it's always May

(Young protesters changing the name of the City Hall Square into 15th May Square in Valencia. Photo by: jacobictus)

It's only been three days since I was contemplating on the need to act, indignant for my passive reaction to what is happening in Greece, discouraged by the way the state has decided to use the police against protesters and disgusted with the way the mainstream media seem to back them up. Thanks to the same media, who have the suspicious tendency to discover a new "terrorist" every time our government is about to announce another set of austerity measures, I -and the majority of Greeks- was still ignorant of the massive protests all over Spain until a few days ago. It looked as if the sensitive journalists of the establishment have failed to realize what was, what IS happening in Spain, where people, young people still maintain the courage to take to the streets, march, shout, even camp in Puerta del Sol, Plaza Catalunya and elsewhere without having to face tear-gas cannisters and globs.

Even more, it looks as if in Spain, the media still see the people -especially the young- for what they really are. Unemployed, in search for a low salary and an even lower rent, disappointed with how their education has turned them into by-products of a system of labour that cares more about interest rates than people and infuriated with their leaders that are too stubborn to realize what is obvious to almost everybody except perhaps to some short-sighted bureaucrats in Brussels. That things, as they are, are simply not working.

The movement of May 15th, is a movement of the young, which sparked of in May, in a European capital. The similarities to that other May, the Parisian one of 1968 end here. The French of the 60s were suffocating in a world of post-war prosperity. They were asking for "imagination to assume power", they were clashing against the police and went back to school once their revolution was smashed. The Spaniards (and the Greeks, the Irish, the Portuguese, tomorrow even the French and Italians) of the 2010s are the casualties of economic warfare. They demand a decent job with a decent pay, a decent place to live. They are pacific and non-violent (for now) but once, when, if their revolution is crashed they will have no other place to go than the exact same streets they now occupy.

Just think about that.

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.

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...

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".

¡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."

Midsummer day's dream

Last Friday after a tiring morning of doing absolutely nothing I finally got my permit to leave the barracks and come home for a short weekend. I rode the bus all the way from Arta, in the Greek midwest, to Athens on a sunny summer afternoon, trying to regain some of the sleep one inevitably loses while in the army. This proved to be more complicated than I thought mostly due to the radiant sunlight and the anticipation of seeing the people I love back home. It was going to be summertime in Athens and there are few things that can match a midsummer afternoon walk on the hill of Philopappoy before heading to Thissio for a couple -or more- glasses of wine.

As the bus was crossing the bridge that connects the Greek mainland with Pelopponese, glancing from my window, I saw the city of Patras, where I spent more than one happy years of early student adolesence back in the late 90s. A lot of nice memories came to my mind. A beach party next to the fortress of Antirrio, dinners with ouzo near the Citadel of Patras, nights out in Vrachneika. It realized that most of these nice memories were summer memories, around this time of the year when long days of study coupled with warm nights of thoughtlessness.

As the bus crossed the bridge and a two-more-hour drive laid ahead of us, I turned to the day's paper to fight boredom. There, at the bottom of the third page an air-company was advertising its new summer destination. It read: "Summer in Barcelona". I could not help smiling. Over the last weeks I had thought a lot about Barcelona, the place I left four months ago and which I had no time to reminisce ever since. Midsummer in Barcelona, with the "Fiesta de Sant Joan", nights in Barceloneta with cold "turbio" wine, sounds of jazz, and that special summer breeze cooling you down.

Then it occurred to me. That the essence of summer is exactly that. That "summer" is not a season but a place. It is THE place you want to be. It is -even more- the sum of all those places. It is the projection of all those midsummer nights in Athens, in Patras, in Barcelona, one cold evening at the edge of Yellowstone Canyon, a warm, humid night looking through a window down on Broadway Avenue, an afternoon up on Kastro in Sifnos, waiting for the full moon. Summer is that special space, the geometrical locus of all the smiles you have cast on the midsummers past.

And on the midsummers to come.

Homage to Barcelona

The photo was taken by Robert Capa in Barcelona on the 17th of October 1938. It pictures the perfect portrait of a man bidding farewell to Spain at the last parade of the International Brigades of the 35th Division of the Spanish Army.

Today I am that man.

