Colin Marshall

A university education assembled around making things

Radio helped determine where Marshall went to college. He had listened to old programs on cassette and regarded UCSB’s student station, KCSB, as a reason to attend. Training on KJUC led to a four-in-the-morning KCSB slot in spring 2004. Colin’s Bachelor Pad developed through jazz, soul, and electronic music; later work included interviewing and Soundforum’s ambient and environmental sounds. The university supplied an institution in which listening could become something he made for others.³

He assembled the education unevenly. Looking back in 2011, he recalled radio internships, considering and rejecting film school, and extending his stay at UCSB until administrators objected to his accumulated units. Work and experimentation organized much of the education. The course of study was one part of it, alongside studios, publications, and attempts to find a form for his interests.⁴

The reviews were already attentive to production. In a May 2004 Daily Nexus piece on the Magnetic Fields’ i, he disliked the mixture of lo-fi sound and melancholy while examining what instrumentation, clean production, and clever rhyme could accomplish. Enthusiasm was not enough to settle a judgment. He wanted to understand how the effect was made, and the young critic’s snark was also part of how he presented that judgment.⁵

A 2006 textbook-prices column addressed a different irritation through demand, market size, and incentives. Its comic campus argument moved from what students disliked toward the arrangements sustaining it. A method of inquiry was already available: something ordinarily complained about could become more intelligible when its conditions were examined.⁶

By November 2007, the Santa Barbara Independent was introducing him as a contributor who had moved from Nexus album, film, and book reviews into its own monthly new-book roundup, Hot Off the Press, plus features and reviews. It also directed readers to his work on commercial Magic 106.3 and KCSB, and named Tom Stoppard and George Orwell among his heroes. Local editors were giving the writer recurring obligations before national bylines became the conspicuous part of his career.⁷

His father collected records, connecting music to a domestic world as well as to a broadcast one. Working evenings at KMGQ, Magic 106.3, Marshall encountered a playlist programmed in advance, with little power for the announcer to alter it. KCSB offered a different relation to the music and the audience: participants could develop their own programming rather than mainly give voice to an existing selection.^{8, 9}

That freedom depended on material arrangements. KCSB received student funding and income from sharing its tower with a cellular-service provider. Local FM was joined by streaming and on-demand programs. Marshall’s weekly KCSBeat column connected the station to the Independent. Studio, distribution, public, and editorial trust existed together. He could learn by using them and contribute to the same community through several kinds of work.¹⁰

Using the institution did not mean he already understood its history. Launching The KCSBeat in October 2009, he worked through clippings, photographs, and recordings to reconstruct the station’s early equipment and organizational changes. Familiarity prompted an inquiry rather than replacing it. This combination of participation and historical reading would later help him approach a neighborhood or city whose everyday surfaces could be known more readily than the forces that produced them.¹¹

Learning what an interview can contain

The Marketplace of Ideas began broadcasting and podcasting in 2007. Marshall admired Charlie Rose’s format and Jesse Thorn’s move from locally rooted radio to a worldwide podcast audience. Contact with Thorn included recording-gear advice and later an opportunity to write Podthoughts. A model was useful partly because it showed how a practice could travel beyond its originating station.¹²

Criticism of other people’s programs also taught him what he wanted to make. His 2009 Bookworm review attended to Michael Silverblatt’s thought unfolding in speech. A question could be an extended, surprising response to a book, with enthusiasm making its density welcoming rather than competitive. Marshall objected especially to the half-hour limit. Preparation and an opening mattered, but so did the time in which a reply could develop.¹³

He also considered the listener’s time. Reviewing the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects in 2010, he distinguished audio that could accompany distraction from work whose informational and sonic density required sustained attention. Interruptions made him restart episodes. A recording’s availability was not identical to its being heard well; a bus, train, or room supplied conditions for the experience that a producer could not entirely control.¹⁴

His own ideal was to follow what he wanted to learn from a guest. Publication required similarly concrete initiative. He answered 3 Quarks Daily’s unpaid-columnist call in 2008 and cold-pitched a Kobo Abe primer to The Millions editor C. Max Magee. He wanted a market for his writing while resisting unrelated advertising and appeals that made audiences feel guilty about support. Access could begin with an application or a proposal, rather than an introduction by someone already inside.¹⁵

