이상하게 들릴지도 모르지만 모국어가 아닌 한국어로 쓰여진 제 첫 번 째 책 <한국 요약 금지>가 출시되어 있어요. 외국인의 눈으로 보는 한국 영화, 문학, 건축, 생활, 신념, 언에 에 대한 에세이가 수록되어 있어요. 전국 서점에서 온라인을 포함한 대부분의 오프라인 채널을 통해 구매가 가능해요.
J.M. Coetzee published a new novel in August — but only in Spanish translation. My latest for the
@NewYorker
on the greatest living English-language's novelist's campaign against the English language itself:
"All people are equally good at time management, but some people are more willing than others to admit that they are doing what they want to do, while others maintain the illusion they wish they were doing something else." -
@TylerCowen
Like everyone else in my generation, I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes. As a kid I naturally respected Calvin, especially for his expansive vocabulary and casual attitude toward schoolwork. I still admire those qualities, but now I find myself respecting Calvin's dad even more.
There was a time in America when you could turn on the TV in the evening and see
@TheDickCavett
interviewing Akira Kurosawa for half an hour — and hear all the master's responses in full, in Japanese. My
@OpenCulture
post on this 1981 broadcast:
The year was 1993. Billy Idol, of all people, became so enamored with the idea of cyberpunk that he based an album on it, even hiring
@Frauenfelder
to write its floppy-disk multimedia liner notes. I revisit this ambitious zeitgeist project at
@OpenCulture
:
"We were not going to play only for the greater Soviet glory now that we knew there were millions of dollars to be had. We had learned more from Fischer than just chess."
@Kasparov63
"Be regular and orderly in your life,” wrote Flaubert, “so that you may be violent and original in your work." David Lynch must agree, as evidenced by his habits — meditation, smoking, going to Bob's Big Boy — about which I've written for
@OpenCulture
:
6. Literally everything I would ever need in life, up to and including higher education and hospitals, lies within a ten minute walk of home. (This is in no way an exaggeration)
4. You save your table at a coffee shop by putting your most expensive personal item down on it. You don’t ask a nearby random to guard your stuff if you have to go to the bathroom
In Korea, when people get up to use the bathroom, they leave their most expensive possession (phone, purse, laptop, DSLR camera) on the table to hold their place
In Korea, pasta — even Olive Garden-grade — is considered a "date" food. (If you take a date to eat something other than pasta, or eat pasta with a non-date, they may get the wrong idea)
7. The crowd on the bus is the same as the crowd at the Starbucks — or anywhere else, for that matter. There’s no feeling of stepping “down a class” (or three)
The almighty Algorithm sent me this recently unearthed 1975 interview with Hunter Thompson, in which he speaks with remarkable cogency on his writing process and the constant "tension" it demands. Naturally, I wasted no time writing it up for
@OpenCulture
:
When required to walk in a certain direction as part of a large group, Americans will sometimes make sarcastic mooing sounds. Nobody in other countries believes me when I tell them about it.
I recently happened across a reference to Andy Warhol's having interviewed Alfred Hitchcock. Intrigued, I proceeded to search for more information on this unlikely meeting of icons — and found that I'd written an
@OpenCulture
post about it myself:
Today marks ten full years that I've been writing for
@OpenCulture
, which comes to more than 2,600 posts so far. Over the next few months, I'll add 100 of my favorites to this thread:
18. The area around Seoul Station, widely considered one of the worst parts of town because of its number of homeless presence, has fewer homeless than I encounter on a walk through any American city
In Korea, Elon Musk is very highly regarded by the general public, though for reasons not quite clear to me (and in any case, he still lacks the godlike status accorded to Steve Jobs)
3. Almost every subway station has coin lockers (just a name, since I pay with the aforementioned debt card), so you seldom have to worry about dragging bags, etc. around all day
Everything I've written about Jorge Luis Borges for
@OpenCulture
(so far): on his life, his ficciones, his film reviews, his conversation with William F. Buckley, and more
5. A Starbucks can move into a neighborhood — or more than one Starbucks — without “driving out” the smaller chains and indies, which just seem to multiply as a result
23. I'd be remiss if I didn't add something about how you can get absolutely everything delivered, which a lot of people enjoy to the point of addiction, but I haven't had reason to try it for myself yet
6. Literally everything I would ever need in life, up to and including higher education and hospitals, lies within a ten minute walk of home. (This is in no way an exaggeration)
In Korea, people put their own phone number in their car window so you can call them and tell them to move it when they're blocking you in (whereas Americans would just call the tow truck)
When required to walk in a certain direction as part of a large group, Americans will sometimes make sarcastic mooing sounds. Nobody in other countries believes me when I tell them about it.