I have not fought in a war (yet) but in an ironic way I am bidding farewell to Spain to join the army back in Greece. But today I am that man, in whose eyes I can see the determination of someone who knows he has fought the right war. Thus I am, today, leaving Barcelona after three years and 29 days having no regrets about anything. On the contrary, this farewell post should be a homage to Catalonia's pride capital.

There are so much I can say and so little space. Three years and 29 days would not fit in a post, even if they were completely void of emotions, memories, colours, sounds, tastes and odours. My days in Barcelona, happen to be full of all of the above. But how can one squeeze it all in here? People I 've met, friends I 've made, places I 've seen...
As this blog was created in the first place so that I can treasure the finest (or the most intense) of these moments, it would be a pleonasm to try to sum them up here. A blog is not a scientific paper. Thus it doesn't have to end with conclusions, or future perspectives. This blog could only end with acknowledgments.

Today I am the man in the photo. Speechless, overwhelmed, sad, thankful, I bid "Farewell" to Barcelona, I say "Thank you" to all of you.
If you still like me you should be proud of yourselves. You made me a better man.

You guys know who you are.

---

Barcabios has stopped but life (βιος) goes on. As I move to Athens I will take everything with me here : http://enathinaisbios.blogspot.com
We 'll keep in touch

---

ligero de equipaje

They say it's hard to say goodbye but they very rarely say why. Last Saturday I found out. And it is all right here in a tuft of little papers hanging from a string.

Next Sunday I 'll have to take the plane that takes me back to my hometown. One of the petty things I have to take care of is the size and weight of my luggage. Even though I 'll be taking the trip with the person I most long for to be with back in Greece, I still need to keep it tight and light. No heavy books, no bulky objects, no clothes I have not wore over the last three years but somehow am still keeping in my closet. There has to be a choice of stuff I take with me and stuff I leave behind.

What I could never leave behind is the bunch of little papers you see hanging from my closet. Each paper carries a small goodbye message written on it. Funny or sad, emotional or cool, "goodbyes" and "till we meet again" messages from the friends I made in Barcelona over the last three years. I see it like a small arc of memories and it's what I will most cherish to take with me on this trip back home.

I am just so lucky that memories have no mass. Because otherwise I would have to carry a lot overweight luggage.

leave the keys on the engine

I read this for the first time in an article in the Times and was reminded of the story reading about it again in Greek newspapers yesterday. More than 3000 cars (most of them luxurious vehicles) have been confiscated by the Dubai authorities after having been abandoned at the parking lot of the Dubai International Airport. Stricken by the crisis, their owners had no choice but to leave them there before taking flight from what used to be the Mecca of real estate economy. That was before the bubble burst. Now that it has, all those aspiring entrepreneurs could think of was to abandon the sinking ship leaving everything behind. Most of the cars had the keys on the engine. And in many back seats, there were piles of unpaid bills, bounced checks and overdraft credit cards. A few have even bothered to leave an apologetic note:

"So long and sorry for everything!"

I was thinking about these abandoned cars -as symbols of jobs that remain undone- while getting ready to leave Barcelona next week, leaving a number of pending issues behind (almost all of them work-related). It then occurred to me that I might look like one of those car-owners "abandoning the ship". I even remembered my boss using this exact term in a sudden outburst of poetic despair one day last December.

I don't think of myself that way though. Next week, when I come in to pick up my stuff I 'll have the sense I am leaving as a gentleman and not as a coward. No unpaid bills, no unfinished reports, no traces of latent procrastination in the back seat. Instead of a goodbye note, I will be leaving my boss with 100 pages of well-documented results. I 'll then load 60G of data on my external hard disc drive and clean up my desk.

The car may stay here but I'll be taking the keys with me.

a thousand days and three months

On the last Saturday of January 2006 I arrived in Barcelona after a three hour flight over a rainy and windy Mediterranean. Maria and Fernando were kindly waiting to pick me up from the airport and so around 10pm I entered the flat located on the third floor of a renovated building on Carrer de la Merce, number 6. I went to bed early as I had nothing better to do and I slept my first night in Barcelona in the company of the sound of the rain on my window. The next morning I woke up to find out the day was as rainy as the previous night. I called my parents back home to reassure them I was fine. Then I watched #1 ranked Federer win the Australian Open and spent the whole day in front of my computer. At night, I watched Isabel Coixet's "La vida secreta de las palabras" winning the Goya award for best film.
Before going to bed I posted the first ever post of barcabios, whose name was decided mostly on the availability of a term combining "Barcelona" and "bios" (which is Greek for life). It had this same photo of Parc Guell on a cloudy day on top and was entitled "Intro".

