2022/08/07 English

BGM: U2 "Stay(Faraway, So Close!)"

I googled about the service Midjourney. I heard that this one is for drawing various pictures by entering some English keywords into AI. I can make 25 pics for free so I tried to draw it. I tried to do a fake Gorillaz, a British pop band's jacket by it (or I let it to draw it). Does it look like? Ah, an interesting age comes... I have no knowledge about painting, but we might be able to get the pics as "Tadanobu Asano by Andy Warhol" or "Scarlet Johannson by Kyoko Okazaki" within 5 minutes in the near future.

This morning I attended an English studying club. We read a speech by Barak Obama in 2009 in a circle. It was really hard. This speech has no complicated expressions because it was held for students in a school, but we have not to 'read' but to 'translate' so I have to check almost all words' meanings strictly. It showed that I read very rapidly and loosely. Therefore I often felt embarrassed, but I could get the meaning of 'translating' something from this reading.

Afternoon, I learned that Shinmon Aoki had passed away from the top page of Yahoo!. I can remember his "Noukanfu Nikki" as an interesting book. He once had stood the place very close to the bodies, and he tried to clean them and send them to heaven. That was his job. It was written vividly and sublimely so I believe it is everlasting. And it provided a great movie "Departures". I have watched it and thought it was interesting. Me, I sometimes feel that my job is bullshit, but following Shinmon and doing it with my mind would move someone's mind, and the work could change this world. I believe so. He was exactly great, so I wanted to learn from him more. R.I.P.

At night, I read Hiroshi Osada's "Nostalgic words". This poet stands between two paradoxical things I guess. Verbal things and nonverbal things. Written rules and unseen rules. It sometimes seems wishy-washy, but that kind of multiple points of view make this collection of essays profound. I have read his poems by "Hiroshi Osada complete works", and found he used to stand the space, and used the silence and echoes unless writing a lot. I can't understand poems, but his poems are my favorites. But the intellectuals might not like his because they are not the ones of verbal experiments.