I’ve previously appeared on a Seoul urbanism radio feature on TBS eFM’s Koreascape as well as hosted and produced the world-traveling podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture [RSS] [iTunes], which evolved from the public radio program The Marketplace of Ideas.
My video essay series The City in Cinema examines cities (especially Los Angeles) as they appear on film.
My public speaking, which I’ve done in places like the Royal Asiatic Society Korea Branch, Portland’s Hollywood Theatre, the San Francisco Urban Film Festival, Seoul National University, Yonsei University, Chapman University, California State University Long Beach, and the Seoul Book and Culture Club, usually covers this same suite of cities-and-culture-related topics.
You can also keep up with me on Twitter and Facebook as well.
콜린 마샬은 도시와 문화를 포함해서 여러 주제들에 대하여 에세이를 쓰는 수필가이다. 그 에세이들은 <뉴요커>와 <가디언> 그리고 <로스 앤젤레스 리뷰 오브 북스> 같은 주로 영미권 매체에 실리고 또한 그는 한국 문학 잡지 <Axt>에 기고한 적이 있고 <동아일보>에 칼럼을 기고하고 있다. 모국인 미국에서 30년 넘게 살며 10년 동안 라디오 방송과 팟캐스트에서 인터뷰을 진행했다. 그 후에 로스앤젤레스의 한인타운을 거쳐 세계에서 제일 큰 한인타운인 서울로 이사왔다. 서울에 사는 동안 <콜린의 한국> 팟캐스트를 운영하며 작가와 교수을 비롯하여 건축가와 방송인 같은 다양한 사람들을 여전히 인터뷰한다. 첫 번째 책 <한국 요약 금지>는 2024년에 출판되었다.
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, one genre of occasionally viral post involves images or videos of American phenomena that “the European mind cannot comprehend.” Recent examples turned up in a search include a morbidly obese old-west cosplayer winning some kind of contest at a shooting range; a man using a flamethrower to clear snow off his driveway; an alligator attempting to climb into a boat only to be slapped off by its pilot, and photographs of the interior of a Buc-ee’s, a chain of enormous just-off-the-freeway convenience stores now spreading outward from Texas. Despite being American myself, I’ve never seen any of those sights in person, though I do hope my next visit to the U.S. includes a stop at a Buc-ee’s. My interest was piqued in part by an enthusiastic post about it on Lost in the USA, a blog by a French couple who’ve traveled my native land much more extensively than I ever will.
Though Americans are notorious for their unwillingness to learn to learn foreign languages, even the most travel-resistant could benefit from doing so in order to attain a fuller view of their homeland. That view would encompass not just criticisms made from afar, but also praise for the qualities of life in the U.S. that they take for granted, or at least find difficult to perceive due to their sheer normality. Some Texans may seize any excuse to pull into a Buc-ee’s, but how often do they stop to consider what its existence says about the nature of American civilization? That line of thinking, I admit, probably occurs much more readily to the European mind in general, and the French mind in particular. It certainly does to that of the philosopher Bruce Bégout, a specialist in phenomenology who’s also written books on airports, the American motel, the hyperrealist sculptor of the lumpenproletariat Duane Hanson, and Las Vegas. When I came across his most recent book on a specifically American subject Los Angeles, capitale du XXe siècle at the Centre Pompidou bookstore, its appeal to my sense of incongruity proved too strong to resist.
지난 10년 동안 한국의 서점과 지인의 집에서 자주 봤던 마이클 샌델의 스테디셀러 ‘정의란 무엇인가’를 최근 읽게 됐다. 이 책을 집어 든 이유는 한국과 내 모국인 미국에서 벌어진 여러 사건들이 ‘정의’의 개념에 대해 생각하게 했기 때문이다. 그중 하나는 윤석열 전 대통령이 내란 재판에서 종신형을 선고받은 사건이었다. 형벌이 과한지, 아니면 정당한지 쉽게 판단하기 어려운 판결이었다. 또 다른 사건은 한 지상파 방송에서 최근 방영된 ‘여수 4개월 영아 사망 사건’의 정황이었다. 해당 영아는 욕조에서 익사한 채 발견됐다.
