Notebook On Cities And Culture

In Seoul's Sinchon district, Colin talks with Stephane Mot, "conceptor," writer of fiction, nonfiction, "nonsense," and author of the blog Seoul Village as well as the collection Dragedies. They discuss Paris as a "recurring hero" of literature and Seoul as a "shapeshifter" glimpsed from different angles in different stories; how he got involved in the early days of internet gaming, surviving three startups in three years; the French embassy job that brought him to Seoul in 1991; why he prefers winter in Seoul to winter in Paris; the difficulty of walking in Seoul when first he got there; the first of the city's "villages" that convinced him to explore more; what kind of relationship with Paris he has as a ninth-generation Parisian, and what it has gained by his becoming a partial outsider; when he first began writing about Korea; why of the two important subjects of love and death, he sticks to death; his "Borgesian experience" of discovering the internet; the subjects to which he finds himself returning in