There is a number of reasons we remember some days in detail. One of them is that some days are more special than others simply because they are radically different or because they signify an event of a certain -subjective- importance. First day at school, graduation day or -for that matter- my first night in Barcelona. Another reason for this memory-imprinting is that some days assume a latent character of periodicity. They tend to be recurring, most of them annually. Birthdays, anniversaries, the final of the Champions League, or -in this case- the last weekend of January.

Comparing that weekend three months and a thousand days ago with the last one, would be of no importance or purpose if it wasn't for yesterday nights insomnia. In my desperate attempt to finally fall asleep, I ended up thinking what happened inbetween days since January 2006.

Some things never change. The last weekend was as rainy as that one back in 2006. Perhaps not as windy as then, since the wind only came one week too early this year. I still call my parents every Sunday, still to reassure them everything is fine.

A number of things have changed. For instance, instead of having nothing better to do than going to bed on Saturday nights I have to fight for my right NOT to spend the whole night out going from dinner, to concert, to party and back. It's normal. Back then I knew nobody. Today I know some people. And they are so good to me that they never stop inviting me out. Even when I am as anti-social as possible.
Other things have changed too.
Federer is no longer ATP's top seed. In fact he lost the Australian Open's final to current #1 Rafa Nadal. Isabel Coixet is now considered to be the most promising Spanish (or I sould probably say Catalan) director. Nonetheless she has done only one film in the meanwhile ("Elegy" starring Ben Kingsley and Penelope Cruz), which was not exactly great.
Barcabios has now 167 posts in addition to that distant, lonely "Intro"(ductory) one. It still has more or less the same number of readers (somewhere between three or four people I would say).

As the though came to me that the last weekend of January 2010 will probably find me in military uniform somewhere in Greece, I suddenly fell asleep.

on the sunny side of the street

Walking back home late last night, alone through the streets around Arc de Triomfe and la Ribera, as my two most beloved cities stood at the opposite coasts of the same sea.

Athens in flames, finally facing its mostly underestimated contradictions, while Barcelona was serenely cruising into the uncompromising limbo of an enduring prosperity.

Going down carrer del Commerc with Interpol singing through my headphones:

"sleep tight, grim rite, we have two thousand couches when you can sleep tonight"

I passed by the front of a bank, one such as those burning in the Athenian major avenues, when I saw a homeless guy -one more of the many- who, unable to spot one of the couches Interpol were singing about, had found refuge in the little space, cramped between to ATM machines.

I wondered what he might think if I told him about my angry compatriots' bank-burning back in my home town. And whether he would even care knowing. Equally unaware of his thoughts, his dreams or nightmares, indifferent to the sufferings of Athens, Barcelona carried on her gaudy, sleepless night.

Tomorrow, this homeless guy will wake up. And maybe one day, he too will stand up between two burning ATMs.

...but seriously

On the bus today, going to work, re-reading my favourite parts of Marcuse's "One dimensional man"...

Next to me I saw a young mother with a baby carriage. Inside it her baby daughter was sleeping, her tiny little hand holding tightly to her mom's mobile phone.

It must have been the saddest thing I have seen in a long time. And the saddest confirmation of what I was reading.

a thousand splendid suns

"A thousand splendid suns" is the title of a book by Khaled Hosseini, which refers to his native city of Kabul. It is a direct reference to a poem by 17th century Persian poet Saib-e-Tabrizi, entitled "Kabul", which talks about the city's beauties. A certain couple of verses -loosely translated into english- talk about:

"One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs
And the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls"

Living a few thousand kilometers far from Kabul, I have had enough time to appreciate Barcelona's uncountable moons. On the other hand, I have been somehow missing out on its splendid suns, an accidental negligence I only realized this morning. In a city like Barcelona, the sun is more perceived than actually seen. One simply knows it's there but never manages to directly look at it. Except of course if he tries to do so very early in the morning. Which brings me to my main point.

