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Korea Blog: Five Years a Seoulite

Thursday, December 17, 2020

I haven’t lived in Korea long — just long enough to forget that I live in Korea. This presents something of a professional danger, given the supposed subject of so much of my work. But like writing about Los Angeles when I lived there, writing about Korea guarantees me frequent reminders that I do indeed live here. This, in part, inspired me to pitch the idea of a Korea Blog to the LARB just before making the move five years ago: having regularly to consider different topics pertaining to Korea would, in theory, prevent me from retreating into an ersatz West — stocked with Western media, Western food, Western languages, Western friends — of the kind known to entrap Westerners here. It would also record a moment in Korean life, culture, and current events as perceived by one foreigner (and occasionallyothers) with a persistent interest in the place.

As any workaday foreign correspondent would confirm, these past five years constitute a particularly interesting time to have been in Korea. When I arrived, President Park Geun-hye was being protested, but not at the scale — nor for the reasons — that would ultimately see her deposed. The sinking of the M.V. Sewol in the spring of 2014 remained bitterly fresh in public memory, not least due to the release of documentaries like Cruel State (나쁜 나라); the feature Birthday (생일) would come later. And though Korean cinema already commanded a not inconsiderable fan base around the world, nobody could have imagined the unprecedented breakthrough it would make just a few years later, when Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (기생층) would win the Palme d’Or and then four Academy Awards, Best Picture included.

Then again, I’d can’t say it wouldn’t have pleased me had the work of Lee Chang-dong, whose Burning (버닝) also contended at Cannes, enjoyed that victory; or even more so, that of Hong Sangsoo. Having put out eight pictures in the time I’ve been living in Korea, the latest being this year’s The Woman Who Ran (도망친 여자), Hong offers me one way of marking my time here, but he also did more than his part to inspire me to dig into Korean cinema, and consequently the Korean language, in the first place. And yes, even after five years of life in Korea and more than a dozen years of study, Korean is still hard. It’s actually become harder, in that every day here reveals more of my own linguistic ignorance — which, to my mind, is half the fun of expatriation.

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

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Books on Cities: Jason Horton, Abandoned and Historic Los Angeles (2020)

Monday, December 14, 2020

When you hear something described as “only in L.A.,” rest assured of its being neither unique to nor representative of Los Angeles. Take, mundane though it may be, the definite article preceding freeway numbers — “the 10,” “the 5,” “the 405” — a linguistic tic mythologized, by a kind of soft cultural conspiracy, as unheard outside Southern California’s metropolis, or at least outside Southern California. True, Los Angeles doesn’t look, feel, or seem to work quite like any other city. Both its avowed lovers and haters agree on that, but what exactly sets it apart, and how, remains a matter of active inquiry. Or it would be if more of us actively inquired into it, rather than gesturing toward settled trivialities: frequent driving on the aforementioned freeways, encounters with flamboyant quasi-celebrities, streets lined with palm trees, buildings not shaped like normal buildings.

In recent decades, those avowed lovers of Los Angeles have started to outnumber the haters, or at any rate to speak over them. I don’t consider this an unmixed good, though I think I can claim a greater enthusiasm for the place than most. The enjoyment of Los Angeles holds a contrarian appeal, not just for me but others more firmly rooted there as well. When documentarian Doug Pray said to me that “Los Angeles can be so hated that I actually enjoy it,” I understood at once what he meant, cool though that hatred had even then. I was interviewing him for Notebook on Cities and Culture, the podcast I launched shortly after first moving to Los Angeles myself about a decade ago — a time, I like to think, when moving to Los Angeles and launching a podcast was less of a cliché than it is today.

