
Posthuman Blues turned us onto The New Post-literate, an extraordinary website on asemic writing.
This is an anecdote I’ve carried in my mind for years:I have a Buddhist friend who was visiting monasteries in Nepal a few years ago. One day, he got a rare invitation to witness a “sky burial” — the funeral of a monk, held on a mountaintop, culminating in the dismemberment of his body and scattering of his flesh and bones to feed birds of prey and other animals. (This ritual, also known as “giving alms to the birds,” has practical roots as well as spiritual resonance. Much of Tibet is above treeline, so cremation is difficult, and it’s generally too rocky for burial.)
My friend hiked for hours to get to the site, and when he arrived, the ceremony was already in progress, punctuated by the overtone singing and thigh-bone trumpets of the monks. In the center, a man was ritually slicing into pieces the body of the old monk who had died.
My friend looked closer and saw that the man doing the cutting was wearing a t-shirt: Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.”
By Steve Silberman. Originally found in the Buddhist magazine Shambhala Sun.
"But it only just now became clear to me how split Jackson’s personality had become. As his public but nonperformance persona grew more and more infantile, his onstage presence became more sexual and more angry. Jackson never spoke much about the allegations against him, and spoke only a few times about his abusive past. But his music and performances had a clear message…I just never knew how to read it."
"One of Dion Fortune's readers...returned a well thumbed copy of "The Winged Bull" to the publishers for fear of corrupting the scavengers if it ended up in the trash can..." -Gareth Knight
Many a classic work of art could be improved upon by adding a battalion of flying saucers, as demonstrated here by Banksy.
