Strike Three - (you 're out...)

This has been the third great general strike since last May. Back then, it all seemed dismal already. Today, a mere 7 months and two more strikes later it looks as if there is no going back.

The most recent (but not the last) of a series of austerity bills hit the ministry desks last night with one more deputy of the ruling "socialists" exlcuding himself from the vote. It was the least he could do not to go down in history as one of those who once gave in to the demands of a foreign, not elected authority that asks for the lowest average income in the EU to be cut down by 10% to 40% and in some cases 60%. Which roughly translates to 10%-40% less spending, 10%-40% less holiday, 10%-40% less education, 10%-40% less health. And 10%-40% more profit for those who used to pay those "surpluss" wages of 700 Euros, the bankers, the CEOs and the company owners who will pay ~15% less taxes this year as a reward for having put up with such overwhelming earnings on behalf of the "lazy" workers of this country.

These workers, will now have to pay the price for having lived on the benefit of "development" for so long. Only this "development" meant a shift of the balance to the bottom. After all this "development" and "expansion" one out of five Greeks lives at the edge of poverty. After all this "growth" you have half a million Greeks unable to visit a doctor. And you see people fighting on the streets for who gets to be the first to look for food in the trash can.

But it was growth for some all right. It was growth for the shareholders who saw their taxes being cut down from 40% to 22% on average over the course of the last 20 years. It was development for the banks who could privatize profits and nationalize debts. It was expansion for those who will now buy this country's forests, coal mines, buses and trains for scrap.
In Europe like in the US the model prevails over the facts. As long as there is "growth" and "development" it's business as usual for those who have their appointed prime ministers cutting the deals. The rest can enjoy poverty.

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Update: All of the above, better said -in Greek- here

the last stand

Of late I have re-newed my devotion to Thanassis Papakonstantinoy mostly due to the interest epxressed by my good friend J. upon listening to a track of Thanassis, which I had casually posted on my facebook page. After giving J. a brief introduction and urging him to listen to "Vrahnos Profitis" (one of my most favourite Greek albums ever) I also found myself unconsciously pressing "repeat" over some of the tracks of the album.

This is how I got to remember "A. Manthos" (the album's fourth track and one with very particular lyrics) and how I came up with the story behind it. The song's lyrics have been adopted from a poem by Christos Bravos, referring to a real incident between Athanasios Manthos, a photographer of the town of Trikala and Thomas Gandaras, an infamous bandit of the region of Thessaly which took place in the 1920s. Gandaras had an extremely bad reputation among the great land-owners of the region for having an extensive record of kidnappings and killings, but as these were limited against the rich and the powerfull, the poor people were largely sympathizing with him. The legend had it that Gandaras became an outlaw in order to avenge the rape of his wife by a squire, thus he and his gang were more often thought of as "Robin-Hood"-like bandits instead of as fierce killers.

But authorities thought (as usually) otherwise and soon the head of Gandaras was put a price on. As the manhunt was closing down on him and his men, he realized that it was not meant for him to last long. Before his last stand, he wanted to strike a last pose. He decided to have his photo taken. One night, he
forgot all precautions and sneaked into the house of Manthos, by then a well-known photographer in the town of Trikala and the nearby villages. Manthos woke up in awe as the ruthless bandit stood before him but was relieved to find out that all the the outlaw wanted was his portraid done. Thus in the middle of the night, Manthos, who was used to photograph weddings and funerals, took a photo of the famous Thomas Gandaras in the living room of his house and in outmost secrecy. The story of this secret meeting is told in the aforementioned poem "A. Manthos" by Christos Bravos, has been made a song by Thanassis Papakonstantinoy and was recently the subject of a beautiful short film by Vassilis Kosmopoulos entitled "The Trikala photographer".

In the days that followed, Manthos met Gandaras in his secret hide-out where he took one more portrait of his (the one you may see here, taken from the blog of Konstantinos Davanelos) as well as a photo of the entire gang. Gandaras finally met his destiny as he was hunted down and killed by militia-men close to Deskati, Grevena on August 5th, 1923. He was decapitated and his head was exposed in the main square of Kalambaka the following day.

Wish you were here (E.T.)

That I am a devoted fan of Pink Floyd is no mystery to the readership of this blog (all three of you). I have repeatedly mentioned names and places related to the greatest band of them all in various past posts, including a (personal) obituary for the late Rick Wright. Having a particular strange tendency for both visual and audial connections it was then very easy for me to spot the missing link behind NASA's Astrobiology lab latest discovery.

According to this, the first living organism to be able to incorporate arsenic instead of phosphorus in its genetic material, was recently isolated in lake Mono in Southern California. The bacterion, whose name (GFAJ-1) comes as yet another proof that people in NASA may provide a whole new level to the definition of dullness, was the object of a greatly anticipated press conference which circulated media feeds and e-mail boxes all over the globe yesterday. People who were let down by the fact that the press release (initially making explicite mention to "the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life") turned out to be about an insignificant bug with an utterly boring name should think twice.

A long time before NASA turned to Lake Mono in desperate search for extra-terrestrial life, Pink Floyd had used its surroundings in a famous photo by Storm Thorgerson which appeared at the back cover of their "Wish you were here" album. This is the snapshot of a diver immersing in the alkaline, toxic but calm and ripless waters of Lake Mono. (And judging from the concentration of arsenic in these waters, I can only hope that the photo is the outcome of some artistic superposition of images.)

Whether the existence of extra terrestrial life was something that concerned Pink Floyd at the time, or whether it was the unwordly atmosphere of the environment that matched their nostalgic title of the album, I dare not speculate. However, the inconcistency with which the scientists announce a talk about alien life only to provide us with an example of what can only be terrestrial (even though underwater) can only make me think that in their quest for E.T, the guys in NASA maybe constantly thinking how they "wish he was here".

getting there (or quite)

Hard as I try to downgrade it trough scorn and ridicule, the truth is this: I like my job. For the simple reason that I am too lazy to be doing anything I would not really like. When I think about it, there are more than one reasons for liking what I do the most important of which being that it is the closest it gets to providing me with a sense of being inspired and productive.
Research is a sort of an art for the untalented. You are not really good in something, other than solving problems, yet you experience a certain feeling of fulfillment once you do solve them, no matter how trivial.

Fellow researchers (or for that matter, "researchers" like myself) may assure you that such a feeling arises far too seldom. Still the reward lies exactly on this rarity. In this way it better resembles an "epiphany" that makes it look like a true inspiration. The best part though is that it gives one the impression of having solved a difficult problem in the twinkling of an eye. Because apart from all sorts of metaphysical satisfaction, it provides you with the obvious advantage of having very little to do. Once you 've single-handedly solved the problem over lunchbreak, your work is done. You can spend the rest of your post-doc term in happy hours, holiday and general slacking-off, simply by attending the occasional conference.

But is it really like this? Until recently I thought (hoped?) it was. I still remember an early Saturday afternoon back in my old flat in Barcelona, sometime in April 2006. It now feels like a long time ago and it probably is. I haven't talked to my -at the time- flatmate Maria for over four months and that old flat is now being rented to tourists on a weekly basis. But it was on that distant afternoon, while Maria was testing her patience waiting for me to accompany her to the supermarket, that I had that idea, that brief glimpse through the peephole of truth (or at least something that seemed like it back then). It was that moment when, between getting my coat and checking my e-mails that I got a crystal-clear idea of how to solve the main problem of my qualified as "impossible" post-doc project. As I triumphantly switched off my laptop, I turned and gave Maria my "I 've done it again" smile. I walked out the door, certain that my job was almost done.