By 2013, his Podthoughts criticism was impatient with programs repeating familiar company and subjects. In reviewing Edward Champion’s Follow Your Ears, he considered the difficulty of an ambitious production made largely alone and the value of questions not arranged to deliver a tidy answer or obvious culprit. Exploratory interviewing gave him a way into another person’s experience. It was a particular editorial preference, with different aims from an adversarial report.¹⁶

Los Angeles provided occasions as well as subjects

Leaving Santa Barbara initially meant losing a station. Replacing The Marketplace of Ideas with Notebook on Cities and Culture gave the work another arrangement: face-to-face meetings outside a studio, travel, greater focus, and Kickstarter financing. Marshall’s 2013 writing about Man School placed this change beside an effort to construct an adult life through work, clothes, and male role models. Its judgments about his generation were gendered and personal. They belong to the younger writer’s self-fashioning, rather than a neutral diagnosis of everyone around him.¹⁷

Cinema was a reason to choose Los Angeles. Cinefamily programming had helped persuade him to move, and the city offered repertory screenings, filmmakers’ appearances, and discussions after films. In his review of Jeff Goldsmith’s The Q&A, he compared events witnessed in person with their recorded versions. Questions about a budget or convention could open into larger accounts of making. Theaters supplied a place to study people talking about their work, alongside a film culture to write about.¹⁸

Reading helped make an apparently ungraspable city legible. He arrived wanting to understand Los Angeles through books, and interviewed D. J. Waldie at Lakewood City Hall in 2012. Waldie’s attention to ordinary suburbia offered a way to look without first demanding picturesque surroundings. A city did not have to conform to familiar standards of attractiveness to be worth understanding.¹⁹

Jonathan Gold showed another route. Marshall had chosen Koreatown after developing interests in Korean language and food; Gold’s writing enlarged his knowledge of the neighborhood. Food could expose Los Angeles’s social and cultural connections, including relations with Korea. Marshall acknowledged Gold’s command of that field as something his own language learning did not reproduce. The reader-to-critic relation supplied a model of particular expertise opening onto a larger place.²⁰

Notebook joined those worlds in a production process. A 2013 announcement named face-to-face interviews in Los Angeles, Vancouver, Mexico City, and Japan, with guests including Pico Iyer, Silverblatt, Karina Longworth, Tom Lutz, Clive Piercy, and Donald Shoup. Literature, design, film, and urban questions could meet in the same interview project, with travel bringing different people and working worlds within reach. The recording then traveled elsewhere. A city was both a subject and a setting in which the encounter could occur.²¹

Film criticism also became a method for assembling a city’s different appearances. The City in Cinema began with Los Angeles in 2014. The Portland video introduced in 2015 drew on twenty films, ranging through publicity images, exploitation and independent cinema, and directors including Gus Van Sant. An aesthetically weak film could still leave a useful record of a place. Selection and juxtaposition made the differences between productions informative, rather than treating one admired film as the city’s definitive image.²²

A journey had to be financed and promised

The fourth-season Notebook campaign ran June 17–24, 2013, asking $8,000 for sixty conversations in Los Angeles, London, Copenhagen, and Toronto. Eighty-seven backers pledged $8,037. The small margin above the goal made the arrangement concrete: a defined project, supporters, and a deadline at which funding determined whether the proposed work could proceed.²³

In April 2014, he announced a Korea tour after four Kickstarter-supported seasons. Hong Sang-soo’s films provided an entry, but the proposed guests extended through literature, technology, academia, and food, inside and beyond Seoul. Postcards, mentions, and a printed text-and-photo diary were offered as rewards. His Open Culture readership could become an audience for a separately financed undertaking.²⁴

The April 7–14 campaign received $5,040 from fifty-five backers against a $5,000 goal and proposed thirty to forty substantial conversations. The amounts are gross project pledges, not personal earnings. Funding had a specific unit and use: movement and recording were sold through a promise about what a journey could produce for an audience.²⁵

The proposed Seattle season of April 2015 linked output even more closely to funding. A $6,000 goal would support fifty-two interviews; another episode would accompany each additional $200, with seventy-two planned at $10,000. Postcards and mentions remained rewards, and a Peter Bagge interview offered a preview. The place familiar from Marshall’s adolescence could be approached as a new inquiry. The proposal did not have to make nostalgia its organizing subject.^{26, 27}

These formats made independence an arrangement with other people. An audience did not simply admire a mobile interviewer: it could support a finite undertaking with outputs and deadlines. Later subscriptions would offer continuing essays and an archive, while columns and other freelance assignments supplied different working formats. The public record does not establish their proportions in his income or his household’s finances. It does establish a freelance practice sustained through more than one form of exchange.

