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Colin Marshall

Sunday, January 1, 1984

… is a Seoul-based essayist, broadcaster, and public speaker on cities, language, and culture.

On my new Substack newsletter Books on Cities, I write long-form essay-reviews on exactly that.

You’ll find my essays here. I write for outlets including the New Yorker, Guardian Cities, Open Culture, the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Review of Books (including its Korea Blog), KCET, Boom: A Journal of California (and guest-edited its issue on architecture, infrastructure, and the built environment), Bookforum, Boing Boing, Put This On, The Japan Foundation, The Millions, 3Quarksdaily, The Quarterly Conversation, and Maximum Fun.

I’ve previously appeared on a Seoul urbanism radio feature on TBS eFM’s Koreascape as well as hosted and produced the world-traveling podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture [RSS] [iTunes], which evolved from the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas. 

My video essay series The City in Cinema examines cities (especially Los Angeles) as they appear on film.

My public speaking, which I’ve done in places like Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Chapman University, California State University Long Beach, and the Seoul Book and Culture Club, usually covers this same suite of cities-and-culture-related topics.

You can also keep up with me on Twitter and Facebook as well.

콜린 마샬은 도시와 문화를 포함해서 여러 주제들에 대하여 에세이를 쓰는 수필가이다. 그 에세이들은 <뉴요커>와 <가디언> 그리고 <로스 앤젤레스 리뷰 오브 북스> 같은 주로 영미권 매체에 실리고 또한 그는 한국 문학 잡지 <Axt>에 기고한 적이 있고 <동아일보>에 칼럼을 기고하고 있다. 모국인 미국에서 30년 넘게 살며 8년 동안 라디오 방송과 팟캐스트에서 인터뷰을 진행했다. 그 후에 로스앤젤레스의 한인타운을 거쳐 세계에서 제일 큰 한인타운인 서울로 이사왔다. 서울에 사는 동안 <콜린의 한국> 팟캐스트를 운영하며 작가와 교수을 비롯하여 건축가와 방송인 같은 다양한 사람들을 여전히 인터뷰한다. 첫 번째 책 <한국 요약 금지>는 2024년 2월에 출판되었다.

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Books on Cities: Harold Brodkey, My Venice

Sunday, April 6, 2025

Harold Brodkey put out his first novel The Runaway Soul at the age of 61. He did so after enjoying more than thirty years of literary notoriety, if “enjoying” be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he’d been publishing only short stories and New Yorker pieces, and somewhere along the line, as the repeatedly promised full-length debut repeatedly failed to appear, his golden-boy reputation turned somehow villainous. During the first half of his career, he seems to have been regarded as a potential American Proust; during the second, as a bloviating, quasi-malevolent egoist, bent on inflicting his torturously convoluted, near-parodically self-obsessed prose on the innocent reading public. When it appeared, the 800-page-long The Runaway Soul was greeted by reviews now remembered — if, like the book itself, remembered at all — as career-endingly harsh.

Yet Brodkey’s career didn’t end: he wrote a second novel, and did so, in fact, in just one year. Where the not-quite-universally-savaged The Runaway Soul centers on his longtime alter-ego Wiley Silenowicz, an adopted child who grows up in nineteen-thirties St. Louis, Profane Friendship centers on Niles O’Hara, a famous novelist remembering his youth in the Venice around that same period. Though primarily set in Venice, it does fall short of being a book about it. In a contemporary London Review of Books piece, Colm Tóibín notes that “there are times when the description of Venice seems to be written by numbers,” quoting the following: “February’s an alphabetical light, pale with dark shadows like lines and blotches on a page. We played in the beckoning and slightly motional, slightly vulgar, pallid and yellowish light of March.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Jorge Almazán + Studiolab, Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City

Friday, February 28, 2025

Japan was experiencing a tourism boom even before the COVID-19 pandemic, and when that period’s restrictions were lifted, the gaijin floodgates opened wider than ever. Though this seems to have been a rather mixed blessing for the Japanese, it’s surely benefited Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City, which had the good fortune to be published in the middle of 2022. While most of Japan’s recent first-time visitors were no doubt content to put together a few Instagram stories and check the Land of the Rising Sun off their “bucket list,” one imagines the more urbanism-minded among them returning home inspired to understand what they saw and experienced of the day-to-day life of Japanese cities — and of no Japanese city more than Tokyo, foreign tourists’ most common starting point.