Well, it's been four and a half years since then and it looks like the job is still almost done. My initial brilliant idea had since developed into a computer program, whose performance had to be bench marked, compared with similar programs based on similarly brilliant ideas, its results had to undergo thorough experimental verification, the whole thing was put to paper sometime in the summer of 2007, reached the desk of my supervisor the next fall, had to wait there until spring 2008, undergo an unfathomable number of revisions, suffer the usual cycle of submission-revision-rejection-resubmission only to be published in its final form last Tuesday. In all, it looks like it took a bit more than the twinkling of an eye.

In the meantime, I have come, seen, not conquered and left Barcelona, having realized that it takes much, much more than a brilliant idea (let alone one that proves to be not so brilliant after all) to get the job done. In this sense research, profession-wise, becomes much more like any other job. Tedious, time-consuming, a stressful endeavour during which the truly inspiring, productive part is consumed within a moment only to leave the rest of the time to be filled by the boring, the tiring and the "what-the-hell"s. "Getting there" is not as easy as just having a great idea. The road is long and winding just like in any other thing that is worth trying.

In the end, no, I am not going to say that "it's the journey that matters" but I have to admit that one can get wiser on the way. Even if it's just by realizing the value of slowing down, catching a breath and realizing that what we do is not important but that it is important that we do it.

would you trust your vote with this woman?

Seriously, would you?

In times when explosives are posted via Fedex to elected government officials, in times when students break into the headquarters of the ruling parties, in times when massive strikes are becoming everyday life, when every single bill is met with the fiercest opposition and outrage...

Well, in times like this, one would say democracy is simply not working. Democracy as it is being practiced at least. Democracy as the system where less than half of the people are convinced to choose among a handful of leaders whose ideas and visions are proven to be remarkably identical. Leaders only by name who are obsessive with power, backward in almost every single aspect of thinking, leaders who look frighteningly, dangerously, suspiciously as if they were "being led" instead of "leading". Leaders, governments, officials, think-tanks that appear "know better" and hence with increasing frequency take decisions that are radically different from what they have set out to, upon being elected.

In times like this, we are asked to cast our votes knowing that this is the closest ever we will get to making a difference. Only the difference is never taking place as new faces take the place of old ones only to iterate the old rhetorics and the so-called democratic governing of the talking heads consists of passing one offensive bill after the other without the slightest support of the electoral body, which has to wait stoically until the next election to "send a message".

But all this is about to change, as enlightened leaders are finally reaching to the root of the problem. Angela Merkel knows better.
At the head of a cast of visionary politicians of the 21st century she has proposed that we do away with voting altogether. "That's it!", she thought, "lets get rid of the votes of the poor European states for starters!"
Why should we have them voting if they cannot even buy our exports anymore? Then we can do away with the votes of all states and be left with the real intelligentsia, all these officials of the European Bank, the directorates of the central European committees that are not elected. I mean, just see how efficient THEY are!
Next comes the big step. Why not banish the whole election process? Seriously, does it make any difference? Why bother with such an irrational expense when we all know that what they are voting for is nowhere close to what they are getting? Do we really need to go through all this fuss?

Well, I couldn't agree more!
Upon facing respectable Angela (or Sharkozy, or Cameron) wouldn't you think twice before trusting them with your vote?

cherchez la femme

Mario Vargas Llosa (left) and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (right).
Gabo's bruised left eye courtesy of the 2010 Literature Nobel Laureate

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded yesterday to Mario Vargas Llosa, a decision that besides being fair (although according to some a very late one) finally brings Llosa on-a-par with his fellow writer, old friend and great rival for the prestigious title of the greatest living Hispanic American writer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Readers around the world are now welcome to reconcile the two literary men as equally great in both public acceptance and critical acclaim.

What remains to be seen is whether this prize will settle a long-lasting feud between them and if Gabo and Mario, once inseparable, will finally talk to each other after refusing to do so for more than 34 years. Over the decades people have attributed this contend between the two once best friends (Marquez being the Godfather of Llosa's son Gabriel) to either professional jealousy or opposing political views. Llosa has been a fierce neoliberal since the early 90s when he even ran for the presidency in Peru, while Marquez has always openly exhibited his left-wing ideas and has been a close friend of Fidel Castro, for which Llosa often refers to him as "el cortesano" (the courtier). Nevertheless the roots of this rivalry are neither political nor authorial. They can be traced back to a winter evening of 1976 in Mexico City, date and place where the incident of the black eye occurred. The story involves two Nobel Prize winners, a right-hooked punch and at least one woman.

The legend has it that on the evening of the 13th of February 1976, while in a movie theater in Mexico City, Marquez spotted Vargas Llosa sitting a few rows behind him. Upon making a move to embrace his good -he thought- friend, he found himself lying on the carpet with a bleeding nose and a sore left eye. (Legend also has that his shiner received immediate treatment by Helena Poniatowska placing a steak on it). In the meanwhile, Vargas Llosa, author -among other works- of the most famous punch in the history of literature, was led outside the theater shouting in rage: "How dare you try to embrace me after what you did to Patricia in Barcelona!"

The background to this incident lies at the verge of being qualified as TV gossip material but since photographer Rodrigo Moya has made it public it has assumed some far-reaching consequences, among which the reluctance of Marquez to complete the second volume of his autobiography or Llosa's refusal to republish his doctorate thesis on Marquez's legendary "One hundred years of solitude". The story goes that while both men where living in Barcelona with their families, Vargas Llosa fell passionately in love with a Swedish air-hostess, for whom he left his wife Patricia and moved to Stockholm. Patricia sought advice in Marquez and his wife Mercedes, the two having always been very close friends of the couple. It was later said that they strongly advised her to ask for a divorce. Even later, it was insinuated that Gabo's consolation to Patricia may have been a bit overly friendly. Vargas Llosa was informed (or misinformed) of the facts (or not) of the matter when he later returned to his wife (they always do) as she was probably too reluctant to contain herself (or too willing to exaggerate).

The rest is history (or not yet). As the two masters casually met in Mexico the following year, Vargas Llosa felt obliged to demonstrate to "the courtier" how the right (hand) can deliver a decisive blow on the left (eye).

How a duel of this kind and proportions can be resolved, even among two of the world's most prominent Nobel laureates, remains unclear.

...................

PS. A couple of hours after this post I read Marquez's latest tweet, posted on the day of the Prize announcement. It simply read "cuentas iguales", roughly meaning "even". Purposefully ambiguous, as all aphorisms, it can be interpreted in many ways. You choose the one you like the most.

going the wrong way

With lorry drivers all over Greece on strike for a mere three days, the minister of transports ordered them to break their strike, threatening to recall their permits if they did otherwise. Two days after that, and with truck drivers keeping their ground, the Greek government has employed the country's military forces to take their place and thus resume the distribution of goods and fuel throughout the country. As of yesterday army trucks are delivering fuel to airports and gas stations and somehow this is supposed to be restoring "stability" in markets and transportations.

My fellow citizens who are relieved to be filling up their tanks and finding fresh apricots on the shelves of their supermarket, should think twice. They may be heading to the nearest beach on their cars and motorbikes but they are probably missing the fact that this is being done at the cost of workers' rights being stepped on in the most audacious of ways.

