{"id":2720,"date":"2015-02-05T07:26:01","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T15:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2720"},"modified":"2015-04-06T09:07:10","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T16:07:10","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-cultures-korea-tour-outsider-status-with-b-r-myers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2720","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour: Outsider Status with B.R. Myers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"brNotebook 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

At Busan’s Dongseo University, Colin talks with North Korea analyst Brian Reynolds Myers, author of such books as\u00a0A Reader’s Manifesto<\/em> and\u00a0The Cleanest Race<\/em>:\u00a0How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters<\/em>. They discuss why South Koreans don’t care about the Sword of Damocles that is North Korea; how Korea’s capital-centricity looks from relatively far-flung Busan; why Koreans from outside Seoul seem to lack “local patriotism”; why Busan feels, to him, more like an “aggregation of apartment buildings than a community,” but nevertheless like home; the benefits he enjoys of his outsider status in Korean society; the intellectual questions he can ask about Korea that a Korean couldn’t; what makes the Koreans as an “ahistoric people,” like the Greeks and unlike the Egyptians (and more Confucian societies); why he thinks Koreans should learn Indonesian, and why they refuse to; the difference between what Koreans tell themselves and what they tell the world; why so many fewer expatriates in Korea learn the language than in Japan or China, and what makes it\u00a0so hard; how he got his Soviet Studies degree just before the Berlin Wall came down; what the reunification of Germany has to teach us about the reunification of Korea; how he became well-known among arch-conservatives for a piece on Korea’s lack of “state spirit”; why he got his higher degrees in Germany, where they didn’t make him go to classes; his arrival in Korea in the time of 9\/11, and what took the most mental readjustment from then on; his trial by fire of lecturing at length about North Korea, in Korean; what South Koreans seem to think America is, and why it still attracts them; what it means to “behave like an American” in Korea; the “expiration period” on a foreigner’s respectability; what he has come to value about Korean “flexibility”; the free-floating aggression he dislikes about America but doesn’t sense in Korea; how he sees the literary pretension situation as having changed in the years since\u00a0A Reader’s Manifesto\u00a0<\/em>(and since e-books have taken off); why he hasn’t fully engaged with Korean\u00a0literature and cinema; and one of the highlights of his time in Busan, meeting Isabelle Huppert on the street; and whether he sees more differences or similarities emerging between North and South Korea in recent years.<\/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. At Busan’s Dongseo University, Colin talks with North Korea analyst Brian Reynolds Myers, author of such books as\u00a0A Reader’s Manifesto and\u00a0The Cleanest Race:\u00a0How North […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,5,33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2720","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-busan","category-korea","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720","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=2720"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2873,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2720\/revisions\/2873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}