to challenge and excite preconceived notion.

The artist will be present at the opening reception, this Friday, 24th of October.

Start Time: Friday, October 24, 2008 at 6:30pm
End Time: Sunday, November 23, 2008 at 8:00pm
Location: St. Paul's Fine Art
Address: Travessa de S.Paulo Nos 3, 5 e 7
City/Town: Macau, Macau

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

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival.
Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories.
Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth.
Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jackie Wullschlager is chief art critic for the Financial Times. Her books include a prizewinning life of Hans Christian Andersen and an acclaimed group biography of children’s book writers, Inventing Wonderland.

Chagall, by Jackie Wullschlager
KNOPF • BIOGRAPHY • HISTORY • OCT 2008

The New Coulour Notebooks

Bloom is proud to present the new Moleskine collection : Volant Notebooks. This collection will be launched in Asia in first week of November 2008. The new Volant notebooks are colourful, light, and fit in every pocket.
MOLESKINE Dressed in New Colours!

They are available in:
• 2 rulings: plain, ruled
• 4 colours: pink, blue, green, black
• 3 sizes: Pocket (9x14cm), Large (13x21cm), and the NEW size Xsmall (6.5x10.5cm)
Each Volants is shrinkwrapped in a pack of 2 notebooks (e.g. a pack of blue Volants = 1 dark blue notebook + 1 light blue notebook).

A Huge hit in Europe, US and Japan
The Volant collection was launched in Europe and US in February 2008 and has become a great hit already. Volants was also launched in Japan in July 2008 and replenishment orders are very strong (even higher than classic collection). For sure, Volants has given a new excitement for current Moleskine users, and also bringing in new customers. Especially, the xsmall size is a huge hit everywhere. First, this is a brand new size amongst all Moleskine collections and it is only available in the Volants family. Second, the little notebook size has made Moleskine even more portable than before. The new colour and the cute size have also attracted a lot of new clients (especially female clients/ fashion lovers) for the Moleskine brand.

PRICING
Retail price of Volant notebooks: Xsmall: MOP$ 58 / Pocket: MOP$ 98 / Large: MOP$ 138

Um dia grande para nós. Aconteceu em Junho do ano passado. Um processo complicado, de preparos longos e escolha minuciosa, que trouxe a nossa maior colecção de livros portugueses até à data. Queremos, com toda a vontade, repeti-lo, muito mais vezes.
É uma semana crucial para a Bloom e para o seu futuro. Período de decisões, em que vivemos no momento preciso e fugídio do traço de novos caminhos. Queremos sobretudo uma aberta no cenário, algo que nos possa levar mais longe, com mais força e abrigados das chuvas e dos ventos. Como se tudo o que aconteceu para trás fosse apenas a preparação do que vai existir para a frente. Uma incógnita e, no entanto, uma certeza. Uma alusão de um mundo diverso onde o futuro seja claro e possível. Concreto como um cataclismo. A certeza de que há ainda muito para fazer neste lado do Mundo. Porque levámos este tempo todo a aprendê-lo e não faz nenhum sentido que o chão tenha fugido de repente, logo agora que estamos munidos de todas as ferramentas.
A única direcção é continuar. Essa é a razão que caminha connosco. Do resto não sabemos. O tempo decidiu e é ele que vai decidir de novo.

Desta guerra entre Bruno e o resto do mundo não é difícil adivinhar quem foi o único morto. Mas nem depois de morto o seu fantasma ficou quieto. Se no século XIX parecia finalmente descansar como mártir da todo‑poderosa ciência, arrumado no panteão [...] já no meio das chamas do cadafalso, com um olhar turvo e arrogante, desviou a vista do crucifixo que lhe apresentavam, e acabou “queimado vivo”, consciente de morrer “mártir, e de boa mente, pois que sua alma subiria junto àquele fumo” para ir reconjugar-se com a alma do universo.
in TRATADO DE MAGIA • EDIÇÕES TINTA DA CHINA

Poderemos compreender tudo isto, mas se não apoiarmos com humanidade, fugirá por entre os nossos dedos.
Poderemos compreender e apoiar com humanidade, mas se não governarmos com verdade, não esperemos a gratidão do povo.
Poderemos compreender, apoiar com humanidade, governar com verdade, mas se não pusermos tudo em prática com todo o nosso empenho, de nada valerá o esforço.
CONFÚCIO [551 BC - 479 BC]

• LIGAÇÕES EXTERIORES: WIKIPEDIA em Português e em Inglês.