This is a government, socialist only by name (like so many, nowadays), that first cuts down salaries and pensions to almost half of the population, then sits and stares at prices going up at record stagflation rates and decides to take action only when it is about further attacking worker's rights according to the dictates of the IMF. The new law -the reason for the lorry drivers being on strike- asks for a change in the status of a so-called "restricted access profession". For more than 35 years, in order to become a lorry driver someone had to pay a lot of money to get a permit that he could later transfer at will and at a price he decided. The government -aka its IMF "dictators"- have now called against this "unjust" system and are attempting a "reformation" (and you have to excuse words within double quotes but they are necessary). The new system will thus "open" the profession by rendering the permits so cheap that they become obsolete. Justice? Well, not quite. What the new law says is that the permit will be almost free to give away as long as someone has set up a "transport company" under which designated drivers will be working on a contract. What the law actually aims at, is opening the way for big food and fuel companies into a new market, safeguarded until yesterday by the lorry driver unions. Because that is exactly what is going to happen. In the past, individuals may have struggled for a permit that, given the organization of the union, guaranteed them a living but there is no chance for a middle or lower-class (if those still exist) guy to be able to start up a company. On the other hand, big companies have their way paved for them by the state. They won't even have to pay for the permits before setting up their own transport branches that will hire the ex drivers who will be unable to work without a contract.
Now does this sound like a "justified" "opening" of the profession to you?
What it really is, is a ruthless attempt to restructure the transportations sector from being limited-profit free-entrepreneurial into an oligopolistic trust with great profit margins for big companies, with the subsequent abasement of the workers.

What is even more striking is the credulity and submission with which the media have supported the government's decisions, first to force the lorry drivers to end their strike and then to bring the soldiers on the streets delivering gasoline as if Greece has suddenly become North Korea. No talk about workers' rights abuse, no talk about dangerous connotations whatsoever.
But the worst part comes when one sees the public opinion dozing off in this media-administered apathy. As the country is experiencing cataclysmic changes in every possible aspect of everyday life, people are actually backing up the government by demanding this strike be over. That is, they are granting officials the right to undermine the future of thirty thousand people, being too short-sighted to see that what happens to the lorry drivers today, will be happening to them tomorrow.

One fifth of the Greek population is living on the verge of poverty. 18% of Greeks will not visit a doctor for not being able to afford it, some 20% have reduced their spending on everyday goods like bread and milk, but in the end what really matters is that the "poor Greeks" get to have a five-day, well-deserved, overpriced summer vacation which is being ruined by them bloody truck drivers. So "bring on the troops", "stop the strike", "put them behind bars" for wanting to maintain their working status. Everything is acceptable as long as people can ride their cars off to a nearby beach.

Well, it's not!

I hope -for the sake of us all- that people start thinking with a clearer mind once the summer is over and sunbathing will no longer be their first and only priority.
Until then and with the lorry drivers holding firm at a brave standstill, it looks like everyone else is going the wrong way.

life in the afternoon

With summer holiday just about to begin, I now know which book to take with me to the beach. This year, it's going to be "Death in the afternoon" by Ernest Hemingway. Not so much for the fun of it, or for an obvious debt in reading it (probably being Hemingway's most "Spanish" of books) but mostly because this book seems like the ideal way to lightly ponder about a long-lasting debate on the future of Spain's bullfighting tradition.

Were he alive today, Hemingway, a passionate bullfighting "aficionado" ever since -the legend says- witnessing the Fiestas de Pamplona back in 1920, would have suffered a blow facing last Tuesday's Catalan Autonomous Parliament's decision to abolish bullfighting in Catalunya. Given the region's historical background and its constant drive for breaking its bonds with anything that is Spanish, it is hard to see perceive this decision completely decoupled from politics. In fact, it would suffice to look at the distribution of votes on the matter to realize a -not so strange- correlation between an assumed sensitivity for animal rights and political views. In all, it was a heavily divided vote, with representatives of the local nationalist parties being strongly in favour of the abolition act, in contrast to those of the moderate ones who maintain stronger links with the Central Government.

In what concerns animal rights I am not sure how big this step is. In total, the bulls killed in arenas worldwide should not be more than a hundred every year, a number that is far inferior to the pigs slaughtered in the same period in the Catalan province alone to supply its sensitive citizens with a great variety of sausages. The obvious argument that bulls suffer an agonizing death in the bullring, whereas animals slaughtered for their flesh are killed "scientifically" does not make me feel a lot better. A great number of animals are still being horrendously tortured during drug and chemical testing and death is probably agonizing no matter the procedure of extermination being followed. I can understand the shock of a sensitive citizen at the sight of a blood-squirting, animal dying in its prime but one has to agree that there is a clear difference between slicing the throat of a baby lamp before putting it on a spit and leading a raging bull in the arena against a group of men, who have been trained throughout their lives into treating the animal with utter respect.

No matter one's opinion on bullfighting, he has to admit that the whole point of it goes far beyond simply killing the bull. As a long-standing tradition, it goes a long way back to ancient ceremonies with a great deal of symbolism embedded so deeply that has become invisible today to short-sighted modernists who choose to see bullfighting as a display of barbarism but find the running-over of animals on the highways an inescapable side-effect of progress. Yes, bullfighting is a remnant of old times, and yes a "corrida" is a hard sight to which I would think twice before submitting my children, but then again, are all things of old destined to be abolished? and to what extent is a dying bull more offensive as a sight than what one can see on TV?

I cannot say I am 100% pro-bullfighting, although I have enjoyed a couple of "corridas", and I am not the passionate fan Hemingway was, even if I appreciate a well-performed "Veronica" and can distinguish a "pase de pecho" from a "pase de desprecio". In all, I see a great deal of hypocrisy in trying to ban an activity that is has its roots in the veneration of an animal and during which animals are treated with extreme respect if not still considered sacred. Those who have never been in a bullfight, or have never read about them (by "Papa" Hemingway or anyone else) may not be aware of the fact that the bull is treated by the crowd with the same respect and admiration as the "torero", that the bullfighter is to be booed and ashamed if the animal is not killed properly (in a way that it suffers less, that is) and that in some -extreme- cases the bull can be "pardoned" by the fighter if the crowd demands it as a reward for its bravery (see for instance the great Jose Tomas pardoning a bull in Barcelona here).

But in the end, we live in a democracy and the decision of a Parliament is to be respected so there is to be no bullfighting in Catalunya as from January 1st 2012. And so the representatives of the people have decided that upon facing a bull instead of grabbing it by the horns, they might as well jump over it. Or even worse, pretend the bull is simply not there...

Cortescher

With the World Cup over, an -expected- July heat wave bringing the city to a standstill and with teaching obligations not to be resumed before early September, I am taking advantage of a loosened working schedule to catch up with some long-due reading. Over the last weeks I have decided to take up the task of reading Douglas Hofstadter's legendary "Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also referred to as GEB-EGB by "connaiseurs").

Being a book I 've always meant to read but at the same time more of a project than actual reading entertainment, GEB is to be given time and space to breath between reading chapters discussing a wide range of subjects from -the obvious but rather misguiding Music and Art- to -the more proper- computing, cognition and artificial intelligence. I therefore relax my GEB-endeavour with interludes of short stories by some of the South American masters, (Cortazar and Marquez mostly), whom I have somehow always connected with the summer.
It was this way that I came to make a strange connection between, GEB (and the middle "E" in particular, that is "Escher") with a short story from Julio Cortazar's "Final del juego" that I read only recently.