잘 알려져 있듯 ‘해든’(가명)이라 불리는 그 아기는 사망 전 어머니로부터 심한 학대를 당했고, 그 장면은 홈캠에 고스란히 담겼다. 이 소식은 온 나라에 충격을 안겼다. 아이를 키우는 사람들에게는 말로 표현하기 어려울 만큼 끔찍한 사건이었다. 해든이와 같은 나이의 쌍둥이를 둔 아버지인 나로서는 그러한 학대를 저지른 부모가 사형을 받더라도 너무 관대한 처벌처럼 느껴진다. 그러나 한 걸음 물러서 객관적으로 바라보고 어떤 결과가 가장 옳은지에 대해 생각해 볼 필요도 있다. 이런 상황에서 과연 정의란 무엇일까.
We now find ourselves living through one of those periods when everything seems to be going wrong. Economic troubles, the COVID-19 pandemic, two separate elections of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, large-scale destruction grinding on in places like Ukraine and Palestine, the proliferation of ever more trivial and addictive forms of social media, the pollution of the intellectual commons with meaningless content generated by artificial intelligence—to certain minds, this unfortunate streak began exactly 10 years ago, with the death of David Bowie. “The progressive intellectual life of moral critiques and ethical idealism that Bowie savoured, a romantic view of the world, turned to ash,” writes Paul Morley, a music journalist who contributed to New Musical Express in the late 1970s and early ’80s, in Far Above the World: The Time and Space of David Bowie (2025). “The kind of thoughtful, articulate and radical celebrity like Bowie started to seem as out of place as a silent movie star, as though ideas and complicated thinking were now as quaint as Chaplin and Keaton.”
Far Above the World is Morley’s second book about Bowie. The first, The Age of Bowie: How David Bowie Made a World of Difference, came out in July 2016, just six months after its subject shuffled off this mortal coil—or, as some fans would no doubt prefer to put it, returned to orbit. Written, in a kind of challenge to himself, in just 10 weeks’ time, the earlier book benefited from a degree of first-mover advantage, vulnerable though it was to charges of excessive speculation and self-indulgence. The intervening decade has given Morley ample time to write a more levelheaded meditation on his idol, indulge though his new book does in hyperbole of its own. “When David Bowie died, the universe itself groaned,” he writes in his introduction. “It too needed time to mourn. It slumped, lost in thought.”
도널드 트럼프 미국 행정부는 1월 초 니콜라스 마두로 베네수엘라 대통령의 안전가옥을 급습해 그와 부인을 체포한 뒤 미국 뉴욕으로 강제 압송했다. 트럼프 대통령은 이어 “당분간 미국이 베네수엘라를 운영해야 한다”고 밝혔다. 마두로 정권 아래에서 빈곤과 불안에 시달려 온 베네수엘라 시민들은 이를 반가운 소식으로 받아들였을 가능성이 높다. 미국이 세운 지도자가 독재자 마두로보다 더 나쁠 가능성은 낮다고 여기는 탓이다. 그러나 갑작스럽게 이뤄진 정권교체가 던지는 메시지는 가볍지 않다. 미국이 국제질서를 넘어 다른 국가의 권력구조까지 뒤흔드는 힘을 지녔다는 사실을 확인했기 때문이다.
미국은 제2차 세계대전 이후 줄곧 그런 위치를 차지해 왔다. 미군의 보호를 받아 온 적지 않은 나라들로서는 이를 문제 삼을 이유가 크지 않았다. 그러나 예측하기 어려운 성향을 지닌 트럼프가 대통령으로 처음 선출된 이후, 이 같은 무사안일주의는 오히려 위험 요인이 되고 있다는 평가가 나온다. 호주 역사학자 에마 쇼티스도 그중 한 사람이다. 그는 지난해 출간한 ‘미국 후(After America)’를 통해 호주가 더 이상 미국에 의존할 수 없는 시대를 상정하고, 대비해야 할 시점에 이르렀다고 주장했다.