Language learning became a reason to move

Korea was not discovered after the Seoul move. An earlier Japanese interest had developed through video games; Korean films encountered in a university library later drew Marshall toward another language. He began studying in idle periods at work. By January 2016 he counted about eight years of classes, audio and video, partners, and books, while conversation remained difficult. For several years, knowledge of grammar had not become reliable understanding of speech. The language itself supplied a reason to seek everyday use, beyond tastes that English-language material might have satisfied.²⁸

His first substantial visit gave that interest a working test. In July 2014, after six weeks including Seoul, Changwon, and Busan, he spoke to Steve Han about a five-part Guardian series and his ability to converse in Korean. He explained Koreatown’s earlier appeal through food, language, urban density, and daily walking, cycling, and transit. Korea could be encountered against an American neighborhood already chosen for related interests. His confident comments about social habits were those of a particular young visitor, not a completed understanding delivered by the trip.²⁹

In December 2015, his opening Korea Blog essay reported a relocation from Los Angeles about three weeks earlier, after years of planning. Seoul’s transit and ordinary amenities answered frustrations with daily Los Angeles life. He also saw space to write about Korea beyond the familiar expatriate roles of English teacher or soldier and the more established expatriate literature about Japan. Dissatisfaction with American nostalgia met an attraction to what he perceived as a forward-looking society. The choice joined living conditions, language, and a literary opportunity.³⁰

Those motives do not require one city or country to be uniformly better than another. They describe the writer’s circumstances and the possibilities he saw. Los Angeles did not vanish from the practice when he left. Koreatown, cinema, and the critics he had read remained comparative resources for approaching a new place, rather than discarded stages of a completed conversion.

Residence kept revealing what he did not know

Marshall proposed the Korea Blog before moving partly to keep himself attentive and prevent withdrawal into an English-speaking bubble. A recurring publication could turn noticing into an obligation after novelty had faded. Looking back in 2020, he still described discovering ignorance after more than a decade of language study. Hong Sang-soo’s successive films helped mark his own Seoul years, and Korean novels gave him access to other lives and settings. Publication and private learning continued to change one another.³¹

An ordinary café makes the process visible. Having read Murakami in English and Spanish, Marshall found more of the novelist available in Korean than in English translation. Familiar plots supported learning without making every sentence easy. At Peter Cat in Seoul, he wrote, heard jazz selected by the owner, and read Korean Murakami volumes from the shelves. He wanted to join the reading group but doubted that his vocabulary was ready. Some forms of participation were possible while another remained aspirational.³²

His insistence on using Korean also produced friction. In his “English fever” essay, he described frustration when service workers switched to English and questioned the status pressures surrounding English study. He worried about the expressive range of a language used principally for global convenience. An American was trying to resist an advantage often assigned to his native language, but his preference could not settle what Korean workers and students needed. The conflict made access particular: language affected whose speech he could understand, what he could read, and which interactions he wanted to have.³³

The literary work repeatedly went beyond the selection available in English. His 2020 Kim Hoon essay followed bodily sensation, historical violence, and resistance to abstraction, while also confronting the novelist’s troubling public statements about women. Calling Kim Korea’s greatest living novelist was Marshall’s judgment, not an external ranking. Admiration required explaining the prose and keeping the writer’s public positions in view, rather than making reputation substitute for criticism.³⁴

Bae Suah posed another problem. International prestige and comparisons could leave a reader no nearer the writing. Marshall examined linguistic texture, strangeness, translation, and difficulty, including complaints from Korean readers. Opacity did not begin only when a book entered English. Working between readerships let him compare expectations and responses without making either cultural origin or foreign approval the final authority.³⁵