The story is called "La noche boca arriba", which would be translated in English as "The night face up" (non-spanish readers can opt for this interesting comic-strip version). It starts with an ordinary motorcycle accident, with the rider -our hero- being taken to hospital to receive first aid treatment. There he drifts into a strange limbo having and a very vivid dream in which he is transformed into a central American warrior-prince being chased by the blood-thirsty soldiers of the enemy in a dense, tenebrous jungle. As our hero resonates in and out of his drug-induced lethargy the realistic description of the surgery room is more and more blending with the visions of his middle-aged American dreamscape. The warrior has now been captured and is being kept captive in a dim, moist cave. As surgery goes on, the wounded rider dozes off deeper and deeper into this horrible nightmare. His captives are now tying him up on a wooden stretcher as the preparations for his sacrifice -for he is going to be sacrificed- are under way. As the story is slowly drawing to a climax, the part of the warrior is gradually occupying the greatest part of the story, the agony of the imminent sacrifice has become the main theme with the ongoing surgery in a distant time and space shifting to a secondary allegory. The upsetting "finale" resolves in a complete reversal of the story, as we realize that the surgery room, the accident, the speedy motorcycle ride have all been parts of a futuristic vision of the moribund warrior instead of the actual facts.

These reversals are rather a commonplace in Cortazar and the rest of his kind (Borges being the most prominent). But having had recently gone through the wonderous worlds of M.C. Escher, I could not but think of his "Metamorphosen", where a main theme being gradually mixed with a secondary until completely transformed into it, and how Douglas Hofstadter might have been delighted in citing this wonderful literary analog to complementary transformations (instead of filling the gaps of his chapters with his somehow dully pedagogical dialogs).

As it was getting very late -but not much cooler- I switched off the light and tried to get some sleep myself, only to realize that I was too upset by Cortazar's complementary nightmares and that instead of taking a "break" I should have moved directly to Hofstadter's next chapter on recursion.

It's always the 26th

On July 26th 1953, some 130 men badly trained, poorly armed, wearing second-hand military uniforms, stormed the barracks of La Moncada in Santiago de Cuba at daybreak. As the attack was pushed back by the soldiers of Fulgencio Batista's military regime, a great part of the insurgents died on the spot. Others were executed the morning after and the rest of them were captured in the following days, tortured, trialed for treason and imprisoned for life.
They did not, however, serve for life. For it only took five years and 158 days for the man who had led them against La Moncada to finally triumph in kicking Batista and Co. out of Cuba. Fidel Castro's first official decree ordered their liberation and the declaration of July 26th as a national holiday.

Last week, that same man, Fidel Castro, having outlived nine U.S. presidents, several CIA-orchestrated attacks against the state of Cuba and himself, made an official appearance after being considered seriously ill (at some times even at the verge of death) for more than a year. He looked feeble but in good humour and even had time to talk to the people for a couple of hours, for remaining silent has never been his thing ever since he defended his own self in the trials of La Moncada movement.

Castro will turn 84 next month but will still be at the center of attention of the whole country for today's celebrations of the National Holiday commemorating the attack on La Moncada. Fifty seven years after that first attempt to change the lives of the Cuban People, he is something more than a talisman of the state he rescued from the gangsters and the pimps. He is still active, taking decisions, forming policies and even committing errors, something Bill Clinton (to name only one) can only match with explaining the way he led the World Economy to ruins to University students all over the planet. (His fee for such "inspired" talks amounts in the thousands, they say, but maybe he plays the sax for free on intermission).

In the meantime, Castro, once the pole of an "axis of evil", demonized for trying to impose a "failed economical system" on the poor Cubans, is seeing how his country sails through the latest international economic crisis, the third one since he took over. I guess he must be entertained with the way his fellows in the US and Europe are cutting down salaries and pensions, watching unemployment rise and public spending decrease. I also guess that by now, having been harshly criticized for nationalizing banks and companies, he must be entertained with how European Governments are using taxpayers money to rescue private banks.
I 'm also guessing Castro, having been repeatedly accused for his insistence on not liberating political prisoners, will be laughing at the new laws in Europe and elsewhere forcing women not to wear burkha, forcing everybody to carry new, biometric passports, registering mobile phones, allowing landlines to be tapped "under special circumstances" e.t.c.

And I 'm guessing Castro will be having the time of his life today. Seeing Cuba maintaining its dignity in times that even sovereign states are being bullied by the IMF and some arbitrary world-dictators named G20. Seeing that Cuba -in the way he has defended it against the wishes of "liberals" worldwide- has not had the luck of Haiti or Bolivia, thus it cannot be devastated by natural catastrophes like earthquakes or un-natural ones like Lehman Brothers.

For Castro, it may not "always be the 26th" (as Omara Portuondo sings in this beautiful anthem) but in the end it looks like history may absolve him after all.

PMD (Post-Mundial-Depression)

Cuando el Mundial comenzó, en la puerta de mi casa colgué un cartel que decía Cerrado por fútbol. Cuando lo descolgué, un mes después, yo ya había jugado sesenta y cuatro partidos, cerveza en mano, sin moverme de mi sillón preferido. Esa proeza me dejó frito, los músculos dolidos, la garganta rota; pero ya estoy sintiendo nostalgia. Ya empiezo a extrañar la insoportable letanía de las vuvuzelas, la emoción de los goles no aptos para cardíacos, la belleza de las mejores jugadas repetidas en cámara lenta. Y también la fiesta y el luto, porque a veces el fútbol es una alegría que duele, y la música que celebra alguna victoria de ésas que hacen bailar a los muertos, suena muy cerca del clamoroso silencio del estadio vacío, donde ha caído la noche y algún vencido sigue sentado, solo, incapaz de moverse, en medio de las inmensas gradas sin nadie.


Eduardo Galeano
El reino magico

*(Find an English translation here)

in the end it's all about football

Last month was a month of traveling, work, reading and partying but first and foremost it was a month of football. Hard as I tried to explain to my girlfriend that the World Cup -apart from being the WORLD CUP- belongs to that special category of rare events -once every four years- that further adds to their immense importance, she still found my enthusiasm (which of course she could only qualify as obsession) increasingly irritating. Having been in a rather good mood (as it always happens while the World Cup approaches the last-16) the time seemed right for me to confront Demetra with the standard, traditional argumentation for the love of the game and the impact of the World Cup

I therefore tried to slowly introduce her to the history of the teams, the differences in the style of play that for so long -not so much anymore, but still- have been connected to the temperament of the people, the Brazilian "jogo bonito" against the Bristish "kick and rush" etc. But having had recently read Jonathan Wilson's -outstanding- "Inverting the Pyramid" I soon found myself over-excited, talking about formations and tactics, arguing for the rise of the modern 4-2-3-1 and the -apparent- decline of 4-4-2 and preaching about posession football being a pro-active strategy. As I realized the expressions on Demetra's face were rapidly shifting from slightly indifferent to utterly bored, I decided I had gone too far and I let it go. By that time the play-offs had already started and I decidedly announced I was to watch all games left till the end. I stayed in to watch USA play Ghana. She stayed in with me, partly out of support and partly -I assume- for educational reasons. Perhaps she could understand what it is that makes football so important.

As it usually happens, by the time you reach the semifinals, even women get to be -a little- interested in the action. With Uruguay about to face the Netherlands in the first semifinal we decided to watch the game in the company of friends (girlfriends included). Before kick off, having been repeatedly asked on which side I was on, I resolved -time and again- to foolish comments of the type "I don't mind", "I like them both" etc. But as the game went under way I gradually shifted from a mild sympathizer of the Uruguayans to the most loyal of their fans . So, I cheered with joy when Diego Forlan scored the superb goal depicted in this post's photo and I stood up from my chair to watch the last minutes as Uruguay struggled for an equalizer.
A few days later, Demetra decided it was high time she went out a bit. As she was having drinks downtown, I was at home biting my fingernails watching Uruguay's agonizing efforts for a late equalizer once more, this time against Germany in the 3rd place final. When Forlan (again) hit the crossbar from a free-kick on the last minute I exploded in a outcry of curses about the world being unjust, the order of the universe and the such!

