Sidetracked Long Time Ago

My mind seems clear after sleeping only for a few hours. Though it is quite true what counts is the quality of sleep not its duration, I usually feel so irritated if I managed to have only a few hours' sleep. Funny day, maybe because it is fine outside this morning after a couple of days of rain.

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I started “Sophie’s Choice” last night. Right now, I’m only at the beginning of Part 2. I feel a strong affinity with Stingo's thought like “But at my age, with a snootful of English Lit. that made me as savagely demanding as Matthew Arnold in my insistence that the written word exemplify only the highest seriousness and truth, I treated these forlorn offspring of a thousand strangers’ lonely and fragile desire with the magistrate abstract loathing of an ape plucking vermin from his pelt.” Or “My attempt at jacket copy filled me with a sense of degradation, especially since the books I have been assigned to magnify represented not literature but its antipodean opposite, commerce.” I absolutely agree. Then, “[The senior editor, Farrell,] paused, then said, ‘Oh, but somehow I side-tracked. I think it was the long years of editorial work, especially of a rather technical nature. I got sidetracked into dealing with other people’s ideas and words rather than my own, and that’s hardly conducive to creative effort.’” “Editorial work” can be replaceable with “translation work.” Here, Farrell is also talking about my own work too. Long ago, I sidetracked…

Stingo was sacked rather happily from his position at McGraw-Hill, and the story goes into the history of his ancestors and their slaves.

Also last night, I watched “An Inconvenient Truth” again.

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Mainichi Shimbun reports: The prosecutors asked for a fine of 200,000 yen on Friday for an amnesiac man who allegedly had stolen nine items (amounting to 1,723 yen) at a supermarket in Kyoto. When he was arrested in February, he had only 152 yen with him. The man says, “What I manage to recall is that I woke up from cold in a mountain and has been surviving with 70,000 or 80,000 yen I had in my pocket. I came on foot from the direction of Hiroshima. My family name is ‘Yamakami’ or ‘Yamagami.’ Born in 1951 or 52.” “Don’t resort to criminal acts even when you find yourself in difficulty. Ask for help,” Judge Higashio said to him. The verdict is expected to hand down to him on 25th of this month.