More aspects of Rimbaud are known than can be assimilated: his vastly various, influential and innovative poetry itself; his expressive letters; his scornful and unhesitating permanent abandonment of poetry at the age of 20; the anecdotes of his contemporaries showing him as a drunken, filthy, amoral homosexualteenager who becomes a reserved, hard-working, responsible and respectable (if misanthropic and disgust-ridden) adult merchant and explorer. One would have to be a genius oneself to grasp the full significance of Arthur Rimbaud, or at least have the ability to hold many opposed ideas in one’s mind at the same time and still function fully. Numerous writers have sought to demonstrate their qualifications along these lines by publishing studies of him.
This biography by Edmund White is the digest version. If you’re casually curious about the fuss made over Rimbaud and want the lowdown from someone literate, it will satisfy you, without badly misleading. This approach seems to be the plan behind the series of short lives, each written by a distinguished author (often a novelist or scholar, not usually a professional biographer) and edited by James Atlas, first for Penguin, now for Atlas & Company, of which “Rimbaud” is the latest entry. Seems like a worthy idea; there are a lot of famous artists and thinkers one wouldn’t mind getting a convenient little handle on.[...]
[RICHARD HELL for THE NEW YORK TIMES • FOLLOW READING HERE]

Rimbaud, The Double Life of a Rebel, by Edmund White
ATLAS & COMPANY • 192 PAGES • HARDCOVER • OCT 2008
[Read a sample chapter here]

«You have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special.
Alma is a Mason Gross student, one of those Sonic Youth, comic-book-reading alternatinas without whom you might never have lost your virginity. Grew up in Hoboken, part of the Latino community that got its heart burned out in the eighties, tenements turning to flame. Spent nearly every teen-age day on the Lower East Side, thought it would always be home, but then N.Y.U. and Columbia both said nyet, and she ended up even farther from the city than before. She is in a painting phase, and the people she paints are all the color of mold, look like they’ve just been dredged from the bottom of a lake. Her last painting was of you, slouching against the front door: only your frowning I-had-a-lousy-Third-World-childhood-and-all-I-got-was-this-attitude eyes recognizable. She did give you one huge forearm. I told you I’d get the muscles in. The past couple of weeks, now that the warm is here, Alma has abandoned black, started wearing these nothing dresses made out of what feels like tissue paper; it wouldn’t take more than a strong wind to undress her. She says she does it for you: I’m reclaiming my Dominican heritage (which ain’t a complete lie—she’s even taking Spanish to better minister to your mom), and when you see her on the street, flaunting, flaunting, you know exactly what every nigger that walks by is thinking. You met at the weekly Latin parties at the DownUnder in New Brunswick. She never went to those parties, was dragged there by her high-school best friend, Patricia, who still listened to TKA, and this was how you got the chance to strike while, as your boys put it, the pussy was hot.
Alma is slender as a reed, you a steroid-addicted block; Alma loves driving, you books; Alma owns a Saturn (bought for her by her carpenter father, who speaks only English in the house), you have no points on your license; Alma’s nails are too dirty for cooking, your spaghetti con pollo is the best in the land. You are so very different—she rolls her eyes every time you turn on the news and says she can’t “stand” politics. She won’t even call herself Hispanic. She brags to her girls that you’re a “radical” and a real Dominican (even though on the Plátano Index you wouldn’t rank, Alma being only the third Latina you’ve ever really dated). You brag to your boys that she has more albums than any of them do, that she says terrible white-girl things while you fuck. She’s more adventurous in bed than any girl you’ve had; on your first date she asked you if you wanted to come on her tits or her face, and maybe during boy training you didn’t get one of the memos but you were, like, umm, neither. And at least once a week she will kneel on the mattress before you and, with one hand pulling at her dark nipples, will play with herself, not letting you touch at all, fingers whisking the soft of her and her face looking desperately, furiously happy. She loves to talk while she’s being dirty, too, will whisper, You like watching me don’t you, you like listening to me come, and when she finishes lets out this long demolished groan and only then will she allow you to pull her into an embrace as she wipes her gummy fingers on your chest. This is me, she says.
Yes—it’s an opposites-attract sort of thing, it’s a great-sex sort of thing, it’s a no-thinking sort of thing. It’s wonderful! Wonderful! Until one June day Alma discovers that you are also fucking this beautiful freshman girl named Laxmi, discovers the fucking of Laxmi because she, Alma, the girlfriend, opens your journal and reads. (Oh, she had her suspicions.) She waits for you on the stoop, and when you pull up in her Saturn and notice the journal in her hand your heart plunges through you like a fat bandit through a hangman’s trap. You take your time turning off the car. You are overwhelmed by a pelagic sadness. Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertible knowledge that she will never forgive you. You stare at her incredible legs and between them, to that even more incredible pópola you’ve loved so inconstantly these past eight months. Only when she starts walking over in anger do you finally step out. You dance across the lawn, powered by the last fumes of your outrageous sinvergüenzería. Hey, muñeca, you say, prevaricating to the end. When she starts shrieking, you ask her, Darling, what ever is the matter? She calls you:
a cocksucker
a punk motherfucker
a fake-ass Dominican.
She claims:
you have a little penis
no penis
and worst of all that you like curried pussy.
(Which really is unfair, you try to say, since Laxmi is technically from Guyana, but Alma isn’t listening.)
Instead of lowering your head and copping to it like a man, you pick up the journal as one might hold a baby’s beshatted diaper, as one might pinch a recently be-nutted condom. You glance at the offending passages. Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel.
This is how you lose her»
[ALMA BY JUNOT DIAZ • ILLUSTRATION BY JAIME HERNANDEZ • PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORKER • DEC 2007]