It is in moments like these, that one realizes the power of football.

When simply by watching a game you start to get involved even when at the beginning you appear indifferent. It is as if you have been set up by a friend on a blind date only to find yourself strangely attracted to the other person and un-strangely in love before you even realize it. In the same way you find yourself cheering for the goals of a far-away country or feeling compassion for a guy being sent off even if you've only seen his face for the first time one hour ago. No matter what the tactics are, wether 4-4-2 is to be abandoned or if Spain's tiki-taka is a defensive or an attacking strategy, in the end it's all about football.

And one day, perhaps, women may feel it too.

Against the anonymous fan

Imagine something you love and at the same time respect too much to see it ridiculed. Now imagine someone who is pretending to love that same thing but obviously understands nothing of its grace. One that instead of appreciating it, is using it as an opportunity to show off. Someone who, in summary, is nowhere near your perception of what is considered to be your "common" passion. He is only there to make a mock out of it and outrage you with his stupidity!
Now put this guy in the position of the anonymous clown of the photo and there you have my feelings about football on one hand and the random football fan on the other.

I 've been watching the games of the World Cup just like any other civilized person who appreciates football and I cannot but be disturbed with the frequency with which the cameras turn to the crowd in search of pathetic exhibitionists like the one in the photo. I cannot be precise about the origins of this sick habit of television broadcast but I am guessing it must have started at the same time football was for the first time treated as a massive commercial product. That would be sometime between the World Cups of USA and Korea-Japan. It was around then, that broadcasting a football game started to involve close-ups of Victoria Beckham (back then Mel-C or B, I can't quite remember). And it was around that time that the anonymous idiot, realized he could have his 5 seconds of fame simply by putting on the most ridiculous kind of garment, (or in the case of women, remove every trace of it) and getting admitted into a football stadium (if only someone would stop him...).

Be it wherever and whenever, I am not here to argue on the power of the medium (that is TV in HD or any other quality). The point I am trying to make is as simple as this:
Since when have we fans become a part of the spectacle so that we deserve to be ostentatiously treated side by side with the actual protagonists, the football players and their coaches?
Since when do people feel that going to a football stadium is more about showing off their worst taste in costumes than watching the actual game?
Since when have people become so self-centered that instead of watching the game they sit patiently staring at the big screen (nowadays all big stadia have at least one) waiting for their little, insignificant existences to appear so that they can wave mommy or daddy hello?
And since when has the feeling "I saw it. I was there!" been substituted by "You saw me. I was there!" ?

It may be a sign of the times, a simple manifestation of how, in a powerful media-driven society, the passive spectator becomes the spectacle or -for that matter- how easily he can be tricked into believing he is something more than just that. A passive spectator. In a society where our ability to have a real say about things that matter has been substituted by the illusion of deciding on the next "pop idol" it is becoming increasingly important to realize what order of things we HAVE to be involved in and what not. Football -other than a great game for those of us lucky to still practice it- is a spectacle and should remain one. The moment the fans get to have their own "Fan of the match" webpage, (check it out, it exists) something is definitely going wrong.

To all those that will arguably point out that football without TV would be something very different than what it really is, I can simply offer to lend them a couple of my DVDs of old World Cups where the TV was present only without the occasional morons staring at the camera, making the V-sign instead of watching the game they had paid for.

Please, keep this in mind, for the next time you see a clown like this popping up on your TV screen in the middle of the semis.

So long and thanks for the fish...

(A guy walking down Carrer dels Flassanders in el Born, Barcelona. Photo by Julien Lagarde)

Some ten days ago, in a bar close to my old working place in the Barceloneta, I indulged into some serious dancing and partying for three main reasons. One, Greece had only won their first ever game in a World Cup on that same afternoon, two after having watched France losing to Mexico in the company of a predominantly French audience I felt we needed to be cheered up and three I was back in the company of good friends I haven't seen for quite a long time. Moreover, we found ourselves in our "natural" environment, the place where we all met, worked and have shared similar moments (that is both vivid disappointments and sudden impulses of joy) over the last years.

It was during that dancing that one of us (I was told later, it was Micha) told someone else (who was Julien): "We were a good group once"

Be it nostalgia, grief or simply "girly-talk" as my own girl put it, there is substantial truth in that. We "were" a group once, we are now individuals that used to be part of the same team, still very good friends, still in the position of meeting every now and then and have fun like we used to. As time goes by and we grow old, some things will necessarily change. And instead of thinking back in sorrow, I prefer to glance forward in joy. I am happy to realize that even though life has moved on, I can still meet my friends and have a great time with them, be it for ten days every few months. A lot of things change in between, but it is as natural, as well as desired.

As time goes by and the perception of time itself is adjusting to a more fragmentary way of "grown-up" life, I choose the most optimistic way of looking at things. Yes, we "were a group" once, but yes we also "are" still a group in a certain sort of way. And no we won't be able to celebrate all of the French defeats, (or any other kind of "defeat" for that manner) but it is quite astonishing that we manage to keep this rate of constancy of celebrating once every few months considering the distances we are all transversing in both space and time.

A few days later during a wonderful ceviche dinner at the place of a couple of friends we remembered the last time I was there. It was almost a year and a half ago, the dinner was lunch then, (but it was again fish), and my friends' precious daughter was sitting at the table with us. Seventeen months later, the precious daughter was sleeping in the room next door, with her -also precious- baby brother who was born on the same night of my last visit. As we wondered what the changes will be the next time we have dinner or lunch together, I thought that witnessing change may be as important as meeting again to share it.

As I once again rode the bus to the airport, on my way home, I promised myself I will be back soon. Not as soon though as not for some change to have taken place. It looks as if I have irreversibly connected Barcelona with the point of reference for my personal development plan ;)

So long, then, and thanks for all the fish...

Barcabios - La vuelta

(Downtown Barcelona as seen from Montjuic. Photo by Julien Lagarde)

So, I am back in Barcelona, as promised. It took me more than fifteen months to fulfill this -seemingly- simple promise. But things are not always what they seem to be and what has been placed between me and Barcelona over these months ended up being as difficult to cope up with as it was to let go.

So it's been one year, three months and two weeks since I took my girl, my suitcases and two backpacks full of memories on a taxi to the El Prat airport. We had had a paella and then coffee in Absinta in the Barceloneta, had said "hasta la proxima" to those friends who stood there till the end and at the door, it looked as if as even "hard" Giuseppe, my flatmate for over three years was about to cry. Then we flew back to Athens on the first day of March and the story changed so suddenly that it would be hard for one to think it's not a different story altogether.

It sounds weird that I get to remember all these details so vividly. But memories are very much like the forgotten souvenirs one brings home from a trip. You only find them once you accidentally hit on the cupboard in which you have been keeping them. In my case the cupboard is a rectangle defined by Montjuic, Gracia, Gottico and Poble Nou. And as it appears I have carelessly left something in every little corner of it, I am delighted that not a single moment passes by without me remembering, names, places and faces. A terrace in the Barceloneta where four people had dinner yesterday was enough of a reason for my being here and my coming back once more.

A couple of days ago, my good friend Kostas, suggested I listened to "Boots of Spanish Leather". As I now realize my "souvenirs" from Barcelona are something more than a pair of boots, I feel like I am at peace. It's certainly more than a pair of boots I will be bringing back home to my beloved as it's more than certain that my cupboard, with its "loyal guardians" will always be here with for me to randomly go about digging for lost, but not forgotten "souvenirs de Barcelona".

today

Oh the time will come up

When the winds will stop
And the breeze will cease to be breathin’
Like the stillness in the wind
’Fore the hurricane begins
The hour when the ship comes in

Bob Dylan,
When the ship comes in

let it spread*!

