{"id":2704,"date":"2015-01-27T15:49:20","date_gmt":"2015-01-27T23:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2704"},"modified":"2015-04-06T09:08:34","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T16:08:34","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-cultures-korea-tour-telling-the-grayness-with-krys-lee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2704","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour: Telling the Grayness with Krys Lee"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"krysNotebook on Cities and Culture‘s Korea Tour is brought to you by Daniel Murphy, David Hayes, and <\/em>The Polar Intertia Journal<\/a>, an outlet for artists and researchers documenting the urban condition.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Seoul’s Seodaemun-gu, Colin talks with Krys Lee, author of the story collection\u00a0Drifting House<\/em>. They discuss the impression of Korean life as a living hell; the way she prefers to mix the light and the dark; the “obsession with violence” that led her to write about a woman who longs to be beaten; “Koreanness” as\u00a0Drifting House<\/em>‘s accidental unifier; what brought her to identify with “the outsider”; her suspicions of “socialization in general”; why she thinks about what it would be like if one person simply told another, “I wish I were a raccoon”; whether one can keep a foot in reality and a foot “somewhere else” through solitude; the surprising presence in Korea of “ideas, strangeness,” “girls who wear dog collars,” and at least one person with a pet squirrel; her problem with genre boundaries; what makes her focus on “individuals both of and not of their culture”; her own pathway from Korea, then around the world and back to Korea again;\u00a0the importance, in her time in the United Kingdom, of meeting not just\u00a0other Koreans but artists; how she came to write about Korea’s IMF period, one instance of her writing “driven by anger”; education as, at least theoretically, Korea’s “grand equalizer”; why some Korean families who go to America pretend they aren’t in America, and what Korean disasters observed from afar might make them feel; how she thinks about “getting it right” with North Korean characters; what surprises Koreans who leave and come back; the condition of the stranger in Korean culture; why some readers thought\u00a0Drifting House<\/em> must have had a “really good translator”; and whether a writer can use the western fascination with North Korea to pull them deeper into a real story, one that tells the “grayness.”<\/p>\n

Download the interview\u00a0here as an MP3<\/a>\u00a0or on\u00a0iTunes<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Notebook on Cities and Culture‘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’s Seodaemun-gu, Colin talks with Krys Lee, author of the story collection\u00a0Drifting House. They discuss the impression of Korean life as a living […]<\/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-2704","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\/2704","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=2704"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2875,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2704\/revisions\/2875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}