Log24

From the same film — the Digital Rights Management (DRM) variant —

As am I.

The above images are from a film  directed by Tony Leech.

I prefer the version of Ashlynn Yennie  directed by Jacky St. James.

"I was at the time a Yale English major (we read, appreciated,
and discussed the meaning of literature) sunk in the toxic quagmire
of the one and only course I ever took in the literature department
(where authorial intent was ignored and every 'text' was considered
solely on how comfortably it nestled within the shackles of Marxism)."

"For decades de Man had been an avatar not just of leftist politics
but also of the leftist war on truth, the never-ending campaign
to recast objective fact as subjective and open to question."

— Kyle Smith in The New Criterion  on March 18

See as well other posts mentioning Kyle Smith in this  journal.

This is related somewhat distantly to Mathieu moonshine.

(Rhetorical question on the NY Times  online front page, 
10:01 PM May 23, 2012, in teaser for "The Stone" column
about Philip K. Dick, "Sci-Fi Philosopher")

Where Entertainment Is God…

Perhaps The Last Airbender ?

The NY Times  philosophy column "The Stone" is currently about gnosticism
and science fiction.

The Last Airbender  is about an avatar who is master of the four elements
air, water, earth, and fire. For a more sophisticated approach to gnosticism
and the four elements, see Irenaeus: Against Heresies.

See, too, Elements Diamond in this journal.

From May 11, 2010, an image—

See also the same date in 2005 in light of

• today's New York Times  piece by Michiko Kakutani on Sherry Turkle
• the music video it leads to, Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?

Split

The first idea was not our own. Adam
in Eden was the father of Descartes.

— Wallace Stevens,
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction

A very interesting web site at
Middle Tennessee State University
relates the Stevens quote
to two others:

“The sundering we sense, between nature and culture, lies not like a canyon outside us but splits our being at its most intimate depths the way mind breaks off from body. It is still another version of that bitter bifurcation long ago decreed: our expulsion from Eden. It differs from the apparently similar Cartesian crease across things in the fact that the two halves of us once were one; that we did not always stand askance like molasses and madness–logically at odds–but grew apart over the years like those husbands and wives who draw themselves into different corners of contemplation.”

— William Gass,
“The Polemical Philosopher”

“The experiment [to make rationality primary] reached the reductio ad absurdum following the attempt by Descartes to solve problems of human knowledge by giving ontological status to the dichotomy of thinking substance and extended substance, that is subject and object. Not only were God and man, sacred and secular, being and becoming, play and seriousness severed, but now also the subject which wished to unite these fragmented dichotomies was itself severed from that which it would attempt to reconcile.”

— David Miller, God and Games

“Which is it then? For Gass, the Cartesian schism is a post- lapsarian divorce-in progress, only apparently similar to the expulsion from paradise. For Stevens the fault is primordial and Descartes only its latter-day avatar. For Miller, Descartes is the historical culprit, the patriarch of the split.”

— The Evil Genius Notebook,
by David Lavery