* Yield spread: The difference between the quoted rates of return on two different investments, usually of different credit quality.

Greeks learned what the "yield spread" (or simply "spread") is only recently. The Portuguese, the Spaniards and many more are soon to find out themselves. In simple words it represents a rate at which a government may borrow from other financial entities. Low spreads mean a country is trustworthy and thus can sell its bonds easily. High spreads reflect a generalized doubt on the government's ability to pay back, therefore borrowing becomes more difficult. At usury rates, borrowing becomes impossible and the country goes bankrupt.

Over the last few months the yield spread of the 10-year Greek government bond rose from about 2.5% (last November) to a prohibiting 8.5%, right before Greece was forced to submit to the IMF and to a record high of 10.4% last Wednesday while the Greek MPs were discussing the ratification of the IMF memorandum and with the house of Parliament being sieged by an uncontrolled mass of demonstrators.

As the value of the yield spread is said to reflect the fiscal reliability of the state economy, I find it hard to understand the degree to which my country's credibility has improved within the last five days. The spread dropped by 50% within thirty minutes yesterday morning and it lies now only marginally (and suspiciously) below 5%, which equals the rate at which Greece is to borrow from the IMF and the EU. As from yesterday, everything seems like business as usual for the "markets". Yield spreads are dropping, the Greek Stock Market marking a rise of almost 9% on Monday and news throughout the media of mass deception talking about "a reversal of the climate", "a new hope" and "the light at the end of the tunnel".

All over Europe, people stand amazed with the clarity and consistency with which the "markets" are behaving. Two days ago, the EU announced a "rescue plan" of 750 billion Euro thus openly admitting for the first time that a number of states -and not only the lazy Greeks- are at the verge of fiscal collapse. To this grave danger, the thoughtful "markets" immediately responded by reducing interest rates and with stocks rising all over the continent. Well aren't they nice?

Well, in Greece in particular, there are a couple of things that happened in the meanwhile. These were the -unprecedented- signing of a treaty that is granting to an outside independent organization (the IMF) the right to decide on critical matters of the daily life of citizens of a member state. These were the complete abolishment of working rights, these were the reduction of the lowest salaries in the EU with a simultaneous rise in taxation. These were all "necessary", "unavoidable", "inescapable" sacrifices the people had to undergo in order to convince some German Bank to lend them money with less than 5% interest.

There are of course the skeptics. The ones who look at the salary reductions, the "reformation" of work rights, pensions being cut down even for the poorest and see "a tunnel at the end of the tunnel". Those who take to the streets because they fear they will soon be living on them, who try to sack the Parliament before it is completely run down by un-elected "loan sharks", who refuse to pay the bill for a country whose 60% rise in GDP over the last decade has gone anywhere else but in their pockets.

And this is what is happening in Greece today, in Portugal and Spain tomorrow and soon to a country near you.

today (more than ever)

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

as I foretold you, were all spirits, and
are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
the cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
the solemn temples, the great globe itself,
yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
and, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
leave not a rack behind.

William Shakespeare
The Tempest (IV, I, 148-156)

¡Átame!

("¡Átame!" is spanish for "Tie me up!". You may know this from the film by Almodovar with the same title.)

Over the past few days, with massive demonstrations going on all over Greece and with incompetent union leaders messing up with the common feeling of protest and the common sense itself, I have wondered more than once on the possibility of alternative ways of protest. Forms of expression of one's disapproval, anger or even despair against an unjust treatment that would be at the same time non-violent, imaginative and reaching to other people.

Then I was informed of this effort by an ingenious, active citizen of Barcelona (from whose blog I obtained this photo) and was delighted to realize that there is still a way to protest in a manner that is at the same time effective, decent and even more, artistic!

The background: Tying bicycles on power light and stop light poles around the city of Barcelona is considered illegal. Bikes found under such circumstances are removed by law enforcing agents and the owner of the bike is then given two options: 1. Get his bike back after paying a 450 Euro fine (starting with a deposit of 59E) or 2.Forget his bike altogether.

The way out: Enters our hero "Pacotilla".
After he had his bike removed from a stop-light pole, he realized the possibility of secret option number 3. He thought that instead of spending 59 Euro to take back his bike and having it removed every time he tries to park it someplace he could do something about it. In fact, he decided to do something about it, about him and the rest of the bikers of the city. So, he took his 59E and instead of getting his bike back he went and bought a number of padlocks which he used in the cleverest and most imaginative way. He simply went about the city chaining all sorts of items on the same poles where he is not allowed to chain his bike. He started with simple things like the stool you see here, a jar or a boot. Then other people heard the call of Pacotilla, joined this initiative which resulted in stop light poles around Barcelona being tied up with suitcases, bird-cages, in one case a whole fridge!

This initiative has become more and more popular among fellow citizens, always open-minded and keen on such ways of expression. "Proyecto 59 interventions" are now considered part of the city's street art performances and a lot of people (count me in) find them superior to many highly esteemed artists' so-called "installations".

The outcome: Well, first of all this great blog and the spreading of the word throughout Barcelona. A change of the regulation and/or the provision of new bicycle parking spots around the city is now imminent.

As someone once said: "If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."

this is your future

There is one clear indication that a society is being destabilized and that is the rise of petty crime. This has been no secret in Greece over the last months. Thefts, muggings, break-ins have increased dramatically not only in the metropolitan areas but throughout the country. Anyone who would refuse to connect this to the current financial crisis would be short-sighted. The crisis is here and it is only financial, but in a society that is so geometrically centered around money, it has assumed dimensions beyond control. A financial crisis has become political, social, moral and -alas- intellectual. Seeing how literally every argument can be twisted, distorted and turned on its head, watching the futility of all measures and protests, one cannot but wonder. Is this the end?

Yesterday three people died during a violent outbreak at the margin of massive protests against the passing of an "austerity bill" that the Greek Government feels obliged to put forward to avoid bankruptcy. The Government is right in suggesting harsh measures out of this dead-end. The Government is wrong in putting forward these measures, which are unjust and whose radicalism is limited to the way it will change poor people's lives. The people have every right to be furious against such measures that limit "austerity" to the lower and middle classes and leave the great majority of the privileged untouched. And some intellectuals are right in pointing out that the measures are futile as they will act only in support and maintenance of the current political system of corruption, injustice and impunity.

There is a new demonstration scheduled for this evening at the same time the bill is going to be voted in the parliament. The people are right in wanting to have a memorial service to the three dead workers. But the people will be in the wrong if they let their anger to drive them down to hatred and violence. The people will be in the wrong if they lose the moral advantage they have always had against their corrupted governments. It is not a question of compliance, submitting to external powers or serfdom. It is purely a matter of survival.

People will be in the wrong if they allow their lives to become subject to pessimism, fear and violence. It is true they have been the constant victims of unjust governments but if the time has come to take things into their own hands -and let us hope it has- they must do so in full responsibility. They cannot -should not- let this society crumble down into a chaos of insecurity that will give rise to "Saviours", bringers of "ultimate solutions", "leaders of the people". We have seen this happen in the past, let us not be the ones who will witness its resurrection.

