One of the most transcendent poets of his generation, Darwish composed this remarkable elegy at the apex of his creativity, but with the full knowledge that his death was imminent. Thinking it might be his final work, he summoned all his poetic genius to create a luminous work that defies categorization. A] unique achievement… It offers costly wisdoms from a life journey, rendered in the opaque lyricism of Darwish’s poetry…His is the voice of dispossessed Palestine but its longings, including sheer lust, are universal. This book overflows with resonant lines and questions… It is a book for life. —The Independent Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Leonardiansyah Allenda, Chapter 6: Marni, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis. Britte Sloothaak & Fadwa Naamna (on behalf of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), Cédric Fauq (curator and writer, Palais de Tokyo), Monika Szewczyk (director De Appel, Amsterdam), Prem Krishnamurthy (designer, curator, writer, Wrkshps and (co-) artistic director FRONT International 2021) and Zippora Elders (artistic director Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen and co-curator sonsbeek21-24)

This is how fights start in high schools. There was no time for it when there was a case to investigate. Pieter Paul Pothoven developed an installation with a spoken monologue. The monologue is broadcast every hour on FM 100.0 and can be heard in the museum at 11 am, 12 pm, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm, 4 pm, and 5 pm. Online conversations and discussions For instance, I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us. I might even be dead. Yet here I am.” When recalled by words, those moments are impervious to the attempt to raise the body to the station of the soul. Who among us has not said to his woman: “I only exist in you,” and was truthful. We were truthful, as well, when we found our existence in a similar utterance in a different place. So do you know how to love? You cannot answer, perhaps because you did not notice the subtle atmospheric shifts when traveling from pole to pole: love and passion, rapture and infatuation, ardor and affection, fondness and devotion, blazing love and bewildering love, craving and caprice, dalliance and desire, longing and lust, admiration and attraction, and other desires in search of senses. In every station the body has a certain state, and for every state there is a station between death and life. So you never know where or how you are.But as you look over your life now, like a mariner considering his own disappointment with the unfathomable secrets of the sea, you ask: Where is my port? You are uncertain how your heart returned safe and solid, like a quince still too hard to bite. Why did you cry, then, when the virgin by the tree was no longer a virgin because one of those who tame the wind had beaten you to her? And why did you cry again, when the second one did not open the door as you stood in the bitter cold shivering from humiliation, not from the cold that lit up your furnace? And why did you cry a third time when the third one departed without noticing that you were hugging a pillow, not a body of silk and ostrich feathers? Infused with poetic clarity and graced with humor, Simon Van Booy’s innovative novella asks the reader to find beauty—even gratitude—in the cycle of birth and death. Stripped of artifice, The Presence of Absence is a meditation between the writer and the reader, an imaginative work that challenges the deceit of written words and explores our strongest emotions. In the end, this book about death advocates for life and how with life continuing after death - can death really exist? Is it really an end? I'm not sure, but this book made me consider it deeply and I'll be thinking about it for a very very long time. Kansas: The Absence of Presence" (in Finnish). Musiikkituottajat – IFPI Finland. Retrieved August 2, 2020. To call a writer prolific can be to damn them with faint praise, but Simon Van Booy is without a doubt prolific — prolific, though, in the positive sense of being marked by abundant inventiveness or productivity.