원래 수필가임에도 불구하고 《(신촌에서) 사라진 여인》이라는 단편 추리소설을 쓰게 되었다. 아니면 추리가 아닌 추리소설이라고 해야 할까? 아무튼 서울의 여러 동네를 배경으로 한 문집 《그날, 서울에서는 무슨 일이》에 수록되어 있다. 미국인 번역가인 주인공은 갑자기 사라져 버린 만나는 여자를 찾으려고 노력하면서 신촌에 살고 있는 다른 외국인들돠 마주하게 되고 이방인으로서 한국에 사는 것이라는 풀 수 없는 수수께끼와 직면하게 된다.
American cities are retarded. Perhaps that sentiment could stand to be further explained. I use American in the most casual sense, in reference not to the continents but to the United States of America in particular; I use retarded in the most literal sense, in reference to a progress being hindered or halted. Keeping those definitions in mind, we have what amounts to the premise of Benjamin Schneider’s new book The Unfinished Metropolis, albeit expressed in a way the author gives the impression of being unwilling to do even in his own head. The proportion of Americans with passports has lately crept up to 50 percent, but even among the half who’ve never gone abroad, many will by now have at least an inkling that their major cities haven’t kept developmental pace with those of Europe and Asia. Comparative deficiencies in public transit and “walkability” have often been lamented, but the lack of less measurable qualities like appealing public spaces and an ambience of life on the street could similarly be ignored only by a die-hard urbanophobe.
Schneider, a die-hard urbanophile who did two years of research visiting a couple dozen major cities both inside and outside the U.S., takes it as his journalistic mission to explain why that happened and what can be done about it. Each resulting chapter of this book takes on one aspect of the American city’s grand retardation. Zoning laws influenced by “the cult of the single-family home” grew increasingly rigid in the twentieth century, making it impossible to build enough housing either to endure a modicum of affordability, let alone to offer the poorest an alternative to life on the street. The auto industry’s lobbying turned once-lively streets into the exclusive property of motorists encouraged to drive them at higher and higher speeds, which not only distorted them out of human scale but also made them inconvenient, even dangerous, to so much as cross. The money that paid for robust prewar streetcar and passenger rail networks dried up, never to be replenished, and the vast postwar freeway system (along with the oversupply of parking dictated by the assumption of universal automobile use) did grievous, possibly irreparable harm to the cities through which it ran. As suburbs prospered while downtowns bled out, the ostensible cure of “urban renewal,” with its misconceived high-rise housing projects and its isolated civic and cultural centers, usually proved as bad as the disease.
For nearly fourteen years now, I’ve written a post every weekday at Open Culture, usually to do with literature, film, music, art, architecture, television, radio, or language. Here are ten of my favorites from the more than 250 I wrote in 2025:
나는 지난해 2월 출간한 에세이집 ‘한국 요약 금지’를 홍보하기 위해 북토크를 진행하면서 대개 질의응답으로 시간을 마무리했다. 그때 아이를 위한 교육 계획을 세웠는지에 관한 질문을 몇 차례 받았다. 당시 나는 아이가 없었기 때문에 좋은 답변을 준비하지 못했다. 다만 만약 아이가 생긴다면 학원이나 국제학교는 피하고 현지 학교에 보낼 생각이라고 말했다. 그 대답에 참석자들은 매번 놀라는 표정을 지었다.
교육 계획에 대한 질문을 처음 받았을 때, 내가 한국에 산 지 얼마 되지 않았을 무렵 만난 한 60대 외국인이 떠올랐다. 그는 나처럼 미국인이었지만 나보다 약 30년 먼저 한국에 이주해 이 나라에서 세 자녀를 모두 키웠다. 그 자녀들을 교육 기간 내내 국제학교에 보내기 위해 지금은 기억하기도 어려울 만큼 큰돈을 썼다고 했다. 내가 이유를 묻자 그는 아이들이 반드시 미국인이 되기를 바랐기 때문이라고 대답했다. 당황한 나는 아이들이 미국인이 되기를 원했다면 왜 하필 한국에서 키웠을까 하는 생각이 들었다.