"Invisible hands" can easilly turn into "iron hands". This is the way it has been planned. They think that the passing from the "rule of the markets" into the "rule of everything" will be assumed physically and with the subservience of a man facing a natural disaster. But this can only happen if we let it happen. In our heads. If we stubbornly keep thinking that the "markets" is the 21st centuries equivalent for "nature", that money is something more than a commodity and that the laws of economy lie beyond and above those of physics.

This is the "dream" they have for us. This is our nightmare. So, let us do ourselves a favour and wake up.

when the pigs broke free

It was just after noon, one shiny spring day in the year twenty-ten.

Everybody was on strike, except perhaps me.

I was fearing what happened and had my camera ready to take with me to the demonstration. I finally decided not to, having sensed that there was not much to be won from such a protest. I have taken part in protests before and have only seen them turning into dangerous demonstrations of anti-propaganda.

Then this demonstration also turned into a riot. No wonder. It has happened before and will happen again, all the more often I am afraid. It is too hard to contain oneself when one feels so suddenly deprived of what he deserves. When from one day to the next, he is being asked to radically re-adjust his lifestyle in the same way some stokebrokers believe they can re-adjust the figures on their screen.
But it is as simple as that. If you apply "shock-treatment" you have to be ready to face seizures.

Then fires broke out all over the city center and three people fell dead, due to the firebombing of a bank in downtown Athens.
And then the markets became "nervous". CDS spreads went up, the Euro started to fall, Bloomberg reported a rapid decline in oil prices.
The three people were still dead.
Portugal's prime minister started to sweat while listening to his minister. Spain's government bonds were under attack. The Greek Government was passing an austerity bill.
The three people were dead, suffocated, burnt.

The dark lords of economy, the invisible hands of the markets, the abominable speculators that have realized they can bankrupt entire countries overnight have called us PIGS. PIGS stands for Portugal-Ireland-Greece-Spain, PIGS stands for economies on the verge of collapse, PIGS stands for meat for the markets.

Now the PIGS are finally being sent to the slaughterhouse. And as it happens with real pigs, they are not behaving as politely as one might have expected.

And that was the day that my government took away my mom's pension.

today

"L'homme est une entreprise qui a contre elle le temps, la nécessité, la fortune, et l'imbécile et toujours croissante primauté du nombre... Les hommes tueront l'homme."

Marguerite Yourcenar
L' Oeuvre au noir

a paso de cangrejo...

...is spanish for "at a crab's pace" or better said "walking like a crab". One needs not be an experienced seaman to grasp the meaning of this expression. It is employed -sometimes at excessive rates- to mock someone's procrastination when, instead of taking a leap forward, he prefers to beat around the bush, walking sideways, towards his scope, sometime even backwards away from it.

In my case, this might be perceived somehow reciprocally. Meaning that instead of myself I find that it is a number of goals I have set appear to be walking away from me. Even worse, in some cases, they tend to ostentatiously pass me by, at their crablike pace, walking sideways as they drift away. Over the last weeks I find the whole essence of time or actually its scantness to have reached some sort of
limit that is beyond me. Desperately as I try to divide my week's efforts among urgent duties, forgotten projects, self-improving assignments I always appear to be running against the clock. At the same time the simplest task of maintaining a marginal social life is all the more being reduced to e-mailing, facebook chatting and talking on the phone. Worse than that, I seem to be not getting any work done.

It might be that I am asking too much from myself (which is not very probable, given that I have more than three days off-work every week) or it might be that I am so tempted by the lack of a tight working schedule that I tend to slack off most of the time (much more likely although I remember far more constructive periods in terms of doing nothing). The fact is that a couple of papers remaining unpublished, another couple of projects remaining un-started, a series of meetings being postponed, combined with a trumpet rusting un-blown, a couple of stories undone and with the end of semester approaching dangerously, I find myself unable to fake the crab's pace anymore. I might rather picture me in the uncomfortable position of the one in the photo, squeezed inside a glass tube and so close to an inevitable stalemate.

follow the money

today

Una mujer morena

resuelta en luna
se derrama hilo a hilo
sobre la cuna.
Ríete, niño,
que te traigo la luna
cuando es preciso.

Alondra de mi casa,
ríete mucho.
Es tu risa en tus ojos
la luz del mundo.
Ríete tanto
que mi alma al oírte
bata el espacio.

Tu risa me hace libre,
me pone alas.
Soledades me quita,
cárcel me arranca.
Boca que vuela,
corazón que en tus labios
relampaguea.

Es tu risa la espada
más victoriosa,
vencedor de las flores
y las alondras
Rival del sol.
Porvenir de mis huesos
y de mi amor.

Miguel Hernandez
Nanas de la cebolla

Miguel Hernandez, "tweets" and regular expressions

Miguel Hernandez, a shepherd-poet, born and raised in the small town of Orihuela, close to Alicante, was a prolific reader since very early. In one of his early poems, "Leyendo", he gives one of most discreet and subtle descriptions of the joy of reading. A young shepherd spends most of his day reading in full harmony with the surrounding provincial landscape.

I tried to follow his example spending most of last Saturday reading an anthology of his poems, one of my favourite books from my time in Spain and one of the few, which made it all the way back with me in Athens a year and two days ago. But my reading could only last this long. By Sunday I had to start preparing the lectures for my upcoming classes. Upon leaving for Crete, Ι packed a few clothes, my notebook and a couple of Bioinformatics books, but refused to leave the poems on my desk. On the boat, instead of preparing slides on regular expressions, I went back to "Leyendo" and Hernandez's "Poemas Sueltos".

I thought I had found the most rewarding way to remember my rusty spanish when I came up with a puzzling recurrence of a certain word. In the beginning of the poem, the sun is greeted by a bird.

Preludia un ave un gorjeo

I faintly remembered "gorjeo" meaning tweet and was about to congratulate myself when upon reaching the last verse I was puzzled with a second instance of that "tweet"

Trunca el ave su gorgeo...

Only now "gorjeo" was spelled as "gorgeo". As my spanish is rather good but still far from allowing me to resolve ambiguities of this kind, I had to turn to a dictionary. In fact I turned to more than one and it turned out that all of them agreed on the "tweet" 's correct spelling being "gorjeo". This could only mean two things. Either there was a typo in my edition of the poem or Miguel had made a spelling mistake. Yet another ambiguity, but one that could not be resolved. I spent the last three days in Crete where an alternative edition of Miguel Hernandez's poems was obviously unreachable. It turned out to be equally difficult to find one in Athens or the web. The only version of the poem I could get was the one I have in my edition of Austral Poesia. Thus I was unable to verify or rule out Miguel's spelling error.

As gorjeo/gorgeo was doing circles in my head, unable to decide which version looked better, regardless of spelling rules, I thought that maybe I had the perfect example of a regular expression right there in front of me.

After all, gor[jg]eo was still rhyming perfectly well.

lost for words...in general

It's been quite a while since I last woke up just to have coffee and read the newspapers on the web, listening to "Ella and Louis", enjoying this blessed slowness on the advantages of which I have commented long ago. This can be seen from the density (not to mention quality) of the posts of this blog. As it often happens, the less you read, the less you are able to write. In fact, sometimes even speaking may deteriorate once you are kept away from books for long. This is more or less my case, for various reasons.

One. I am to travel to Crete once every week, where I have to either talk ceaselessly while lecturing undergraduates on Computational Biology and Programming, or bust my eyeballs in front of my tiny net-book screen while preparing the next lecture.
Two. Because of this work-travelling overload I have barely managed to read one book since the beginning of the year. A saddening output especially when compared to my prolific reading during my term in the army (which I still do not miss at all by the way). Two more books that I 've started reading through February, are still disgracefully lying on my small bed-table. Last but not least, I cannot remember the last time I entered a bookstore.
Three. Partly from guilt and partly from bad organization of leisure time, I have stopped reading on the web. That is no more newspapers, google-reader, daily news updates in four languages. All this is gone. My old colleagues will understand how big a change this is.

