Skip to content

Colin Marshall

… 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 CitiesOpen Culture, the Times Literary Supplementthe 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 Millions3QuarksdailyThe 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Favorite Open Culture posts of 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 2012201320142015201620172018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

동아일보: 한국에서의 운전이 더 안전하다고 느끼는 이유

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.

Los Angeles Review of Books: Jeremy Braddock, Firesign

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.

동아일보: 미국 이민자 문제가 한국에 주는 교훈

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.

Books on Cities: Alex Hannaford, Lost in Austin

If you’ve never visited Austin, Texas, it’s probably too late to do so now. That, in any case, is the impression I’ve received over the past fifteen years, during which time my interest in the city has greatly diminished. Word has long circulated that Austin is “over,” but until now, there hasn’t been a book declaring quite how over it is. Just this month, that book arrived: Lost in Austin: The Evolution of an American City, by a British reporter named Alex Hannaford. Enamored with the drifting, breakfast taco-fueled bohemianism of Texas capital since a road trip in 1999, Hannaford made regular visits thereafter, meeting the woman who would become his wife at South by Southwest in 2003. He put down down roots in what seemed like an ideal adopted hometown, and even started a family there. But within a couple of decades, he’d pulled those roots up.

What made Austin intolerable for Hannaford turns out to be the progression of trends that had long preceded his arrival. He’d much preferred the nearly year-round sunshine to the long stretches of unrelieved gray back in London, but eventually the climate became too hot to enjoy the local outdoor-activity culture as often as he once did. A spike in school shootings inspired fresh reservations about Texas’ rate of gun ownership. The latest “tech boom,” a successor of the one driven by the arrival of Dell Computer and the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in the early eighties, brought Tesla, Apple, and Google to town, among many other smaller players, provoking real-estate bidding wars and waves of gentrification. And the increasing difficulty of keeping concert venues in business had made ever hollower Austin’s brand of being “the Live Music Capital of the World®.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

Books on Cities: Steven Conn, Americans Against the City

Every so often on the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, discourse erupts about the relative merits of Europe versus the United States. The arguments always seem to come down to the value of individual earning potential versus overall quality of life. “Amerifats” always to point to the large salaries earned in their country by software developers — or even Buc-ee’s car-wash managers — and “Europoors” always counter that the high cost of living in the U.S. cancels out the difference in pay. The latter aren’t wrong about everything being more expensive in America, in part due to a host of hidden costs of which they probably aren’t even aware. But the former have a point about the almost comical difference between a decent American salary and its equivalent in even the most prominent European countries. There’s really no comparison; the U.S. wins on that score.

In the eternal struggle between U.S. and Europe, I chose Asia. Yet if I couldn’t live here, I’d certainly look into Europe first. That has to do in part with my not belonging to a highly compensated profession in any region of the world, but also because I find it increasingly difficult to stomach the prospect of living in an American city again. Los Angeles remains one of my main subjects of interest, but after nearly a decade of living in Seoul, where nobody demands money from you on the street and where every subway station has usable restrooms, I suspect I’d struggle to reacclimate. It doesn’t help that the cost of rent, restaurants and the like, already burdensome when I left America, have since risen to what I’ve heard is the very edge of tolerability (to say nothing of other recent undesirable phenomena, like the proliferation of Fentanyl addicts).

Read the whole thing at Substack.

동아일보: 영어 슬로건으로 한국을 홍보하는 것의 함정

2024년 올림픽은 파리에서 열렸지만 한국에 긍정적인 관심을 많이 불러일으켰다. 미국인인 내가 매일 보는 미국 SNS에서 사람들이 제일 많이 열광했던 선수는 바로 특이하고 멋진 모습의 사격으로 은메달을 받은 김예지 선수였다. 외신은 한국과 북한 탁구팀이 같이 찍었던 셀카도 마치 중요한 외교 행사처럼 보도했다. 삼성은 참여한 모든 선수에게 갤럭시 스마트폰을 줘서 적지 않은 광고 효과를 얻었을지 모른다. 한국의 해외 홍보를 담당하는 정부 관리들은 매우 기뻤을 것이다.

어떻게 보면 한국의 해외 홍보는 1988년 서울 올림픽에서부터 본격적으로 시작되었다고 할 수 있다. 한국을 세계에 선진국으로 소개한 그 큰 행사 이후로 국가 이미지를 개선하는 작업은 여러 시행착오를 겪었다. 아시아인을 제외한 외국인들은 대부분 한국에 대해 특화된 인식을 갖고 있지 않다. 옛날과 달리 내가 아는 많은 미국인이 한국이 재미있을 것 같아서 언젠가 방문하고 싶다고 하긴 하지만, 중국이나 일본과 차별되는 특징을 전혀 모른다. 어떻게 이렇게 정체성이 독특한 나라인 한국이 그런 위치에 놓이게 되었을까?

나는 올해 초에 에세이를 출간한 뒤 많은 언론사와 인터뷰를 진행했다. 나를 찾아온 기자들이 자주 하는 질문 중 하나가 어떻게 하면 해외에 한국을 효과적으로 홍보할 수 있냐는 것이었다. 떠오른 대답은 우선 서울 영어 슬로건을 그만 만들어야 한다는 것이었다. 만약 굳이 쓴다면 진부한 말장난인 현재 슬로건 ‘SEOUL MY SOUL’보다 2015년에 처음 도입되자마자 논란을 빚은 ‘I·SEOUL·U’를 선호한다. 영어를 사용하면서도 보편적인 영어식 표현이 아니기 때문이다.

동아일보 사이트에서 이어지는 내용을 볼 수 있습니다.