지난여름 아내가 쌍둥이를 낳은 뒤 중요하게 생각하게 된 것이 있다. 우리 아이들이 미국인이 되는 것이 아니라 한국인이 되는 일이다. 그렇기 때문에 외국인으로서 한국에서 아버지가 된 경험은 자연스레 ‘한국인이란 정확히 무엇인가’라는 질문을 스스로 던지게 했다.
“Are you deeply interested in how an Argentinean observer might phenomenologically regard a southern Brazilian city, combined with his philosophy of walking, in fictional form?” once asked economist Tyler Cowen in a post on his long-running blog Marginal Revolution. He went on to give his own answer: “I am.” The context was one of his occasional “What I’ve been reading” roundups, and the book in question was Mis dos mundos by Sergio Chejfec — or rather My Two Worlds, as it had just then, in 2011, been published in an English translation by Margaret Carson. Though I’d already been reading Marginal Revolution for years at that point, I can’t recall whether that description piqued my interest when Cowen first posted it, when I had scant experience with cities or travel in any case. But when I found my way back to it last year, my desire to read such a book, ideally in the Spanish original, could hardly have been stronger. Looking up Chejfec and his body of work, I wondered — as I do ever more frequently about Latin American writers — where he’d been all my life.
By that point, Chejfec had been gone for nearly two years, having died of cancer in 2022 at age 65. He began publishing in Spanish since 1990, the year he left his native Buenos Aires for a fifteen-year stint in Caracas, but My Two Worlds was his first English translation; the same press, Open Letter, has since put out The Planets, The Dark, and The Incompletes. These are all, in one sense or another, novels, or at least novellas, though Chejfec was known for eschewing many of the elements novel-readers tend to expect: plot, dialogue, named narrators. The unnamed narrator of Mis dos mundos, a writer, finds himself in the aforementioned southern Brazilian city to appear at its literary festival. In the text, he recounts not the events of the festival, but a walk he takes the following day to an urban park not far from his hotel, having been captivated by the green expanse representing it on his map. The sights and sounds he encounters during preparations for this outing the night before and on the day of the outing itself send his narration down various byways of memory and contemplation — many more, it feels at the end of 128 pages, than could normally be explored within the confines of such a short book.
Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay “Notes on American Fascism” probably couldn’t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevitable editorial demands that its argument be “sharpened” (premised upon the assumption that an argument, rather than notes, is what it offers), or at least that the words of a geopolitical expert or two be shoehorned in to gin up a bit of academic-journalistic gravitas. Not that the essay seems to have been publishable even when Brodkey first wrote it, given that it only appeared several years later in his collection Sea Battles on Dry Land, published a few years after his death from AIDS in 1996. Nevertheless, when revisited more than three decades on, its torrent of portentous observation and speculation about the decline of the kind of liberalism Brodkey calls “the primary American tradition” now seems considerably less disposable than the many anxious prophesies of a fascist United States published more recently, during the reign of Donald Trump.
By the early Nineties, as Brodkey sees it, the gods of “ethnic diversity” (summoned by “the failure of the melting pot to work”) and “the new federalism” (no longer denoting a dynamic between the federal and state governments but between the U.S. and the entire world) have both failed, neither having produced “a new sense of community” or “a workable sense of America.” Real estate is “now so expensive that it is very difficult for people in the lower tier to buy a house, or very much of a house, even if they have inherited money.” The government “does not support American manufacturing or American exports except in very sophisticated ways closed to outsiders.” The uninspiring Democratic program comes down to “a demand for order, for more government, more centralized government”; the Republicans have their perpetual interest in “looting,” but no “overt program beyond the slogans of American greatness and American supremacy.”