At least I wasn’t doing a comedy podcast, a genre that even then seemed to emanate an unlistenably huge amount of content from Los Angeles alone. Though I might interview the occasional comedian — an appealing breed of guest, due not least to their habits of observation and perpetual willingness to talk — my primary goal was to get not laughs but a variety of perspectives on Los Angeles in order to better understand the city. Though I’d already hosted radio interviews for years, I thus found my instinct for identifying articulate interlocutors more rigorously tested. Few of the negative preconceptions about Los Angeles were borne out by my daily experience, but those about a certain class of Angeleno speech have, I admit, something to them. Beginning with “so,” sentences stagger through a series of “like”s and “you know”s before eventually finding their unstructured way to a concluding “awesome.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Books on Cities: Rem Koolhaas, “Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan” (1978)

Thursday, December 3, 2020

When Rem Koolhaas published Delirious New York in 1978, he hadn’t yet built his best-known work. Central China Television Headquarters was 35 years away, the Seattle Central Library was 26 years away, and even the Maison à Bordeaux (subject of the documentary Koolhaas Houselife) was 20 years away. In fact he hadn’t yet built anything at all, having established his Office of Metropolitan Architecture just three years earlier. If Koolhaas is to be taken at his word — and the character of his pronouncements suggests he often isn’t — the book laid the foundation of his architectural career. And though he may have written it grandiosely, he didn’t write it frivolously: its origins go at least as far back as his student days at Cornell University, where he received a grant to study in the early 1970s, and which put him in relative proximity to New York.

After growing up in the Netherlands, with three formative years in Jakarta, Koolhaas commenced his architectural education in London. This placed him well to lead, for good or ill, the life of the 21st-century “global citizen.” His physically weighty 1995 book S,M,L,XL presents a chart of all the flights he takes during his hundreds of days abroad in a year. Only such a thorough familiarity with airports could have inspired 2006’s Junkspace, which defines and even pays tribute to the kind of cheap, utilitarian, placeless, and often purgatorial spaces — albeit spaces at the summit of staggering technological development — occupied by the international traveler. This suggests a streak of Ballardian brazenness that takes hypermodern mundanity (or hypermundane modernity) as found, even amid the commercial nondescriptness of Rotterdam, the city of Koolhaas’ birth and the one in which he’s headquartered OMA.

Whatever his current sensibilities, Koolhaas is hardly the only architect to have been captivated in his younger days by New York. But as far as I know, none of the others have written for the city a “retroactive manifesto,” as Delirious New York‘s subtitle declares it. More specifically, Koolhaas wrote it for Manhattan, from the history of whose built environment he attempts to derive the principles of an emergent, implicit ideology called “Manhattanism.” Under Manhattanism, “doctrine of indefinitely postponed consciousness,” each new building strives to be “a City Within a City,” a condition that, taken to its logical conclusion, “makes the Metropolis a collection of architectural city-states, all potentially at war with each other.” The “language of fantasy-pragmatism” lends an appearance of objectivity to Manhattanism’s ambition, that of creating “congestion on all possible levels.” Manhattanism “is the only program where the efficiency” demanded in 20th-century America “intersects with the sublime.”

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Times Literary Supplement: Matt Alt, “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World”

Saturday, November 28, 2020

After overseeing the postwar occupation of Japan, General Douglas MacArthur made a blunt assessment of the cultural and emotional state of the defeated people. “If the Anglo-Saxon was, say, 45 years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature,” said the former Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. “The Japanese, however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. Measured by the standards of modern civilization, they would be like a boy of twelve.” The popular mind now remembers MacArthur as having described Japan as “a nation of twelve-year-olds”, and many of the country’s high-profile exports – dizzying video games, trinkets and stationery branded with cartoon animals, cheaply produced comics and animation saturated with sex and violence – would seem to retroactively underscore the general’s perceptiveness.

In the annals of Western accounts of Japan, MacArthur’s pronouncement is not without precedent. “From the earliest days of contact, the effort Japanese devoted to devising toys and games shocked Western observers”, writes Matt Alt in Pure Invention: How Japan’s pop culture conquered the world. “One of the first was the British diplomat Rutherford Alcock, who in 1863 dubbed Japan ‘a paradise of babies’. They were even more shocked by how many of these babies grew into adults who unabashedly continued to enjoy the pleasures of childhood.” From here Alt, an American resident of Japan who has spent nearly two decades professionally “localizing” Japanese culture for Western consumers, goes on to give a history of his adopted homeland through the products it has designed to deliver entertainment – in other words, through its toys.

The most telling early example comes not from the mid-nineteenth century, when Japan re-opened to trade with the world after more than 200 years of isolationist government, but from the devastated years following the Second World War. Gathering discarded food tins and beer cans for metal, a toymaker named Matsuzo Kosuge began to manufacture tiny models of the Allied jeeps that had swept into Japanese cities after V-J Day. Impoverished though they were, the Japanese sensed in those utilitarian military vehicles the same alluring modernity Kosuge had, and from the start the toy jeeps sold more rapidly than they could be manufactured. In the 1950s, exemplifying the apparently infinite Japanese capacity for taking pains, Kosuge brought to market a miniature Cadillac so laboriously detailed that Japanese buyers couldn’t afford them. His real customers, the many Americans with the desire for a Cadillac but not the means to buy a real one, lay on the other side of the Pacific.

Read the whole thing at the Times Literary Supplement.

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Korea Blog: Michael Gibb’s Island-Hopping Travelogue “A Korean Odyssey”

Sunday, November 22, 2020

Modern South Korea made its orchestrated debut on the world stage with the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Since that time, the most memorable English-language travel narratives about this country have been written by Englishmen. Simon Winchester’s Korea: A Walk through the Land of Miracles, which came out the year of the Games, seems to remain the best-known, though as supplementary reading I always recommend Clive Leatherdale’s lesser-known To Dream of Pigs, the chronicle of a journey around the country taken in the same time and published in the early 1990s. Over the past decade, during which Korea has made a fuller return to the global zeitgeist, a few more such books have appeared: Graham Holiday’s culinary travelogue Eating Korea, for instance, or Michael Booth’s Three Tigers, One Mountain, an exploration of northeast Asia given over in large part to Korea. What keeps bringing these Brits?

For the London-born Michael Gibb, author of the new book A Korean Odyssey: Island-Hopping in Choppy Waters, the attraction feels atavistic. “Just as a hiker salivates at the prospect of scrambling over a mountain range or an equestrian glows at the prospect of galloping across a far-flung grassland,” he writes, “I get giddy thinking about ferry trips to remote outlying islands,” especially “the storm-ravaged, history-rich, guano-splattered archipelagos of South Korea.” Even when transplanted to the other side of the world, it seems, a man from an island not known for its pleasant weather will seek out more of the same. Gibb currently lives with his Korean wife and young daughter on Hong Kong’s Lamma Island, where he relishes each summer, which begins “dark and thundery, oppressive enough to transform the jolliest of friends into miserable wretches,” then turns into “clear blue skies and enough heat to melt your brains.”

In the 1990s, Gibb lived here in Seoul — or rather, in the altogether different Seoul that existed in the 1990s. “It was far from easy dealing with a complex language, a feisty cuisine, and complex social etiquette,” he recalls. “The shove in the back while boarding a bus was not welcomed. Testy nationalism and insular world views alienated me. Motorbikes roaring down sidewalks instead of on the street boiled my blood.” By all accounts, the still freshly developed nation was indeed more reckless and slipshod all around in those days. “Planes fell out of the sky, bridges collapsed, gas pipes exploded, the top of a bus was shorn off by a low bridge, and one of my former students and my wife’s cousin were both crushed when a shopping mall collapsed.” The collapse was presumably that of the Sampoong Department Store in 1995, which killed more than 500 people.

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

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Books on Cities: Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (2012)

Sunday, November 15, 2020

Anyone with an interest in American cities today has heard of Walk Score. Launched in 2007, the web site calculates the proximity of any given address to various necessities and amenities — grocery stores, schools, restaurants, hospitals, movie theaters — and assigns it the eponymous numerical rating. When I first heard of it, I naturally punched in all my previous addresses. The neighborhood of Seattle’s eastern suburbs in which I lived throughout most of elementary and all of middle and high school rates a Walk Score of three. That’s three out of a possible 100, mind, but it still beats my first childhood home about thirty miles outside of Sacramento, California, whose Walk Score comes in at a perfect zero. This may go some way to explaining my subsequent choices of location in adulthood: downtown Santa Barbara (85), followed by Los Angeles’ Koreatown (“walker’s paradise” at 97).

Today I live in the capital of South Korea, a country not served by Walk Score. If it were, my address would surely blow up the meter: here everything one could need in life, from coffee shops and bookstores to gyms and shopping malls to major hospitals and universities, lies within a ten-minute walk. (When I say this to Americans in America, I usually have to add the words “without exaggeration.”) After five years, this feels as natural to me as being unable to walk to anything but another house once did, back when I was growing up in the suburban nation. There I borrow from the title of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, a 2000 indictment of post-war U.S. urban planning by Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, founders of an organization called the Congress for the New Urbanism.

The term “New Urbanism” seems to me something of a bait-and-switch, given how many of its advocates go in for labored small-town kitsch of the Truman Show variety. That film was shot, in fact, in Seaside, Florida, a master-planned community designed by the architecture-and-planning firm DPZ, which stands for Duany and Plater-Zyberk. But then they also founded Arquitectonica, the studio responsible for the early-80s sublime of the Atlantis Condominium as immortalized by the opening credits of Miami Vice. Clearly this husband-and-wife architecture team commands a serious Floridian aesthetic range. And if Speck, formerly DPZ’s Director of Town Planning, is to be believed, Duany in particular knows everything there is to know about how to create satisfying urban spaces. Having partaken of this knowledge, Speck frequently emphasizes an intellectual debt to his former boss in his first solo book Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Open Culture Posts on Korea

Monday, November 9, 2020

Since 2012 I’ve written about all manner of topics at Open Culture, and you can find a selection of some of my favorite posts over the years in the Open Culture section of my essays page. Sometimes write there about things Korean — South Korea being the country in which I live, and about which I regularly write on the Los Angeles Review of Books Korea Blog — and you’ll find those posts gathered below:

See also my Open Culture posts on Japan.

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Korea Blog: Revisiting the Late Kevin O’Rourke’s “My Korea,” a Curious Memoir of a Land that Gets in the Blood

Sunday, November 8, 2020

Western expatriates in Asia often see themselves as having missed out on their adopted homeland’s golden age. I arrived recently, just under five years ago, and have since heard much about how I really should’ve been here at the time of the World Cup, if not in the 1990s. Some time ago I met an American here in Seoul who’d first come to Korea in the 1970s as a Mormon missionary. He confirmed what I’d suspected: even back then, the Westerners who’d preceded him were telling him he really should’ve been there in the sixties. Many who came from the West in those decades came for missionary reasons, religious or otherwise. Some, like Kevin O’Rourke, stayed for the long haul, diversifying their activities all the while but never, of course, forgetting the prelapsarian age in which they’d arrived.

“You really had to see Korea in the sixties to know what it was like,” writes O’Rourke in the opening of My Korea: 40 Years Without a Horsehair Hat. “Korea time was the conceptual axis on which the culture turned. Modernization and the need for quick decisions has done away with this lovely, lazy, exasperating way of life.” Back then, “when you didn’t know any other way home, it was normal to ask the traffic policeman to reverse the traffic on a one-way street, and invariably he obliged.” This seems to have been a favorite memory: O’Rourke repeated it in the media interviews entailed by his status as a famous foreigner, and the Korea Timesincluded it last month in his obituary. Having made the initial trip form his native Ireland in 1964, he had by the end of his life spent 56 of his 81 years here in Korea.

Readers of Korean literature in translation may well know O’Rourke’s name, bring as he did more than 2,000 Korean poems, stories, and novels into the English language. These include “Wings” (날개), Yi Sang’s bizarre modernist tale of colonial humiliation (O’Rourke’s rendition of which I studied just a few years ago at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea), and The Square, Choi In-hun’s sweeping novelistic critique of Korea both North and South (the partial inspiration for last year’s sprawling exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art). He also taught English literature at Kyung Hee University in Seoul for nearly four decades, but he was at the core a man of the cloth, a priest brought to Korea by the Irish Catholic Missionary Society of St. Columban.

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

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Books on Cities: Andrei Codrescu, “New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City”

Tuesday, November 3, 2020

Andrei Codrescu moved to New Orleans in 1985, and Hurricane Katrina followed two decades later. “New Orleans will be rebuilt, but it will never again be the city I know and love,” he declares in the final chapter of his anthology New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City, published the year after the disaster. I’ve heard variations on that sentiment from other observers over the past decade and a half, and I now wonder what part they played in my putting off visiting the place for so long. If post-Katrina New Orleans isn’t really New Orleans, I thought — and if I lack the pre-Katrina experience that would at least allow me to make a before-and-after comparison — why bother? I appreciate a good plate of red beans and rice, but felt little need to eat one in a city drained of its essence.

I finally bothered last year, taking a few days’ side trip to New Orleans with my dad as part of a longer visit back to the United States. Despite the occasional abandoned structure — and the one that made an impression on me, the inverted-looking midcentury Plaza Tower, was already sitting empty three years before Katrina — it didn’t strike me as a city that had been devastated not all that long before. (The most obvious signs pointed to broader devastation of the economic variety, and indeed were actual signs: judging by the billboards, the sole healthy industry between New Orleans and Pensacola, Florida is personal injury litigation.) But then, I stayed at the edge of the relatively undamaged French Quarter, on the other side of a bend in the Mississippi River from the likes of the Lower Ninth Ward, whose name the hurricane made a byword for sodden neglect.

“Tourists experience New Orleans by guidebook geography,” Codrescu writes in a piece from 1995, “which recognizes only three areas: the French Quarter, the Garden District, and Audubon Park.” This remains broadly true, in that I spent a good deal of time myself in the first two of those, though such French Quarter-adjacent neighborhoods as the music bar-filled Marigny hardly felt like sacrosanct locals’ turf. I’ve enjoyed enjoy beignets and café au lait at Café du Monde and will do so again, but I’m also considering how best, when next I visit New Orleans, to transcend the tourist city. The French Quarter has much to recommend it — not least a used bookstore from whose seemingly load-bearing floor-to-ceiling piles I managed to extract Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s Faire L’amour — but when I recently pulled it up on Google Street View, my girlfriend asked if I was looking at Disneyland.

Read the whole thing at Substack.

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Korea Blog: An Introduction to Outsider Novelist-Essayist Bae Suah

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Bae Suah has a dedicated readership in her native South Korea, owing to the unconventional nature of her fiction as well as her passage into literary fame. Over the past half-decade her work has begun to appear in English translation, and in that form it has met with bad reviews: not negative reviews but badly written ones, hazily abstract in their description and incontinent in their praise. “The amorphous logic of memory or dream, where things are both familiar and strange, connects physical and intangible worlds,” insists the Guardian‘s first consideration (under the Observer banner) of Bae’s Untold Night and Day (알려지지 않은 밤과 하루). Its secondlauds the book as “a hallucinatory novel propelled by the logic of dreams: the story resists conventional categorization and coherence in favor of instability, a shamanistic borderland of feverish disintegration between the physical and the spiritual.”

To critics in the English-language press, directly conveying the qualities of Bae’s writing has proven a challenge. Some of them have done better with the indirect method, name-checking such Western literary figures as W.G. Sebald, Peter Handke, Fernando Pessoa, and Clarice Lispector. All four are referenced in reviews by way of not just aesthetic comparison but professional introduction, since as a translator Bae has brought works by all four into the Korean language. Her ability to translate Sebald and Handke (as well as Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Franz Kafka) owes to years spent in Germany, a country in which she’s made annual sojourns since the early 2000s. Pessoa and Lispector she handles at a further remove, working from German translations: not an ideal arrangement, but a necessary one absent Korean Portuguese translators invested in Pessoa and Lispector’s remote niches of literature.

The first edition of Lispector in Korean, a collection of short stories translated by Bae, was published just last year. This says something about the foreign fiction favored, or more to the point disfavored, in South Korea, and that Bae was the translator to finally take the project on says something about the kind of writer she is. Bae is known, as Lispector is remembered, as a woman encumbered by few of her country’s social or artistic conventions, and her prose style, like Lispector’s, is described by both her appreciators and detractors as sounding persistently alien even in the original. In Lispector’s writing this quality admits of a degree of biographical explanation: as an immigrant to Brazil from modern-day Ukraine, albeit one who relocated with her family in early childhood, she could have retained characteristics that marked her as an outsider in Brazilian society, literary and otherwise.

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

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