{"id":2672,"date":"2015-01-14T07:15:24","date_gmt":"2015-01-14T15:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2672"},"modified":"2015-04-06T09:12:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T16:12:47","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-cultures-korea-tour-cowboys-and-yangban-with-charles-montgomery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2672","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture&#8217;s Korea Tour: Cowboys and Yangban with Charles Montgomery"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-2673\" style=\"border: 0;\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/charles-montgomery.jpg\" alt=\"charles montgomery\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/charles-montgomery.jpg 300w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/charles-montgomery-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>Notebook on Cities and Culture<em>&#8216;s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and <\/em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.polarinertia.com\/\">The Polar Intertia Journal<\/a><em>, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>In Seoul&#8217;s\u00a0Haebangchon district, Colin Marshall talks with Charles Montgomery, professor\u00a0in\u00a0the English Interpretation and Translation Division of Dongguk University,\u00a0editor of the site <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ktlit.com\/\">KTlit.com<\/a>, and global ambassador of Korean literature in translation.\u00a0They discuss the first Korean books that excited him; the mistakes he made in choosing his first works of Korean literature to read; the significance of bestseller authors Kim Young-ha and Shin Kyoung-sook; the impossibility of getting around the literary prize system, and how that suppresses genre; how the substantial literature of the Korean War compares to what literature America has of its own Civil War; how his Korean best friend influenced the course of his professional life; why he burnt out as a marketing director and how it led him to Korea; the intense nature of Korean emotional bonds (and the intensity of their absence); why you have to treat everyone in the United States as a &#8220;potential shooter&#8221;; what happens when you read Korean literature with an understanding of the culture; whether Americans can ever internalize the Korean sense of obligation to society; how much Korean literature makes it into English; the idea that, to write for foreigners, a Korean writer somehow becomes less Korean; the popularity of Haruki Murakami in Korean translation; how he got &#8220;inside the elbow&#8221;; America and Korea as cultural antidotes to one another; why cities back in the U.S. seem to lag so far behind those of Korea; how one translated bestseller &#8220;drags&#8221; the rest of its country&#8217;s literature behind it; how Dalkey Archive handled Korean literature; the Korean preference for short stories and novellas over full-length novels; the insights into Korean society that literature still gives him; why Korean characters seem to lack agency; what Western literature he likes; which Korean writers have a tantalizing amount of work still untranslated; why Koreans have considered so many elements of their culture unknowable to foreigners; the exalted status of the \uc791\uac00\ub2d8; the signs that will let us know Korean literature has made it; and what stands a chance of\u00a0becoming Korea&#8217;s geisha, chrysanthemum, sword, sushi, and Shinjuku.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/traffic.libsyn.com\/colinmarshall\/NCC_Korea_Tour_Charles_Montgomery.output.mp3\">here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Notebook on Cities and Culture&#8216;s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and The Polar Intertia Journal, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition. In Seoul&#8217;s\u00a0Haebangchon district, Colin Marshall talks with Charles Montgomery, professor\u00a0in\u00a0the English Interpretation and Translation Division of Dongguk University,\u00a0editor of the site KTlit.com, and global [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,33,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-korea","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture","category-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2672"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2879,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2672\/revisions\/2879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}