It hardly needs saying that Tokyo is unlike any capital in the West, and it doesn’t closely resemble any other Asian megacity either. Sheer scale contributes something to its difference — more than 14 million people live within the city proper, and 41 million in the metro area — but more so the sheer functionality it exhibits at that scale. At every level, from its efficient train networks to its countless eateries to its well-stocked convenience stores to its ever-present bottled-drink vending machines, Tokyo appears simply to “work” in a way Westerners no longer even expect from their own cities, even without an apparent guiding intelligence overseeing the process. The reasons behind that hold out enough interest that Emergent Tokyo‘s co-author Joe McReynolds, an American academic with a good deal of experience in Japan, has spoken of originally having intended to write a book called How Tokyo Works.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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동아일보: “트럼프주의”에 함축된 미국인들의 속내

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

미국 캘리포니아에 계시는 어머니와 마지막으로 통화했을 때 어머니는 내가 한국에 사는 것이 다행이라고 하셨다. 지난달에 도널드 트럼프가 두 번째로 대통령에 취임한 것을 염두에 두고 하신 말씀이다. 현재 문제는 트럼프 그 자체뿐만 아니라 트럼프 때문에 미국에서 심화되는 내부 투쟁과 정치적 분열이다. 현재 한국도 그러한 상황에 시달리는 듯 보이지만 미국만큼은 아닌 것 같다. 내 어머니는 트럼프를 싫어하시는 반면 아버지는 트럼프를 응원하시는데, 이처럼 미국인들이 완전히 다른 정치적인 색깔로 나눠지고 있다는 인상을 받는다.

나는 트럼프 팬이 아니지만 그의 매력을 어느 정도 이해할 수 있을 것 같다. 트럼프는 대부분의 정치인과 달리 유머 감각이 있다. 미국인들은 코미디언들에 대해 ‘우리가 생각하는 것을 말해 준다’며 칭찬하곤 하는데, 트럼프에 대해서도 그렇다고 한다. 2018년 이민법 개정안을 논의하기 위해 의원들과 트럼프가 만났을 때 트럼프는 아이티를 언급하며 “왜 거지 소굴에서 들어오는 사람들을 계속 받아주는 것이냐”라고 말한 적이 있다. 언론은 거친 발언을 한 트럼프를 꾸짖었지만 많은 미국인들은 바로 그 질문에 응답한 것 같다.

동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.

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Books on Cities: Italo Calvino, Le città invisibili (Invisible Cities)

Saturday, February 8, 2025

Stendhal was born and buried in France, but his tombstone describes him as a Milanese. Italo Calvino, whose life began and ended in Italy, long maintained that he wanted “New Yorker” engraved on his tombstone. Stendhal may only have lived in Milan for seven years, but that was considerably more time than Calvino’s longest stretch in New York, four months of a six-month trip to the United States sponsored by the Ford Foundation in 1959 and 1960. Though he did make an effort to see the country from the Midwest to California and back around to the South, he felt most at home in New York, “a place which is neither exactly America nor exactly Europe, which gives you a burst of extraordinary energy, which you immediately feel you know like the back of your hand, as though you had always lived here.”

This passage comes from Martin McLaughlin’s English translation of Calvino’s “American Diary,” which is included in the collection Hermit in Paris. So is an interview conducted in 1985, the last year of Calvino’s life, by the scholar Maria Corti. “Every time I go to New York I find it more beautiful and closer to the shape of an ideal city,” he tells her. “It may also be the fact that it is a geometric, crystalline city, without a past, without depth, apparently without secrets; therefore it is the city which intimidates me least, the city which I can have the illusion of possessing in my mind, of being able to think about in its entirety all in the same instant.” This could almost be a passage from his most famous book — and perhaps the most famous modern Italian book — Le città invisibili, which had come out in 1972.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Ross Perlin, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York

Friday, January 24, 2025

If you want to learn a language, move to New York. It doesn’t really matter what language you want to learn: with its nearly 40-percent foreign-born population, it’s now “the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world,” home to over 700 of them. So writes linguist and New Yorker Ross Perlin in his book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. If you do make such a move, you could do worse than following his example and living in Queens, since “nowhere on the planet, square mile after square mile, is more linguistically diverse.” This was heartening for me to read, since I’ve long imagined that Queens would be my own most viable New York option, given the cost of Manhattan and Brooklyn. I still recall a good Dominican breakfast I had the one time I stayed there.

Whether I ordered that breakfast in Spanish doesn’t come back to mind. Not that I would have had to go to New York to do so, Spanish being a practicable language in more than a few regions of the United States — and, in any case, not one especially relevant to Perlin’s project. The core chapters of this book deal with Seke, Wakhi, Yiddish, N’Ko (technically a writing system), Nahuatl, and Lenape, some of whose names may not ring a bell even for serious linguaphiles. But linguaphiles don’t come much more serious than Perlin, who in college “tried inhaling Old Norse, Uighur, Luo, Russian, and Arabic, racing like a bucket-list traveler to stamp the pages of my linguistic passport. Above all I threw myself into Mandarin, keen to go up against its proverbial difficulty,” a desire that led him to a six-month immersion sojourn in Beijing.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Orhan Pamuk has spent almost all of his 72 years in Istanbul. That may not be especially rare for a Turk, but it’s somewhat more surprising for one who happens to be an internationally acclaimed novelist, not to mention a Nobel laureate. When he was growing up, as he tells it in Istanbul: Memories and the City, his older brother was the real achiever. Şevket Pamuk went on to become a economist, educated at Yale and Berkeley, who throughout his career has year held positions at universities like Penn, Villanova, and Princeton, with more recent stints at the London School of Economics and Harvard. As for the younger of the two, “apart from three years in New York, Orhan Pamuk has spent all his life in the same streets and district of Istanbul, and he now lives in the building where he was raised.”

I quote from the bio on his official web site, which one might expect to end by saying he’s now an emeritus at, say, UC Irvine. That seems to be part of the deal for those who rise sufficiently high up in the realm of “world literature,” on whose top tier Pamuk presumably sits. But he’s done things his own way: “I’ve never left Istanbul, never left the houses, streets, and neighborhoods of my childhood,” he writes in the first chapter of this book, which was first published in 2003, before his New York sojourn. (Maureen Freely’s English translation came out two years later.) “We live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants, so l am sometimes hard-pressed to explain why I’ve stayed, not only in the same place but in the same building.” The rest of the text constitutes that explanation, more or less.

Istanbul is a book about the eponymous city, but it’s also an autobiography. Any attempt Pamuk might make at the former would also be the latter, it seems, and vice versa. Moreover, it’s a book about civilization, though it presents Turkish civilization per se as something of a construct, evoked mainly to shore up the modernization project that, amid Ottoman ruins, created the Turkish Republic we know today. “Great as the desire to Westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire,” he writes. “But as nothing, Western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to Westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past; the effect on culture was reductive and stunting, leading families like mine, otherwise glad of republican progress, to furnish their houses like museums.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Favorite Open Culture posts of 2024

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

For nearly thirteen years now, I’ve written a post every weekday at Open Culture, usually to do with literature, film, music, art, architecture, television, radio, or language. The total comes to more than 3,800 so far, and here are ten of my favorites from the more than 250 I wrote in 2023:

See also my ten favorite Open Culture posts of 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

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동아일보: 한국에서의 운전이 더 안전하다고 느끼는 이유

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

한국에 산 지 거의 10년이 되었지만 이제야 한국 운전면허를 땄다. 엄밀히 말하면 미국 운전면허를 한국 면허로 교환했다. 하지만 과정은 말처럼 간단하지 않았다. 다행히도 주행시험을 볼 필요가 없었지만, 필기시험은 꼭 봐야 했다. 부담스러울 수 있는 필기시험을 또 다른 배움의 기회로 받아들이기로 해서 문제집과 앱 그리고 유튜브 동영상과 한국 사람들이 사용하는 학습지로 똑같이 공부했다.

옛날에 한국어능력시험인 TOPIK을 준비했던 경험이 떠올랐다. TOPIK은 한국인들이 보는 시험이 아님에도 나는 TOPIK을 한국식 시험이라 부를 수 있다고 생각한다. 그 이유는 이 시험에서 제일 어려운 점이 ‘정답을 가능한 한 빨리 작성해야 하는 것’이기 때문이다. 지난달 치러진 수능과 마찬가지로 한국에서 시험을 잘 보려면 정답을 아는 것은 기본이고 속도도 빨라야 한다. 한국인들에게만 익숙한 이런 시험은 한국의 실제 삶을 대변하는 것 같다.