Local books could also become encounters with local practitioners. A February 2022 Bricks Magazine interview with Lee Juho began from a book about Tokyo that Marshall had discovered and moved through Murakami, Japanese cultural traces in Korea, youth, travel writing, and essay construction. Questions followed the writer and editor’s account. A bookshop discovery became a publishing contact and an interview: language learning opened professional access through a particular work and another working person.³⁶

When movement was interrupted

Pandemic restrictions disturbed a practice partly organized around travel. In April 2020, Marshall wrote about the relative comfort he experienced under South Korea’s coronavirus response, comparing it with the American situation. Ordinary infrastructure, one of the reasons he had moved, now had consequences under exceptional pressure. The dispatch concerned a particular moment of experience rather than a verdict on either country’s entire pandemic history.³⁷

In 2019, he argued for city criticism combining situated observation with literary form, beyond architectural appraisal.³⁸ The earlier work helps make that proposal intelligible. Waldie showed ordinary surroundings becoming readable; Gold connected a food practice to a city’s wider life; the cinema project compared images produced for different purposes. Marshall’s subjects were not merely separate enthusiasms collected beneath an urban label. They provided different entrances into how people used and understood a place.^{39, 40, 41}

Books on Cities supplied a form less dependent on recording trips. Its founding account explicitly connects the subscription project to travel restrictions. Long essays approach places through old and new books; paid readers receive the archive, and founding members can propose books for review. Jane Jacobs, Reyner Banham, Orhan Pamuk, Christopher Alexander, and Japanese urban studies belong to its planned range. Literary and city criticism could recur through reading even when the interviewer could not travel to each subject.⁴²

The earlier cinema work and Los Angeles reading therefore acquired another relevance. They had already shown him how a place could be approached through representations rather than only through arrival. An archive and subscriber relationship made that inquiry an ongoing publication. The materials and transaction changed, while the task of comparing a place’s images to lived experience remained available.

Korean publication changed the direction of address

한국 요약 금지 appeared from Across on February 20, 2024, as a 264-page essay collection. It followed years of writing and interviewing, and included translated earlier work as well as Korean originals. The title No Summarizing Korea resists treating those essays as a compact national manual. The new book changed the audience of a practice already in motion.^{43, 44}

Its route to an editor was specific. Park Sanghyun encountered Marshall’s New Yorker “Gangnam Style” essay and introduced it in his Otterletter newsletter. An editor Park knew read that introduction and selected Marshall as a prospective author. An English-language essay had traveled through a Korean publication and a reader’s judgment toward a Korean book, rather than a national byline automatically turning into a contract.⁴⁵

Park’s review also asked why Korean readers should welcome another white foreign man explaining Korea. He found value in essays that, in his view, tried to escape the assumption that Western taste supplied the standard. The question belongs inside the work’s reception. Language learning and residence gave him access; local publication made his judgments answerable to readers for whom the subject was home.⁴⁶

Writing Korean originals changed the sentences themselves. In the March 2024 Yes24 interview, Marshall noticed that they tended not to use the semicolons and parenthetical structures retained in translations of his English. Korean interviews and book events also returned meanings readers found that he had not consciously supplied. Local publication was reciprocal: he offered interpretations and had to encounter others’ interpretations of his work.⁴⁷

The process was slower than writing in English. His March 2024 Korea.net interview described the deliberation Korean composition required and daily exposure through Hanguk Gihaeng, Winter Bookstore’s YouTube channel, and life around Kkachisan Market in Hwagok-dong. Provincial travel on television, books, and an ordinary neighborhood supplied different vocabularies and observations. He wanted to write more Korean originals, but that intention did not imply that learning was finished.⁴⁸

Personal ties changed the situation too. In a February 2024 Kyunghyang interview, Marshall discussed his Korean wife and discovering that Korean readers could welcome criticism. Experience complicated an earlier assumption that foreign criticism would simply be resisted. His argument for locally appropriate solutions followed the same resistance to using another country as a ready-made model. Marriage and reception made residence a more involved relation than an observer’s accumulated expertise alone.⁴⁹

