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Hi, I’m Colin Marshall

Sunday, January 1, 1984

… 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>에도 기고한 적이 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.

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Los Angeles Review of Books: Ward Farnsworth’s guidebooks to English virtuosity and ancient philosophy

Sunday, May 22, 2022

Fifteen years ago, The New York Times Book Review put out a call for readers’ favorite literary sentences of the past quarter-century, intending to print a pageful of the best examples. This was meant to correct the “blind spot” of the then-new edition of the Yale Book of Quotations (2006), with its seemingly inexplicable dearth of contributions from writers born after 1950. A month later, the Review’s editor Dwight Garner conceded defeat: “[M]ore than 400 people e-mailed us or posted lines on our Web site,” but “[m]any of the quotes weren’t from writers at all, or were from quite old (or quite dead) ones.” The few that qualified amounted to thin gruel indeed: from Jonathan Safran Foer: “Try to live so that you can always tell the truth”; from Irvine Welsh: “If things go a bit dodgy, ah jist cannae be bothered.”

This did not surprise Ward Farnsworth. “Current customs about rhetoric don’t encourage the creation of great and memorable sentences that lend themselves to the kind of display the Times proposed,” he writes in Farnsworth’s Classical English Style (2020). “Usually the apex of modern achievement is a sentence that sets new standards for informality.” That book was the third and latest in a series beginning with Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric (2010) and Farnsworth’s Classical English Metaphor (2006). In parallel, Farnsworth has also written two books on ancient philosophy, The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual (2018) and The Socratic Method: A Practitioner’s Handbook (2021). All were published over the past decade, the same length of time he’s held his formidable day job as dean of the University of Texas School of Law.

These titles may collectively suggest a rather old-fashioned authorial intelligence at work. In our time, we seldom look for guidance to the likes of Socrates or (despite a recent Silicon Valley–inflected revival, duly subject to bien-pensant sneering) the Stoics. Still less do we set great store by virtuosity in the English language, especially in the countries that speak it natively. Elsewhere, educational industries trade lucratively on the promise of competence in what their advertisements claim to be the unchallenged medium of global communication. But in the speech to be heard and writing to be read in, say, the United States of America, competence is the highest state to which many aspire. As Farnsworth writes in Classical English Style, “A large share of books about prose style are about how to avoid mistakes. They explain why bad writing sounds that way. This book is about stylistic virtue.”

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

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Books on Cities: Witold Rybczynski, City Life (1995)

Monday, May 2, 2022

The American shopping mall emerged in the nineteen-fifties, during which the United States became at once more affluent and less urban. “The postwar period saw much new suburban construction, but just as the subdivision replaced the garden suburb, the shopping village was replaced by the regional shopping center,” writes architect-critic-historian Witold Rybczynski. “Probably the first such center was Northgate, which opened on the outskirts of Seattle on May 1, 1950.” I know Northgate well, or at least I used to know well what Northgate had evolved into by the mid-nineteen-nineties, when Rybczynski wrote those words. Back then, for a suburban preteen such as myself, much life outside home and school came packaged by the shopping mall: perhaps Bellevue Square, that paragon of dead-center-of-the-middle-class aspiration; perhaps the more run-down but more culturally unpredictable Crossroads; perhaps Northgate, whose faintly left-behind feeling owed, I now suspect, to its aforementioned history.

Not that I knew anything about that history at the time, or would have cared. At eleven years old, my concerns had more to do with the volumes of Choose Your Own Adventure at Half Price Books or the anime VHS tapes at the Suncoast Motion Picture Company. Yet as one ages, one takes an interest in the the larger forces that influenced one’s early years, not least the built environment in which it played out. This, in effect, is the subject of Rybczynski’s City Life: the forces that shaped not the built environment of his own early years, which he spent in the England and Canada of the nineteen-fifties, but mine. This happened inadvertently, of course, a function of when he wrote the book, which when published in 1995 was promoted as an explanation of the state of the contemporary American city.

City Life is an awfully broad title for such a project, even granted the subtitle Urban Expectations in a New World. Far punchier would have been the name of its first chapter, Why Aren’t Our Cities Like That? So Rybczynski was asked, over for dinner at the home he and his wife had built themselves in rural Quebec, by a Montrealer friend just back from Paris. Those words express the distinctive mixture of wonder and frustration felt by many North Americans recently exposed to European capitals, if one that typically disperses in short order. But Rybczynski, who’s been writing about architecture, housing, and cities since at least the early 1980s, pursued the question: why aren’t our cities like that? Given his professional experience, he must have known the answer — but also that the question itself could constitute a sturdy framework for a book’s worth of essays.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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New Yorker: What The Twilight Zone reveals about today’s prestige TV

Friday, April 15, 2022

Television is a vast wasteland, or so I often heard while growing up. That description had been commonplace since Newton Minow, of the F.C.C., used it in his address at the convention of the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961. But, as with so many famous American turns of phrase, its context was soon forgotten. In his speech, titled “Television and the Public Interest,” Minow challenged the industry members in his audience to sit down and watch their own stations for an entire day. “Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland,” one crossed by “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.”

“When television is bad,” Minow claimed, “nothing is worse”—but not before assuring his listeners that when television is good, nothing is better. In support, he adduced a handful of then current examples: specials hosted by Fred Astaire and Bing Crosby, adaptations of Joseph Conrad’s “Victory” and Winston Churchill’s memoirs. By far the best-remembered of Minow’s exemptions from the wasteland is “The Twilight Zone,” which had débuted on CBS in 1959 and would run until 1964. It’s also the least obviously high-minded: as an anthology series, “The Twilight Zone” tells a different story each episode, and many of the genres through which it cycles do involve a certain amount of mayhem, violence, sadism, and murder—as well as a few gangsters and Western men both good and bad. Yet “The Twilight Zone” also stands as perhaps the earliest example of what we think of today as auteur-driven prestige television.

Read the whole thing at the New Yorker.

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Books on Cities: Joan Didion, Miami (1987)

Friday, April 1, 2022

Joan Didion is associated with no place more than southern California. Yet she also spent two major stretches of her life in New York, one from the mid-nineteen-fifties to the mid-nineteen-sixties, and another from 1988 until her death this past December. She made that second move the year after publishing Miami, an ostensible examination of the titular South Floridian metropolis mainly, she later admitted, “about what I think is wrong with Washington.” Yet Miami is also about a specific Miami, and in a sense the dominant one: Cuban Miami, whose inhabitants constituted 56 percent of the total population by the time Didion began visiting the city in the mid-eighties. “There had come to exist in South Florida two parallel cultures,” she writes, “separate but not exactly equal, a key distinction being that only one of the two, the Cuban, exhibited even a remote interest in the activities of the other.”

What surprises me about this is the implied existence of a non-Cuban Miami. Though I still haven’t been there, I’ve long imagined the city’s overall cultural formation as even more dependent on Cuba than that of Los Angeles has been on Mexico. Of course, even 35 years ago a major American city’s being influenced by a large number of Latin American immigrants wasn’t a novelty. Miami’s uniqueness manifests to Didion linguistically: “In, say, Los Angeles, Spanish remained a language only barely registered by the Anglo population, part of the ambient noise, the language spoken by the people who worked in the car wash and came to trim the trees and cleared the tables in restaurants. In Miami Spanish was spoken by the people who ate in the restaurants, the people who owned the cars and the trees, which made, on the socioauditory scale, a considerable difference.”

Hence the way I occasionally heard Spanish described by my fellow students of the language back in Los Angeles: there an advantage, but in Miami a necessity. Though evidently without Spanish herself, Didion was sensitive enough to the undercurrents of power to pick up on what its use revealed about the city. (The Hispanophone David Rieff published his own Going to Miami in 1988, followed by Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World in 1991, but neither book remains prominent in the literature of those cities.) She engages Cuban Miami through its English-speakers, as when “on one of the first evenings I spent in Miami I sat at midnight over carne con papas in an art-filled condominium in one of the Arquitectonica buildings on Brickell Avenue and listened to several exiles talk about the relationship of what was said in Washington to what was done in Miami.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Los Angeles Review of Books: Robert Whiting, Tokyo Junkie

Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Early in his new book, Robert Whiting refers to the “Yamate Line,” and most readers who have been to Tokyo in the past half-century will suspect a misprint. Few visitors to the Japanese capital could avoid the subway train in question, which runs in a loop through such well-known districts as Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, and Ginza. But they’ll know it as the Yamanote Line, a romanization of its Japanese name (literally “mountain’s hand,” equivalent to the English “foothill”) first adopted in 1971. But by then, the Californian Whiting had already logged almost a decade in Japan, having been sent there by the United States Air Force in 1962. “Tokyo is the best city in the world,” he remembers a master sergeant saying when informing him of his posting: “You’ll be over there with all those geisha girls, riding around in rickshaws. Ten million people. More neon signs than you can imagine.”

The neon comes up quite often throughout Tokyo Junkie: 60 Years of Bright Lights and Back Alleys … and Baseball, as one of the city’s few constants during a period of ceaseless change. Whiting closes his memoir with his 77th birthday lunch at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Nihonbashi: “It occurred to me over our gelato that there is very little left in Tokyo that is older than I am, given how this city keeps on renewing itself.” He arrived nearly 60 years ago to “the biggest construction site in the world,” a transformation motivated by preparation for the 1964 Summer Olympics. Still, there were plenty of attractions amid all the dust: there were “deluxe movie theaters with 70mm screens, and pachinko pinball parlors jangling noisily all day long,” beside “noodle stands, yakitori shops with their smoky grills, food marts, and discount shops,” beside “ancient temples with serene gardens of gravel and rocks and inner courtyards.”

As in many pre-Olympics development binges of the 20th century, an overarching goal was to bring the infrastructure of a “backward” country up to the standards of the modern West. “[D]espite the frantic rebuilding, less than a quarter of the city’s twenty-three sprawling wards had flush sewage systems at all, making Tokyo one of the world’s most undeveloped (and odiferous) megalopolises,” Whiting recalls, olfactory memories supposedly being the most deeply recorded of them all: “Tokyo was also rat-infested. Some 40 percent of Japanese had tapeworms. There were no ambulances, and infant mortality was twenty times what it is today. Moreover, house theft was rampant, narcotics use was endemic, and it was considered too dangerous to walk in public parks at night.” This is a far cry indeed from the city world-renowned for its safe streets at all hours, its high-tech bidets, and its far-reaching, precision-engineered train networks.

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

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Books on Cities: A. N. Wilson, London: A History (2004)

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

London is a world city. Los Angeles, where I used to live, is less a world city than, as I once saw a banner at the airport call it, a “city that’s a world in itself.” Seoul, where I now live, is not a world city, despite strenuous promotional efforts on the part of its officialdom to convert it into one. By none of these descriptions do I mean to deliver a judgment either positive or negative; indeed, Seoul’s not being a world city counts among the reasons I enjoy living here. But recent decades have made “world city” into a highly desirable label: so highly, in fact, that the failure to qualify for it — that is, the failure to be a large, multiethnic metropolis sustained by international commerce and immigration — is now seen in many quarters as a mark of shame.

World-city hood as understood in the twenty-first century also requires widespread use of the English language. (This has done its part to keep Seoul out of the running, as has the not-unrelated ethnic homogeneity of the population.) It’s hardly a surprise, then, that the very worldliest of cities would happen to include the capital of England. But in any sense apart from the strictly geographic, is London in England? “Some years ago, I opined that London was not really an English city anymore,” John Cleese tweeted in 2019. “Since then, virtually all my friends from abroad have confirmed my observation.” To my mind he didn’t necessarily mean this in, as they say, a bad way — especially given his well-documented professional history of ridiculing Englishness — but the tweet nonetheless sparked a predictably harsh backlash whose contributors including London mayor Sadiq Khan.

“Londoners know that our diversity is our greatest strength,” Khan responded. “We are proudly the English capital, a European city, and a global hub.” This political marketing-speak belongs very much to our age, one that mandates an increasingly great distance between the statesman and the man of letters. And so it is to a man of letters we must turn for a more serious articulation of the quality in question. “I deposit my daughter at school with her Mexican classroom assistant and her friends whose parents are, to name but seven, Italian, African American, Japanese, Chinese, Palestinian, German, and Indian,” writes A.N. Wilson of a typical day in early-twenty-first century London. There follow encounters with a Sikh upholsterer, a Malaysian barber, waiters French, Bulgarian, and Indian, and a Polish carpenter, among other citizens who form a cast it would now cause grave offense to call colorful.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Taras Grescoe, Straphanger

Monday, February 21, 2022

I moved from Los Angeles to Seoul a bit over six years ago, and it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to say I did so because Seoul has the better subway system. It still surprises some people to hear that Los Angeles, a city globally perceived as synonymous with American “car culture,” has a subway system at all. Yet the city put into service the first of its modern urban rail lines in 1990, and four or five more have opened since. Though still inadequate to the size of its territory, Los Angeles Metro Rail as a whole tends favorably to impress the visitors who ride it. Those visitors include no less a public-transit connoisseur than Taras Grescoe, whose tough-but-fair evaluation constitutes a chapter of his book Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile, first published in 2012.

Back then I was still living in Los Angeles, and indeed first having my eyes opened to the urban itself. Lacking experience of adult life within a major city proper, I was intoxicated with the possibilities newly opened to me: that, for instance, of catching a subway train to Little Tokyo from my home in Koreatown whenever I pleased. The vague notion I had of buying a car once I got to “L.A.” soon evaporated, and I began avidly to track the progress of not just Metro’s construction but also the city’s development in general, especially where it produced greater density. Even then it would have been difficult for me not to like Straphanger, which offers clear-eyed assessment of Los Angeles’ urban condition as well as evocative accounts of travel and transit in about a dozen other world cities, from New York and Toronto to Copenhagen and Shanghai.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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New Yorker: Regular Car Reviews and the Semiotics of a 1999 Toyota Corolla

Sunday, February 13, 2022

Despite the ever-increasing might of South Korea’s automobile industry, it’s a dull place for the car connoisseur. The occasional Ferrari or Lamborghini always looks freshly delivered in the loud yet basic color schemes beloved of the Gangnam nouveau riche. More tasteful but rarer are the domestic survivors of the scrappy nineteen-eighties: the Kia Pride, for instance, a mass-produced modernity symbol marketed in the West as the Ford Festiva, or the Daewoo Maepsy, the last Korean car branded with a genuinely Korean-sounding name. For the most part, the streets of Seoul offer up a halting parade of just-this-side-of-generic vehicles stamped out by local automakers in (besides the signature orange of the city’s taxicabs) black, white, and gray, none of the designs liable to quicken the pulse of anyone but a development economist.