So, in one of this wonderfully ironic coincidences, I sat on my couch this morning to read my favourite Babelia on the web (by far the best thing being printed weekly in the Spanish language) where I came upon this article by columnist-writer Antonio Munoz Molina. Ironic, because this article somehow dealt with all of the above. Books, bookstores, talking and writing. I apologise to the non-spanish speakers unable to read this wonderful piece, for not providing a concise summary, but the truth is that it is not that easy to sum up all of the things that come through it.

The article starts with a quote by Hemingway and goes on to mention the closing of a certain bookstore in New York, then goes through a brief history of american literature of the 20th century and ends with a comparison of english and spanish in terms of verbosity, conciseness and wealth of vocabulary. All subjects I was connected to, one way or another.

One. Hemingway's mentioned quote was: "Each writer should have a built-in bullshitting detector". To which point I can already see the smiles on my ex-colleagues' faces. You see, during my term in Barcelona I have become famous for two things and these were: 1. bullshitting while talking (scientific talks included) and 2. bullshitting while writing (this blog included). Funnily enough, bullshitting got me through then and there and gets me through still through every class I have to teach. It's more of a style than an attitude and dear old Ernest can say whatever he wants.

Two. The bookstore about to close is Morningside Books somewhere on Broadway and 135th (or 136th, or 137th). I have only spent two months in New York but it so happened I was living a few blocks from that place and I vividly remember spending quite sometime browsing its the old, rusty shelves. I also remember its timid, humble window, which looked nothing like the picture above, taken from a fancy Athenian book store, with more books on the display than on the shelves. Come to think of it, Morningside Books must have been the only bookstore I entered while in NYC, probably intimidated by the size of the crowds in all the huge Barnes and Nobles. As I recalled, the boxes filled with old, used Virginia Woolfs and William Faulkners I was deeply saddened to hear the place is closing down.

Three. Spanish verbosity vs Anglosaxon strictness of content. Having lived in a place where I had to use these two languages interchangeably for more than three years I can see what Molina means. But I cannot help but think how overwhelmed he would be if he were to compare them to Greek. Being in that position (even though not at the level of an established academic like the one he is) I can testify Greek to be superior in bullshitting potential to all existing idioms. The wealth of terms, ambiguities, verbal and written forms is beyond any comparison.

In fact it is so overwhelming that I suddenly realize I am not doing well in not talking (or reading) that much these last weeks. And which also reminds me I have to stop writing and go on to make some long-promised phone calls to friends that have not heard me talking for ages.

(...not that they are missing anything...)

three wild alley cats

For three whole years I have been walking late and alone through the streets of el Raval in Barcelona. I 've wandered in the alleys of the rumorous Condesa district in Mexico City. Once I got lost in the Bronx past midnight and on two occasions I had to go through some of the rough parts of South East London on my way home. But it was fate that I was to get mugged in downtown Athens, just a few blocks away from the place my father grew up.

It was probably fate because it was one of those nights when nothing works out as planned. First we failed to locate the place of the party we had initially set out for. Then, after ending up in Gazi, we chose a relatively dark alley to park far from the busy, noisy streets. And finally, we made for the bar the wrong direction, that is through the end of the alley instead of choosing a wider, busier street with better lighting. There at the end of the alley, three kids were waiting for us.

I 've witnessed similar situations before, not exactly the same, but cases where one needs to come in the defense of his own self. In cases like those there is one thing that always happens no matter how experienced one is, and that is you always do the wrong thing. Yesterday, I simply tried to run away from those three wild alley cats. Naturally I soon found myself lying on my stomach, while two of the kids were kicking my arm while pulling the stripe of my handbag. I came to my senses, calmed down and was allowed back on my feet only to see my friend Giorgos handing all his money to the senior of our attackers who was at the moment holding a knife gently pressed against my friend's abdomen.

I stood there, trying to grasp what was going on while the three kids (because they were just that, three kids with one -or at least one- knives) turned their backs at us, leaving us in the middle of a desert street. I felt less scared than angry, much more furious than afraid and was more eager of getting even than getting away. I started thinking of all the things I had done wrong. Wrong choice of street, wrong choice of attitude, I thought that I should have taken a different street or turned back the moment I saw them. As I looked around for a witness, some aid or consolation I caught a glimpse of a guy at the other end of the street, a guy who as soon as he caught sight of me watching him turned around and fled. Then I realized that there was no way we would have got away with it.

What had been done was done. We checked ourselves for wounds and scratches. As I found my thigh a bit less bruised than my pride and Giorgos felt his heart much lighter than his pocket, we saw that our casualties were not substantial enough to rob us of our first night out together since New Year's. I reached for a fifty Euro note at the bottom of my pocket and we decided to convert it to drinks as soon as possible. Thus we headed for the closest bar and had what must have been our most deserved drinks ever. At the end of the night each of us would go home with one more adventure to talk about.

released-recaptured

Outside there is a nasty storm going on. I am asleep because of the freaking wind blasting against my window the whole of last night and trying to set up my new netbook while going through some bioinformatics papers with Brad Mehldau keeping me company. Tomorrow I will be leaving for Crete for the first class of my new job appointment. In brief, a lot of things have changed since the last post some weeks ago.

The rainbow seen from outside the window of my new flat is more than three weeks old. Which says a thing or two for how busy I 've been over this period. A new job that needed all the necessary preparations (mostly of psychological and bureaucratical nature), some old projects still pending and a lot of background household life, the thing I dare to admit, enjoy the most.

It seems thus that my wish came true and so soon after getting over with the ironic joke that the military service really is, I am back on track again, more active than ever (or perhaps as active as I 'd like to be), ready for a new start.

Released from the army - Recaptured by life. Lets see if I can stand the captivitiy

the end (is the beginning...)

There are a number of reasons for why "Abbey Road" is the cover of this post, the first of this new year. For one thing, I have come to think of it as my favourite Beatles album. Apart from the myths and legends connected to Rock's most famous album cover, it contains some of my favourite songs plus the coolest medley of short melodic poems ever written (all the tracks from the "Sun King" to the end of the album are a continuous piece of McCartney's genius). For another thing, I recently read that "Abbey Road", although released prior to "Let it be", was actually recorded after it, thus it constitutes the last Beatles album. It moreover finishes off with a glorious "The End"*, a sort of coda of less than two and a half minutes, which at the same time conveys the message of closure and bids farewell.

Such an end of ends, the last track of the last album cannot but remind me the last week of the last of the weights I had to carry (and "Carry that Weight" is not curiously Abbey Road's next to last track) over the past year. My military service will soon be over and I cannot but look back at these last nine months without a sigh of relief. 2009 was the year of great changes, sudden adaptations and an irreplaceable loss. In all I am glad it's over. In some very different way, so must have been the Beatles about Abbey Road.

Still, all the changes that the last year brought about, the closure in many aspects of my life and completing the one last thing that I really HAD to do, somehow mark more of a beginning than an end. I am soon to be starting a new life, something I am trying for the first time, something for which I have been waiting for too long, something that is probably the reason behind all these changes.
I am starting a common life with someone so special, for whom I can only think of the last, the ultimate line of the Beatles' lyrics.

"...And in the end, the love we take, is equal to the love we make."

See that there is a full stop, right there.

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*the album's last track, "Her Majesty's" is a mere joke and should not count