He continued to consider himself an outsider. An April 2024 Economy Chosun interview treated that position as something he could work with while discussing the urban life around him. The planned café had unexpectedly closed, exposing some of the instability in the neighborhood economy he valued. The book also brought further media approaches and invitations. Publication created new occasions for speaking, while the place itself continued to complicate what he could say about it.⁵⁰

A reader’s disagreement makes the book’s limits more specific. In August 2024, 기로기 found some observations fresh or more informed than expected, but had wanted a more sustained treatment of contemporary society and ways of thinking. Reasons to dislike Seoul could coexist with Marshall’s reasons to love it. The response identifies an expectation the collection did not meet. Perceptive particulars were not the comprehensive social account every reader might be seeking.⁵¹

Colleagues, children, and an ordinary working day

A collaborative book widened the practice again. Korean Newtro: Where Youth Meets Tradition credits Marshall and writer-photographer Yoon Kwangjun, joining writing to another practitioner’s visual and cultural expertise. Its subject is the renewed use of older Korean tastes, forms, technologies, and aesthetics. Looking beyond familiar contemporary exports involved looking at how people reused what was already around them.⁵²

Korean writing also entered another genre. He contributed to 그날, 서울에서는 무슨 일이, published by 한끼 on December 15, 2025, with Jung Myung-seop, Choi Ha-na, and Kim A-jik. His announcement identified a short mystery, “(신촌에서) 사라진 여인,” concerned with a disappearance in Sinchon. The collective volume records another kind of work in the language, rather than simply another essay collection.⁵³

Fatherhood gave the language choices a different weight. In November 2025, he wrote that his wife had given birth to twins that summer. He described speaking Korean to them and wanting it to form the foundation of their lives, alongside encounters with English and other languages through cultural interests. Book-talk audiences had been surprised at his preference for local over international schooling. These were wishes and practices, not the children’s eventual educational outcome. Residence now included responsibility for another generation, and language was a medium of parenting as well as of reading and work.⁵⁴

The daily work remained materially ordinary. In August 2026, Marshall identified himself as a freelancer writing in cafés almost every day. An irritating musical environment prompted attention and a failed Shazam search, then an essay about generated music and technological adoption. The workspace became a subject through the same activity that made it a place to work: listening, testing an explanation, and relating the encountered detail to a larger change.⁵⁵

Repeated listening outside paid work helps explain the attention available to such an encounter. In a 2022 essay, he described taking an artist’s studio discography chronologically, one album a week, played straight through each day. Streaming’s abundance met a self-imposed sequence. The aim was sustained acquaintance, not simply collecting access to more music. The habit resembles the continued return to books and language that allowed a new place to remain unfamiliar in useful ways.⁵⁶

Public speaking and interviews added other occasions. The 2025 Gyeonggido Library International Conference listed him for a lecture approaching AI through literature. In May 2026 he appeared on David Tizzard’s Korea Deconstructed in an episode titled “Korean Culture Without the K.” Library and conversational venues placed his literary work before further publics, alongside the recurring writing.^{57, 58}

A place that also makes demands on its writer

Marshall’s practice began with things he wanted to hear and make, inside institutions that gave him equipment, editors, and an audience. Los Angeles supplied cinema occasions, a neighborhood, and models of looking that made the city more intelligible. Traveling interviews required promises and financing as well as curiosity. Seoul then changed the books and people available to him, while repeated publication required attention after the novelty of arrival had ended.

The more recent changes concern address and responsibility. Korean originals alter his syntax; local readers can answer or disappoint his expectations; collaboration supplies another person’s expertise; parenting makes language a condition he helps create for others. The position remains situated and contestable. He can resist received images of Korea without his own preference becoming its comprehensive description.

His occupation therefore depends on moving between participation and observation rather than completing a passage from outsider to fully initiated insider. A café is a workspace, a musical environment, and part of a changing economy. A Korean book is a reading experience, a language exercise, and a possible route to another practitioner. The work makes those relations available through particular essays and encounters. The same place that supplies material also supplies readers, colleagues, and family obligations to whom its writer must respond.

Research cutoff: October 4, 2026, with a focused rereading of the cited 2019 city-criticism essay on October 5. Catalog and listing evidence are distinguished from full text or audio access in the notes; current biographies are not used to invent a complete employment or publication calendar.

Notes and sources