Most passenger cars on Korean roads are of recent vintage, dating overwhelmingly from the past ten to fifteen years. Even the stalwart Spectra, Kia’s budget-priced compact, has become a rare sight in its homeland since its discontinuation in 2003. Test-driving a model of that year, my favorite car-review channel on YouTube once summed up the Spectra’s lack of distinctiveness by likening it to “the fictional idea of a regular car, a completely made-up symptom of the ridiculousness of the human condition.” Nor has the channel’s host praised other Korean automobiles much more effusively: Hyundai’s somewhat design-forward 2013 Veloster Turbo is “an economy car in a Men’s Wearhouse dinner jacket”; the chintzily hip 2016 Kia Soul 6MT is “the official car of wearing fake Gucci to a deposition.” Of Hyundai’s sleeper 2020 Elantra GT N Line, he declares, “Fine: the very definition of it.”

The channel is Regular Car Reviews, which I discovered after moving to South Korea in 2015. I’d come from Los Angeles, a city reflexively associated with a car culture of which I never partook. The same transportation-dissident impulse that kept me from driving in Southern California now compels me, in Seoul—a city whose subway system is as good as its car spotting is bad—to watch videos about the Chevrolet Camaro, the Dodge Neon, and even the Ford Pinto. It could simply be a way of securing one hoped-for benefit of expatriation: a fresh perspective on my homeland, the United States of America. Each of the more than five hundred episodes of Regular Car Reviews evaluates an automobile’s design and performance, but also reflects on that automobile’s sociological significance, goes off on non-sequitur comedic riffs ranging in vulgarity from mild to bestial, and unfailingly delivers a shot of pure twenty-first-century America.

Read the whole thing at the New Yorker.

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Books on Cities: Donald Richie, Tokyo (1999)

Tuesday, February 1, 2022

Donald Richie closes his most personal book on Tokyo by quoting from his own diary. The entry dates from the summer of 1978, more than twenty years before. One of his generation’s best-known American expatriates in Japan, Richie first arrived while working for the U.S. occupation force after the Second World War. He returned to Tokyo to live in the mid-1950s, and there he remained until his death in 2013. The only exception was his stint as Film Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, which lasted for a few years of the late 1960s and early 70s. Toward the end of that decade, he writes in his diary of being back in Tokyo, taking in a heartily atavistic summer festival in his neighborhood of Ueno:

Japan in the summer is always more Japanese and never more so than at this fair. Families in summer yukata, clacking along on geta, gang boys hawking in cummerbunds and shorts; old gentlemen shuffling about in suteteko and underwear tops, carrying fans; girls back from the bath with wet hair sleeked back, towels in hands. This is what Japan once looked like. Summer brings it back again. And old attitudes as well. A sudden interest in nature, here in the bowels of the city. Exclamations at the size of the lotus buds. And a much slower tempo. No one striding, everyone strolling. And with it the old politeness. People standing to one side for each other.

Writing in the late 20th century, Richie finds this memory bringing to mind the memories of another Tokyoite: Nagai Kafu, who chronicled the life of the city in the early 20th-century. Even then, Kafu “was regretting the passing of the latter part of the century before. And in the middle of this century, he was complaining, remembering the early part of the century. Fifty years from now, this time about which I am complaining will probably have become someone else’s golden age.” I myself first visited Japan a decade ago, and never could have experienced the 70s there, much less the immediate postwar years. But Japan’s 90s would be a tempting decade to revisit, at least according to the stories of a slightly older American friend who studied abroad there at that time — and took film classes taught by Richie himself.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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콜린의 한국 팟캐스트: 「한국인의 맛」 저자 정명섭 작가님

Sunday, January 23, 2022

청소년, 공상과학, 역사, 추리와 좀비를 포함한 다양한 장르의 소설을 쓰시는 정명섭 작가님께서 소설과 에세이를 합치는「한국인외 맛」에서 20세기 동안 하국화된 외국 음식의 역사를 기술하신다. 인터뷰를 여기나 애플 팟캐스트를 통해 다운받을 수 있다. 유튜브에서도 스트리밍할 수 있다.

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