Wednesdays are always difficult to start with. Stuck right in the middle of the week, too far from the weekend, but with an already accumulating weariness, they become even worse when I remember the lab meetings, scheduled every Wednesday morning at 9.30. To my bad luck, it happened that today, Barcelona's coldest day of the year so far, this time was pushed half an hour earlier, which meant I had to set my alarm for sometime around 7.30. Coming out of bed was as difficult as expected but I finally managed a few minutes before 8. As I was preparing a coffee-to-go and while getting dressed as fast as possible, I realized something of which I was subconsciously unaware until then. The fact that 8am is a quite reasonable wake-up time -for some people.

It was more like discovering an unseen world. As I was trying to be as quiet as possible, I noticed Giuseppe already having breakfast in the living-room, welcoming me with a rather ironic smile. I was in the shower, when glimpsing outside the bathroom window, I saw people already at their desks in the building next door. As I came out, hurrying for the bus, thinking I would find myself in a dark, deserted town, I saw people walking their dogs, reading their newspaper while having coffee, some of them having even finished their morning jog. A new, unknown world, lived and breathed under Barcelona's splendid sun, the same sun I came face-to-face with as soon as I turned right on Carrer Braille. A glorious sun rising out of the Mediterranean horizon, waving good morning to us all.

And a good morning it was. On the bus, the driver let two homeless people ride without a ticket.

my own personal "third circle of Irrigation"

Some few weeks ago I remember warning my friends about my intentions to switch my working mode into the one of a Greek civil servant. It was to be considered as warning since Greek civil servants are not exactly famous for their commitment and devotion. In my case, however, it had more to do with a sense of a lack of objective and an increasing decline of interest. You see, in my mind, working as a civil servant is less about lack of commitment and more about lack of goals. People think civil servants are not working enough, I think they are simply doing meaningless work. Instead of working for something, they are working for someone. In the end, they have been obliged, or have simply accepted to channel their efforts into something other than what they would like or consider fruitful.

As my main research project was growing to be more and more like the boring job of a ministry clerk and my main focus was shifting from doing something original to re-doing all the things other people have been publishing before I was allowed to, I started to feel like the life of a civil servant would be more suitable for me. I saw myself in a grey office, with piles of papers all around, in a world somewhere between that of Kafka and that of Pessoa. It looked less and less like my sunlit desk at the side of the Mediterranean and more like the one in the photo.

It was then that in order not to get completely depressed, I somehow subconsciously remembered of probably the most famous of all Greek civil servants of all time, Constantin Cavafy. For those unaware of this great man, I can simply recount a couple of biographical facts. He was Greek, living in Alexandria around the turn of the previous century and he was a civil servant for the Ministry of Public works, a position he held throughout his life. There you have it, your Greek civil servant. What makes Cavafy so special, is the fact that at the margin of an extremely boring life, spent between his desk at the "Third cycle of Irrigation" and his rather small, badly decorated, apartment in Rue Lepsius, he wrote a number of poems, whose number was big enough to qualify him as a poet and whose essence and style so supreme as to qualify him the great of them all.

I reflected a bit about this life of his, which most of his friends and acquaintances would describe as rather dull and ordinary, nothing like the tragically, romantic trajectory of Byron, the glorious magnificence of Goethe, or the bohemian voluptuousness of Beaudelaire. I saw Cavafy on his way home, back from work and I imagined him completely detached from the daily routine, drifting away in his timeless universe of interweaving pasts, the Byzantine emperors, the Alexandrian notaries and the forgotten lovers. To him, being a civil servant was simply a condition of subsidy, the irrigation plans, the daily correspondence and the translations were all but the side-effects of a conventional life he was too coward or too wise, (or perhaps both) to renounce.

I imagined how he could safely steer away from all these conventions and slowly, uncompromisingly head towards greatness. Cavafy, was able to achieve immortality. The rest of us, whose aim is the simple deliverance from everyday frustration and the hope for a meaningful life that takes place outside the office and resumes after 5pm, should know that this hope still exists.

