Long ago I heard an interview with Jonathan Lethem on City Arts and Lectures in which he said a number of things I found very interesting, which I wrote down, but I have no idea where. (I have often wanted to link people to various City Arts and Lectures recordings, but have been unable to do so as they don’t provide tapes, transcripts, or streaming audio – which, come to think of it, is kind of ironic given what I’m about to talk about, but let’s move on)
Lethem coined the term “culture oracle” to describe a sort of person who knows about, and has access to, all kinds of obscure cultural products that you’d never be able to find except through them. The example he gave was a friend of his who would occasionally invite him over to watch a movie, and the movie would be a third-generation copy of a VHS tape that was recorded years ago from public-access television at three in the morning, and that would be the only chance Jonathan Lethem would ever have to see that movie. Things like that still existed only as physical objects. You could only access them if you were plugged into the right social networks, and frequently you wouldn’t know you were looking for them until you found them. This gave the culture oracles an almost mystical aura, as though they could see aspects of the world that were invisible to others.
(One such person, I think now deceased, was the inspiration for Perkus Tooth in Chronic City.)
Today it’s much more difficult for these people to exist, because so many media products have been digitized, and even if something hasn’t been digitized you can often order a used copy online. And even if you still can’t find something, it lacks the mystique it might have had before, because the scope of things you can find is so bewilderingly vast now.
(Digression, sort of: film is a partial exception to this, in that films are much harder to digitize, and potentially much harder to ship, than books or records. I used to be a volunteer assistant projectionist at my college movie theater, where I learned to work with 35mm film. The set of 35mm reels that makes up a feature film is extremely heavy, and has to be shipped in a set of metal canisters at a cost comparable to that of shipping furniture. And every time you project the film, there’s an inherent risk that it will be damaged, especially if it’s old film that may not have been stored properly in the past. Someone on our programming committee once pitched a series on the history of South African film, which would have included several movies that had never been shown in the US, but all the films would have had to be shipped from South Africa, which would have been ludicrously expensive. If you want to see something that has never been released on VHS or DVD, you are likely still out of luck, especially if it’s foreign. On the other hand, in the pre-Internet days, you’d be considerably less likely to be aware of its existence at all.)
As I was saying, thanks to the limitless cultural stimuli available on the Internet, I think it’s nearly impossible for a text or a piece of music to feel like a message from another world, as was still possible even fifteen years ago. Yet there might be a few ways in which you can sort of approach culture oracle status in some respects:
- You can translate things that are not otherwise available in translation, because it’s not profitable. For instance, I would imagine that some anime fansubbers know a lot of Japanese cultural trivia that a non-Japanese speaker would have no way to discover.
- You are interested in something that interests almost no one else, like early 20thC British suit patterns or old aircraft manuals.
- You’re willing to sift through vast amounts of material that most people already have access to, but would be strongly disinclined to read, in order to find the interesting bits (i.e., you are @nostalgebraist)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