• Junot Diaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), this will be the book chosen by Bloom to initiate our Book Club in English. We'll announce it very soon. Join Bloom activities. Save Bloom!

Prefiro situar-me nas margens

Quem o diz é António Conceição Júnior, um dos mais destacados artistas de Macau. Afirma que não tem vocação para o feérico e daí a vocação solitária e solidária. São estes alguns dos pontos de uma entrevista, onde discorre ainda sobre a paisagem cultural, a sua actividade, a obra de arte, falando da obscuridade como fundo da vida. O fio da compreensão está na disponibilidade do encantamento, afirma nas páginas do Hoje Macau na edição de hoje.
Uma exposição e um livro assinalam o seu regresso público. É já amanhã, Sexta-feira, pelas 18 e 30, no Clube Militar.

ENTREVISTA QUE PODE SER SEGUIDA NA SUA TOTALIDADE AQUI.
[TEXTO E FOTOS FABRICADOS @ BLOOMLAND.CN]

Ontem, escalei um monte; a subida correu bem até que deparei com o piso coberto de gelo e me desequilibrei. Não havia por ali uma única arvorezinha a que me pudesse agarrar. Se teimasse em conservar uma pose bonita, não iria conseguir nada. Tive então a ideia, a que seria mais do que evidente, aliás, de colocar as mãos também no chão e de passar algum tempo a andar de gatas numa posição das mais graciosas que se possam imaginar. Sou da opinião que devemos saber adaptar-nos às situações. Esta posição de gatas tinha o valor de um desafio, porque o que interessava era chegar lá acima. Se eu não me tivesse curvado daquela maneira, teria ficado parado no mesmo sítio. A docilidade pode também conter em si algo de orgulho. O que me interessava era vencer o caminho.
[ROBERT WALSER in A ROSA (1925) • RELÓGIO D'ÁGUA EDITORES]

The first thing you need to do before you go is catching the flight. If you've got your ticket and your passport that's much better, you don't need to worry about anything else. If you're in, even if it seems like a small cage, it means that you're on the way to getting there. To your destination.
I lost the boat for fifteen minutes, the one that goes directly to the airplanes. Then, after ridding to a different route, the train closed its doors just in front of my eyes. The clock didn't stop. It kept going on the same pace.
The first check-in was closed and at the second they were packing everything down, after I ran desperately for a kilometer lost on the airport counters. I begged. And they walkie-talked the one in charge on the end of the line. Seconds too long and finally they let me in. I was there and it didn't matter if I had to remove some books from my overweighted luggage. At that time I've reached the point of no return.
That's how the following fifteen days began.

Associamos a Luz ao Saber. (Dizemos até que Fulano tem umas luzes de Trigonometria).
Mas aqui o Autor associa a Luz ao Não-saber. Porque a Luz inicial, a primeira, indecisa e primacial, é aquela em que o Iluminado não o é, aquela em que ele não sabe se sabe.
Só à custa de muitos logros, transpostos de olhos bem abertos, o Iluminado que não é Iluminado apreende, a uma segunda Luz, que o não saber se sabe é afinal a culminância do Saber.
E assim regressa à Luz primeira, para se comprazer na beleza incomparável da sua incompletude.
Como lhe agradeceremos o fazer-nos participar dessa experiência?

We associate Light to Knowledge (to the point of saying that so-and-so has a some lights on Trigonometry).
Here, however, the author associates Light to Non-knowledge. Because in light - first light, undecided and primordial - the Enlightened is not so; in the very light under which he knows not whether he knows.
Only in the course of failures experienced with eyes wide open does the Enlightened one - who is not Enlightened – learn that - under a second Light - if non-knowledge knows, it is, after all, the summit of knowledge.
And thus he returns to primordial Light, to enjoy the incomparable beauty of incompleteness.
How to thank him for making us share this experience?
[Pedro Támen • JUN 2008]

For the introduction of Primum Lumen, a Photography Work by António Conceição Júnior.
OPENS NEXT FRIDAY, 10TH OF OCTOBER, AT THE MILITAR CLUB