And that anyone may be worth his own personal "Third cycle of irrigation".

say "welcome" to the machine!

This was yesterday's view of the corridor leading to the lab. The usual, crispy clean, futuristic hallway was blocked by what appeared to be some sort of heavy, important shipment of scientific equipment. In fact it was something much more than just that. It was our own "doomsday machine" or in brief "The Machine"!

For the more observative ones that are also aware of the latest(?) advances in the field of genomics (not that you deserve any merit for that) the inscription on the top left part of the wooden box that reads "Illumina" may say something. For the rest let me just inform you that what we are dealing with here is a third-generation genome sequencer, whose capacities involve ultra-rapid, massive DNA sequencing in short read-fragments, genome mapping and de novo sequence assembly. Oh yes! it also disposes of a bioinformatician-repeller!

Assuming this last (add-on) function, the Solexa-Illumina sequencer will soon start the process of expelling us, the entire Computational Genomics Group, from the fine altitudes of the 4th floor of the Biomedical Research Park of Barcelona, which we currently occupy, to the ground floor of the same building. I can see many of you raising an eyebrow in doubt of the potential of such a machine to kick out an entire department, but things are -as always- slightly more complicated than they seem to be. You see, this doomsday machine, is only the second to be purchased by our Institute and is very likely going to be followed by 6 or 8 more in the process of "our" Centre for Genomic Regulation becoming the "main node" in sequencing in the entire country. (Quotation marks added the way I feel like. It's my blog isn't it?")

I will skip posing the question related to whether spending tax-payers money on trying to become the "main node" is really worth it. I shall also omit questioning the quality of the data these machines are producing. No matter how hard I try over these last six months, they simply fail to make sense (or I am failing to make sense of their profound, unquestionably objective noise). What cannot pass unquestioned though, is something that has fewer things to do with the machines themselves and more with the people (us, the scientific community, or whoever they are) who manage them. Because one of the main side-effects of our dear Institute becoming the "main node" in genomic sequencing all over Spain, would be the displacement of roughly 30 or more "people who treat our data", formerly known as "bioinformaticians", formerly known as "theoretical biologists", (this last term being a remote reference to science therefore abolished some long time ago). In the course of this displacement, we are to pack books, CD, computers, notebooks and the rest to make space for the installation of "the machines", ironically the same machines which will carry on producing the data we will be asked to treat, analyze and (hopefully) interpret.

The bottom line of all of the above would probably be to ask oneself the obvious question: "Since when did people become commodities comparable to technology?".
But I am afraid the even more obvious answer would be: "When did they stop being exactly that?"

I shall leave that question to you, the (few but loyal) readers. What I shall leave to me and to my fellow colleagues is a slightly more existential (thus also more provocative) question. And that is to what extent are we ourselves responsible for such a treatment. I mean, there is a long distance from the "computational biologists" we started out to be, researchers with our own projects and ideas to the "data analyzers", the last part (human but not much less dispensable) in a high-tech pipeline that we have turned ourselves into.

Is it my idea, or are we in the process of losing something more significant than our 4th floor sea view?

Have a nice (Lady) Day

I must be (in)famous for my difficulty to wake up in the morning. That is a lie. Or at least only a half one. Alike Marilyn Monroe (or was it some other star?), who once said that she wouldn't get out of bed for less than a thousand dollars (or was it more), I find it very difficult to get out of mine when I know that it is a thousand DNA sequences that await for me. On the other hand, I have never had trouble waking up to catch a boat to the islands, a bus that will take me to some nice place up on the Pyrenees or in general to any sort of activity that a normal person cannot but anticipate.

Today being a Thursday, like many others and many more to come, I found it a bit hard to force my body out from beneath the sheets. And as I found myself strolling down Carrer de la Merce on the way to the lab, I sensed I needed the sort of soothing music that would bring my mind in a tranquil and at the same time functional status. I chose Billie Holiday.

