demotivation

One can think of a number of reasons for not blogging for the last 2 or more months (is it that much already). Being busy is one, although in my case this is not it, despite the fact that over the last two months, I underwent marriage, mild surgery and yet another employment crisis.

Depression, boredom and a general feeling of "n' importe quoi" are probably more valid. In all, there is a significant lack of motivation in talking about something in here, when there is a lot to be done out there. There are issues at stake that demand something more than blogging, but as it turns out in these times of shock and awe one ends up in doing nothing, not even blogging.

I have no idea of what will happen in the next few weeks. In times when a dictator's downfall brings about an increase in oil prices instead of freedom and massive earthquakes fuel more discussions on the economy rather than on the victims, one has to admit that there is little margin for fight against the tsunami of stupidity that is threatening to drown us all.

Still, one has to find the motivation to do something about it. Until then he can at least blog about it.

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.

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.

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.