Antoon’s translation puts a greater emphasis on re-creating rhythm: “It rises and falls, an echo of an echo of a sky stripped of the howling of steel. As if hearing water dripping from a leaky tap. Or listening to footsteps approaching the door, but never arriving.” The Muncy/Velasco story took up far less of the hour than I expected, but I was grateful. Right now, Muncy's reactions are childish and unbecoming of an SVU detective. A desire to keep moving, a commitment to rewriting and revision: these are the tools Darwish used to break free from the prisons of habit. Indeed, for all his mastery of the medium, Darwish’s career was a series of experiments. Some are more successful than others, but none are dashed off. The mixed prosody of In the Presence of Absence shows that his experiment was ongoing. Here, prose is pushed to extremes. It is relentlessly figurative in a way that English readers may find bewildering. In the book’s final chapter, Darwish offers a list of personal keywords: “My memory is a pomegranate. Shall I open it over you and let it scatter, seed by seed: red pearls befitting a farewell that asks nothing of me except forgetfulness?” Some of the playfulness here is unavoidably lost in translation: nathara means both “to scatter” and “to compose in prose” — a pun Darwish uses throughout the work — and the distinction between loose and linked pearls is an old Arabic trope for the difference between prose and verse. What seems like a baroque metaphor is in fact a commentary on the relationship between history (or memory) and prosody. “Poetry is the archive of the Arabs,” runs the old saw. The rhythms of Darwish’s prose are also heavily marked. His sentences are almost liturgical in their balanced yet onrushing momentum. One of the models for this highly metaphorical, richly cadenced style is the Qur’an. And it is a measure of Darwish’s ambition as a poet that his imitation is equal parts homage and rivalry (although, theologically speaking, the holy book is strictly inimitable). All of which makes Sinan Antoon’s translation especially heroic. I cannot think of another text by Darwish so difficult to render into English as this one, yet Antoon’s rendering is both elegant and faithful — an homage in its turn. In the final days of his life, Max Little takes memory and gratitude as the tasks at hand. Writing a journal from his hospital bed, he describes the people who have mattered to him: Carol, the therapist he saw in the weeks following his diagnosis; Jeremy, a kindred spirit facing the loss of his mother; and, most importantly, his wife, Hadley, whom he met when they were children. After his diagnosis, he wonders how he should break the news to her. How will his death affect her? These questions weigh on Max even more than his own sadness: While his diagnosis does cause pain, Max’s tone is overwhelmingly one of acceptance and nostalgia. “Those we’ve lost do return,” he says. In the novel’s brief second section, we see that theory manifest in scenes taking place eight years after Max's death. The concept of listening to a famous author reflect on life and writing is an appealing one, but the novel's aphoristic musings are often too pat to yield new insight or too abstract to reconfigure the reader's views. One of Max’s central claims is that each reader will imagine scenes differently in light of their unique experience. To that end, he repeatedly invokes his readers—“good company you are”; “It’s actually you telling the story”—but the novel is most affecting when it commits to a narrative of its own. Max’s initial response to his diagnosis is particularly poignant: He goes through a series of everyday activities—making toast, brewing tea, taking a bath—that feel like “impersonating myself.” But his later posture of calm renders the narrative placid and oddly ethereal.Life doesn’t start when you’re born- it begins when you commit yourself to the eventual devastating loss that results from connecting to a person […] it’s in the eyes. That’s where you can tell. And.. by how- long after they’ve disappeared from your life- you somehow go on. Loving them.” Love, like meaning, is out on the open road, but like poetry, it is difficult. It requires talent, endurance, and skillful formulation, because of its many stations. It is not enough to love, for that is one of nature’s magical acts, like rainfall and thunder. It takes you out of yourself into the other’s orbit and then you have to fend for yourself. It is not enough to love, you have to know how to love. Do you know how? You cannot answer, because you cannot relive the ecstasies that shook you and scattered you all over the lilac’s escapade, electrified you and tortured you with the scorching taste of honey. You cannot recall the liveliest and sweetest modes of death; when your “I” left you for your woman, and you encountered your self, fresh as a ripe fruit, in her. At the center of Max Little’s concern is his wife, Hadley, and the reader is taken to their first meeting even as Max shares his ruminations on how to best tell Hadley he is dying. Pondering his plight alone on a beach, he arrives at a profound spiritual truth, when he comes to consider himself in the third person. Max posits, “When you nurture the ability to witness your life in the third person, in extremis, or through prayer or meditation, there is an unavoidable shift in consciousness as you realize that who you are is not simply how you feel—but a presence beyond desire of any sort.” The Proposals for Municipal Art Acquisitions is a series of biannual exhibitions organized with the financial support of the Municipality of Amsterdam. Scenography Our life is perpetuated by connection. Sometimes, I think about my fear of connection being linked to the dread I feel towards living. “When one dies, it is the living that suffer.”

The first part of the book is Little writing a journal while at hospice, telling us about his life, his writing, how he met his wife and how he finally told her about his diagnosis. As the chapters count down we know what’s coming. All the entries are short, but I felt connected to Max. The book opens with a self-referential prologue in which Van Booy positions himself as the Little fan chosen by the dead writer's widow, Hadley, to help arrange for the posthumous publication of the "small journal of his last days" that was "too fragmented in its original form" to make sense on its own. Instead, says Van Booy's fictional version of himself, he, Hadley, and the late Little's publisher Sipsworth House decided that Van Booy would incorporate those fragments "into a novel that I would write and publish under my own name with an introduction explaining the circumstances of our collaboration." On request of the family, Van Booy constructs a collection of observations on dying, acceptance, and after-life, from random notes scribbled by a dying author from his hospice bed. It is very philosophical in a light-hearted and almost conversational way. The protagonist both connects to, and engages with, the reader for the duration of the time taken to read the book, knowing that he is deceased while the reader lives, yet both are in their ‘present’: “I’m writing this in the present, and you’re reading it in the present. Except there is a gulf of time between us.” Simon Van Booy electrifyingly combines story with parable....wise, witty and always breathtakingly beautiful.”— San Francisco Chronicle, Best Fiction of the YearDutchcharts.nl – Kansas – The Absence of Presence" (in Dutch). Hung Medien. Retrieved July 24, 2020. Ewing, Jerry (March 30, 2020). "Kansas release trailer for new album The Absence of Presence". Prog . Retrieved June 19, 2020. Austriancharts.at – Kansas – The Absence of Presence" (in German). Hung Medien. Retrieved July 30, 2020.

Kansas move The Absence of Presence release date to July 17". Brave Words. June 16, 2020 . Retrieved June 19, 2020. Throughout the book, there is a continual interplay of the real and the statue, memory and forgetfulness, sleep and waking, airports, ghosts and ghost limbs, and the act of writing itself.You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel withdelicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud. It was as though I had been a bystander, a voyeur who contributes ideas but who has no real hand in governance… Ironic how the fleeting nature of time compels us to act, yet is indifferent to our chronic inaction” Muncy's loyalty to Velasco doesn't give her license to get in Chrulish's face about starting the ball rolling on investigating him.