As the first notes of "In my solitude" started streaming through my headphones and my mood was slowly going back from frustrated to normal, I realized that I was passing by a number of bars that I have only seen full during the evening. Still, it was 9.30 and most of them had at least a couple of groups of customers who chatted while having their morning coffee, or having a light breakfast while reading the morning paper. I felt an indescribable envy. Right there and then I had just realized what would get me out of bed almost every morning and that was the promise that I could have the chance of starting my day, every day, in such a relaxing way. Walking in a bar, ask for a cup of coffee, a tostada or a scone, sit at a quiet table at the back and unfold my newspaper, or my book, or whatever it were that I might be reading. Now lets imagine that at the back of this coffee-shop there is a wide window facing the beach of Barceloneta, the sun is only starting to shine and Billie Holiday is discretely singing through the bar's speakers "God bless the child".

I could not help of thinking about other places and other times, where other people -more inspired than I am- were lucky enough to consider this dream of mine their daily routine. I thought about Joyce strolling down the south bank of the Seine, Freud walking into some Viennese cafe asking for a fresh croissant, Pessoa meeting with his friends in "A brasileira". And then I went on my walk to the lab, with the useless consolation thought that probably none of them was so happy about their mornings.

And that they all lived before having the chance to listen to Lady Day comforting them in the playful way she was doing it for me.

"Good morning heartache"...

How should one read a science paper?

Yesterday night, while sitting at my living-room's table, having dinner, a strange thing happened. I read two scientific papers.

This was rather unusual because I cannot quite recall the last time it happened and this is something for which I tend to blame science more than I blame myself.

Still, I read two papers, one by a group of people, whom one of my bosses like to refer to as "competitors" and the other suggested by another of my bosses (I only have two but sometimes I feel they are more). As I was going through the first one, I realized I was facing inherent difficulties in comprehending it. What was really puzzling about it, was that although the title and the brief summary preceding it were describing a clear concept in a quite straightforward manner, the main body of the work was going around the subject in a way that to me appeared rather obscure. I forced myself to go on, putting aside my glass of wine and blaming my recent paper-reading idleness for not being able to grasp simple scientific truths. But the harder I tried, the worse I was getting entangled in its twisted structure. Right when I thought the answer would pop up in the next page I would find myself staring at exotic scientific terms, which I was coming upon for the very first time, funny-sounding acronyms which said nothing to me and all this combined with plots, where I could not make out the real data from the simulated ones.

I reached the end of the paper seriously questioning myself and thinking whether I had become inept for activities of this sort. I gathered all the strength I had left and went on to the second one.

I found myself in front of a similarly clear and straight-forward title, so I thought "not again!" To my relief it was not the case. This one was as clear as its title, the concepts were all well-explained from the start, the necessary "catchy" acronyms had been clarified in the very beginning, the plots were self-explanatory. As I was regaining my self-esteem, my questioning gradually started to direct itself towards the writers instead of the readers. Some papers I thought are good and some bad. And that's that. I took some notes at the margins of both articles, washed the dishes and went to finish my wine on the couch with my book.

To this point I should make clear, that the whole process did not take more than what a normal person needs to finish off a salad, perhaps only a bit more, so I guess we are talking about 20 minutes or so. And I hope you find I am right when I say that one should dedicate no more than 10 minutes to go through a scientific paper. It's not that I am a fast reader but I guess if on average it takes one about 10 days to read "Mrs Dalloway" or "Crime and Punishment", it is imperative that he doesn't devote more than 10 minutes to the average science paper he comes upon. (And in case I realize someone has devoted more than 2 minutes in one of my few papers I will be more than happy). This comparison is not entirely unrelated to the fact that right after fulfilling my nocturnal, scientific duties I found myself on the sofa with an essay by Virginia Woolf entitled "How should one read a book?"

The essay is a good and pleasant read, (I assume especially for those who unlike myself are more than simply familiar with British literature) but it was mostly the main point of it that made me think twice about reading in general, and yes -even- science papers in particular. Woolf's main argument is that when it comes to a book the reader has above all a responsibility. For reading it carefully, for realizing the difficulty of writing in general, for judging it with a sincere kindness and a kind sincerity. Furthermore though, -she concluded- the criticism for which we readers are responsible (and in the case of science, readers coincide with critics although not to an extent that I would dare consider desirable) is mostly to be based on brief impressions, images and thoughts that flow as one reads without having to go into detail. Because this is what really matters.