시험이 없는 한국 인생을 상상할 수 있을까? 수능뿐만 아니라 셀 수 없을 만큼 많은 전문적인 시험이 있다. 내가 한국에 처음 왔을 때 서울 지하철에서 공무원 시험을 준비하는 학원 광고가 얼마나 많은지에 놀랐다. 아나운서가 되기 위한 시험도 따로 있다는 것을 믿기가 어려웠다. 내 모국인 미국에서는 그런 직업들은 주로 특별한 교육을 필요로 하지 않기 때문이다.

동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.

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Los Angeles Review of Books: Jeremy Braddock, Firesign

Friday, November 1, 2024

In a 1994 episode of Rugrats, the cartoon series’ one-year-old protagonist Tommy Pickles insists on taking off his clothes and not putting them back on. He soon convinces his twin playmates Phil and Lil DeVille to do the same, just before they’re picked up by their mother Betty, a stocky, voluble woman never seen without her athletic headband and Venus glyph sweatshirt. Scandalized at this scene of infant nudism, Betty explodes at Tommy’s mother: “I don’t know what kind of baby commune you’re trying to run here, but it’s time to face facts. The sixties are over, and we lost!” This line went over my head when I first watched the episode, as it must also have done for the rest of the show’s elementary school–age viewership, but it haunted me nevertheless, hinting offhandedly at a period of bitter, possibly violent sociopolitical turmoil not so very far in the past.

Yet I daresay I had a more vivid sense of what “the sixties” were about than most members of the generation yet to be labeled millennials, and for a reason not entirely unrelated to Rugrats. Even before that show premiered, I was a fan of Philip Proctor, who voiced Phil and Lil’s ineffectual stay-at-home father Howard DeVille. A stage actor who had also played countless one-off television parts, Proctor was then best known as a member of the Firesign Theatre, a four-man comedy troupe that had, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, put out a series of record albums densely layered with elaborate sonic production and laced with topical, esoteric, and absurd countercultural humor. Or so Proctor was known, at least, to a certain turned-on segment of the baby boomer generation to which my father belonged.

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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동아일보: 미국 이민자 문제가 한국에 주는 교훈

Monday, October 28, 2024

한국에 살면서도 매일 미국 소셜네트워크서비스(SNS)를 보고 있다. SNS에서 몇 주 전에 이민에 대한 논란이 있었다. 작년 오하이오주 스프링필드라는 소도시에서 학교 버스와 승용차가 충돌한 치명적인 교통사고가 발생했다. 대선을 앞두고 어떤 미국 정치인들은 자동차의 운전자가 아이티 이민자인 사실을 계속해서 언급했다. 처음에 그들은 3만 명의 아이티 이민자가 지난 3년에 걸쳐서 스프링필드에 정착했다고 주장했다. SNS에서 그 아이티 이민자 중에는 반려동물을 훔치고 먹는 사람이 있다는 소문도 나돌기 시작했다.

알고 보니 그것을 뒷받침하는 근거가 없고 스프링필드에 살고 있는 아이티 이민자의 실제 수는 3만 명이 아닌 1만2000명에서 1만5000명이었다. 사실상 미국 정치인들이 스프링필드의 이야기를 과장하는 이유는 요즘 이민에 대한 불안감을 느끼는 미국인들이 많아졌기 때문이다. 이민자들이 일자리를 빼앗을 수 있다는 걱정뿐만 아니라 문화적인 변화가 문제를 일으킬 가능성도 있다고 두려워하고 있다.

SNS나 매체에서 그러한 걱정을 표현하는 사람들은 어리석은 사람으로 여겨지기도 하지만 그 불안감이 터무니없는 것은 아니다. 한 지역에 짧은 기간 동안 다른 나라 사람이 이주하면 그 지역의 문화가 바뀌는 것은 불가피한 현상이다. 갑작스러운 이민자의 유입은 인구가 6만 명도 안 되는 스프링필드에 영향을 미칠 수밖에 없다. 독일에선 튀르키예 이민자가 옛날부터 많이 유입되고 있어서 어떤 동네는 독일이 아니라 마치 튀르키예처럼 느껴진다고 한다. 독일과 달리 미국은 전 세계에 ‘이민의 국가’로 잘 알려져 있다. 그럼에도 불구하고 대부분의 미국인들은 자기의 나라를 조금 색다른 개념으로 인지한다. 그들에게는 이민자가 아무리 많아도 미국은 이민과 무관한 정체성과 문화가 따로 있고 그 문화 덕분에 성공했다고 믿는다.

동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.

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