"It is obvious that the new Citroen has fallen from the sky inasmuch as it appears at first sight as a superlative object." — Roland Barthes on the DS, 1957
@OpenCulture
All the posts on self-improvement I've written for
@OpenCulture
, featuring advice on how to improve your habits in writing, learning, thinking, and more, from Martin Amis, Brian Eno, Richard Feynman, Bill Murray, Pico Iyer, David Lynch, Seneca and others:
I'm making all the interviews from my world-traveling podcast Notebook on Cities and Culture available to stream on Youtube, and they'll appear below as I do so:
The Korean alphabet has impressed many Westerners. It impressed the Star Trek writer Joe Menosky so much that he wrote an entire novel about its creation by King Sejong the Great, subject of my latest piece at the
@LAReviewofBooks
Korea Blog:
“Everything was moving fast, and I just wasn’t thinking," Laurie Anderson says about the technological and pop-cultural onrush of the 1980s. "That’s my excuse, anyway.”
My
@OpenCulture
post on her hypnotic Norton Lectures, now viewable online:
My ten favorite
@OpenCulture
posts of 2019: brutalist architecture, the great American road trip, Barthes on the Citroën DS, Houellebecq reading Tocqueville, and more
There was a time when people got angry at avant-garde art — angry enough to write and illustrate an entire children's alphabet book attacking it. My
@OpenCulture
post on The Cubies' ABC, a charming and long-obscure entry in the annals of philistinism:
Everything I've written about David Lynch for
@OpenCulture
: on his films, on "Twin Peaks," on what constitutes the "Lynchian," on his comic strip, on his Japanese movie posters and coffee commercials, on his love of Bob's Big Boy milkshakes, and much more
Nearly all Koreans have read "The Shower," a story of tragic young love between a country boy and city girl. Its haunting 1978 film adaptation is free online thanks to the Korean
@Film_Archive
— and the subject of my new
@LAReviewofBooks
Korea Blog essay:
You'll find no more stimulating holiday binge-watch than First Person, the TV series in which
@ErrolMorris
intensely interviews a parade of geniuses, eccentrics, obsessives, heroes, and frauds. It's all on Youtube, and I've written it up for
@OpenCulture
:
"Much of Western society—but American society in particular—is permeated with influential people who have deluded themselves into thinking that their ability to manipulate words, images and sounds gives them the ability to control reality itself."
@aelkus
I haven’t set foot in Los Angeles for six years, but the next time I go, I’ll be keenly aware of the precise extent to which the city has become more like Tokyo — the subject of this 2020 piece I wrote for
@Archinect
:
Asked why I moved from the United States to South Korea, I often say that it was because I wanted to live in the First World. Though it began as a half joke, the coronavirus' Stateside rampage has granted it a new and discomfiting plausibility.
@NewYorker
I read no print publication as enthusiastically as I read the
@LRB
. When they put out a video demonstrating how they used to put together their layouts with scissors, an X-ACTO, and Cow Gum, I naturally clicked without hesitation:
@Openculture
The more than 100 posts I've written for
@OpenCulture
on anime, Haruki Murakami, Tokyo, ukiyo-e, Akira Kurosawa, sushi, vintage ads, Yasujirō Ozu, Yan-san, craftsmanship, city pop, David Lynch posters, chindōgu, Marie Kondo, and many other things Japanese:
There exists a film in which the Alfred Hitchcock of 1962 meets the Alfred Hitchcock of 1980 at the zenith of the fear- and TV-saturated Cold War, with a Borges-inspired script by Tom McCarthy — and as I write at
@OpenCulture
, you can watch it free online: