{"id":2813,"date":"2015-03-13T07:52:52","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T14:52:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2813"},"modified":"2015-04-06T09:00:47","modified_gmt":"2015-04-06T16:00:47","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-cultures-korea-tour-the-style-of-the-time-with-matt-vanvolkenburg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=2813","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture’s Korea Tour: The Style of the Time with Matt VanVolkenburg"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"mattNotebook 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 Sinchon district, Colin talks with Matt VanVolkenburg, author of Gusts of Popular Feeling<\/a>, a blog on “Korean society, history, urban space, cyberspace, film, and current events, among other things.”\u00a0They discuss what it feels like to live in Seoul, of all places, without a smartphone; why navigating the city poses so much of a challenge to the newcomer; how he sees the relationship of the Korean media to foreign English teachers, “the new incarnation of the GIs”; what made it possible for the Korean media to talk freely about the acts of foreigners; the history of “Korea as a victim”; why non-English-teaching foreigners surprise Koreans; what makes some Koreans and foreigners alike see entry-level foreign English teachers as third-class citizens; the country’s distinctive combination of overregulation and under-enforcement, and what it says about the difference between the legal cultures of\u00a0Korea and North America; what he does on trips instead of hitting the beach; Isabella Bird Bishop, the 19th-century traveler and write from whom Gusts of Popular Feeling takes its name; why the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store didn’t prevent the sinking of the Sewol; the writing of Percival Lowell and others who had more to comment on than dirtiness and superstition did about Korea in the late 19th century; the Chonggyecheon’s very short history as a “clean stream”; James Wade, one of the more prolific English-language observers of postwar Korea; what he finds reading old Korean newspapers; his incredulousness at a foreigner’s complaint that “you can’t get cheese here”; the 1988\u00a0Hustler\u00a0<\/em>article<\/a> on the easiness of Korean women; the importance of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to Korean relations with foreigners in the country; the fallout of\u00a0“Dog Poop Girl”; the thorough change he’s seen in the built environment of Seoul in his 13 years there, and what he notices about the less-developed cityscape revealed in old movies; Korea’s relative lack of the geek and the nerd; and what word he really doesn’t want to use when describing why he likes living in Korea.<\/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 Sinchon district, Colin talks with Matt VanVolkenburg, author of Gusts of Popular Feeling, a blog on “Korean society, history, urban space, cyberspace, […]<\/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-2813","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\/2813","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=2813"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2863,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2813\/revisions\/2863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}