![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/KB-LRB-tote-bags-Twitter.png\")
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Though I\u2019ve lived in Korea only a few years, I sometimes fear I\u2019ve already lost sight of the culture around me. When visiting foreign friends bring up sights that strike them as notable or even shocking, I increasingly have to admit that they no longer even register in my consciousness. Though I headed off the brunt of initial culture shock by studying the Korean language and living in Los Angeles\u2019s Koreatown for years before ever visiting Korea, certain things still jumped out at me on my first trip here. The fearsome power of trends, for instance: as soon as a certain article of clothing gains popularity, you\u2019ll see it on the streets of Seoul many times a day, every day. Every society has its fads, but the degree of speed, breadth, and regularity of adoption here boggles the Western mind. As a Korean-American friend once wondered aloud, \u201cHow do they get the memo?\u201d<\/p>\n
At this point, though, life in Seoul has dulled my sensitivity to these trends \u2014 in not just clothing but music, design, personal electronics, and much else besides \u2014 that wax and wane on a monthly and even weekly basis. This despite considerable effort, deliberate and otherwise, to retain my outsider\u2019s perspective by keeping a foot in current Western culture. I do it primarily by reading magazines: not just those I write for like\u00a0LARB<\/em>, but others like the\u00a0New Yorker<\/em>, the\u00a0New York Review<\/em>\u00a0of Books<\/em>, and the\u00a0London Review of Books<\/em>\u00a0as well. To that last I actually only started subscribing while living in Korea. I\u2019d expected to purchase a digital-only subscription, as I\u2019d done with the others, but from what I could tell the\u00a0LRB\u00a0<\/em>offered no such thing, insisting on accompanying my online access with print issues mailed fortnightly all the way to my home in Seoul.<\/p>\n
Maybe the regular arrival of each paper\u00a0LRB<\/em>, two weeks after its content comes available on the site, primed me to notice its tote bags. Not that I made too much, earlier this year, of the first 20-something Korean girl I spotted on a train platform with one on her shoulder. For all I knew she\u2019d brought it back to Seoul as a souvenir of an afternoon snack at the\u00a0London Review Cake Shop<\/a>\u00a0while on vacation in the English capital \u2014 or even a year of study abroad there. And it wasn\u2019t impossible that she actually subscribed, probably out of the same kind of aspirational English-reading impulse that gets parents enrolling their young children in after-school academies that force them to read the likes of\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/em>magazine. (I myself occasionally pick up esoteric Korean literary journals on the same principle.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n