I am not sure science papers are meant to be read as books. But considering the pleasure I get from reading books while my bosses' "paper recommendations" are piling up on my desk, I think I 'll follow Virginia's advice about it. I mean after all, we are supposed to take an expert opinion before serious undertakings, aren't we?

time

Time is relative. This we all know.

What we sometimes do not realize are the conditions that impose this relativity in our daily lives. Time is after and above all, OUR time, and while we are supposed to make of it what best suits us we are also responsible for defining it on the basis of our limited perception of duration within the confines of eternity. The fact that I had to wake up at 6.30 a.m. last Saturday to welcome my friend Kostas had nothing relative about it. It was the simple consequence of Vueling having setting up a flight schedule that is meant to torture its Greek customers.

The relativity of the whole thing makes its sudden appearance only under comparison. And such a comparison was painfully made this morning, just two days after Kostas' arrival. According to the earth's axial tilt and the geographical longitude of Barcelona, the difference in sunrise between two days is marginally less than 2 minutes. I can assure you though that the temporal distance between some days, which calendar-wise seem only slightly distant, can be huge. Especially if we are dealing with the distance between Saturday and Monday.

This was my case, last weekend. Kostas woke me up at 6.50 a.m. on Saturday, but it was a smooth waking up, simply knowing that I would go back to bed. There followed a nice nap, interrupted every now and then by the joyful sounds of a beautiful weekend morning, the smell of fresh coffee coming from the kitchen and the promise of the newspaper lying on the couch. Then all these promises were fulfilled and the day started, carried on and ended in the midst of the Fiesta Mayor of the city of Barcelona, in the company of a rather reassuring sun.

This morning, though, less than 48 hours later, when the alarm went of at 6.30 a.m. so that Kostas would catch his flight back to Boston, it seemed more like life on a different planet. A planet, where every day is Monday morning, grey and dull, with the threat of too many boring stuff piling up on your desk, where the coffee tastes like boiled leather and where there are no more fireworks or disguised people dancing in the streets. Most important of all, you cannot go back to bed. I know because I tried. But it just felt so that the atmosphere on Monday planet is too dense and too humid for me to fall asleep.

At 6.50, as the street lights started to go off, I was already waiting for the bus. It looked like it was about to rain. Through my headphones Radiohead sang "I might be wrong".

Emma Bovary's eyes

Emma Bovary's eyes are irrevocably black.

I spent a wonderful five days in France last week, during which I bought a copy of Flaubert's great novel and remembered how Emma Bovary's eyes have steered a great deal of controversy and how Julian Barnes has so wittingly criticized literary critics, using the colour of Emma's eyes as a starting point, in his great book about Flaubert. (chapter 6 for the lazy ones)

Emma Bovary's eyes are naturally black.
Nonetheless there is a flowing ambiguity when it comes to their appearance. Sometimes they appear blue, others brown, most of the times it's hard to tell. Given my somewhat frustrating situation at work it is hard not to think about Emma's eyes when I look at the results on the screen of my computer. Quite often the numbers appear reasonable, but sometimes they acquire rather unfamiliar values, strange shapes and weird distributions. But science -we have been told- is objective, therefore my plots and numbers should be naturally making sense, or not. There should be no inbetweens, no greyzones, no conflicting conclusions. Alas, this is not the case.

Emma Bovary's eyes are most ardently black.
But the real wonder in them is their ever-changing impression, their transcendental hues, their unequivocal ambiguity. Sadly though, Emma Bovary is a fictional character of a great French novel while my results are the mere outcome of a poorly supported, sloppily applied algorithm. And since poor science cannot even remotely compare to the literature of masterpieces, my plots' changing shapes have nothing transcendental or charming, romantic or mysterious. These are simply bad results. There is nevertheless something comforting about them and this is exactly the fact that when one (me in this case) tries to present them in their lack of clarity, when one tries to explain why a plot of the same kind looks sharp in Figure 1 and suddenly bends over in Figure 4b, the resulting feeling is more to the frustration than to the amusement of the reader. Science, it is, cannot be converted to literature, the romantic ambiguities remain safe under the pen of geniouses of a different caliber and we are ascertained that the joy we get from a good book will never be spoiled by bad science.

Emma Bovary's eyes are wonderfully black.