I was watching road rage videos in my office one afternoon in February of 2013 when I got an email from upstairs asking me to kindly represent the School at a Digital Humanities conference in North Dakota. I went straight to see Neil, the head of the department.

'Why me?'

The day was overcast and he was huddled over his desk in a cone of lamplight reading Finnegan's Wake. (I knew it was Finnegan's Wake because Neil only ever reads Finnegan's Wake. Or books about Finnegan's Wake by people who only read Finnegan's Wake.)

He squinted in my direction. 'Dwight is it then? Come in.'

I stayed where I was; I wanted to deal with this one in passing: 'This North Dakota thing. Why me?'

'Well the thing... What? Did you actually read the email, you eejit? Christ, you're blinder nor I am. It's North Korea, not Dakota.'

'Oh. Well, I'm still not tempted.'

'The thing is, Dwight, Stan's had to pull out and no one else is free. Your Korean puts you first in line.'

'My Korean. Neil, I took one course in my undergrad. How can that possibly put me ahead of Hyunjung?'

'Hyunjung's doing research in LA. Besides, she's South Korean, remember? She couldn't fookin go anyway.'

Neil is short for Cornelius. He is the only man I know who makes expletives sound like terms of endearment. He peers out at you from beneath the world's most frenetic eyebrows and it's really hard to take his fookin this and fookin that as unkindly.

I slumped into one of the pastel green blobs our offices came refurbished with instead of chairs. 'Neil, how can I give a plenary on a topic I know nothing about? Digital Humanities? What is that?'

'Contradiction in terms, I know. Look, you're just representin' the university. Stan's already written the speech.'

'Great, what's the topic, replicants?'

I didn't know whether to be glad or insulted the speech was already written. Of course I didn't want to go to the trouble of writing something new, but it did strike me as a little ignominious to be sent as a departmental mouthpiece.

'What point is there in having a conference on the humanities in North Korea? I mean, seriously?'

He crossed his Clarks and stretched. 'Well, I reckon that depends on what kind of attitude you take wit' you. What kind of influence you want to be.'

'I don't believe in influences,' I said. 'I have no agenda whatsoever.'

'So you've told me, but I've always refused to fookin believe you.'

'Why?'

'Surelookit I dunno, maybe belief in my fellow man?'

My fellow man. God, he was so lovable. Still, I had to stand up for my refusal to stand up. 'Literature has no practical...'

'Yeah yeah, no practical function whatsoever. You've told me that too.' Some electronic thing on his desk beeped. He brought it close to his face and sighed. 'Ah, Jeezuz. Dwight, I'd love to talk about literature all day but I have a literature department to run. Think of it as a favour, will you? If it ain't you then it has to be me and I'm up to my ears.'

I stared past him at the rain clouds over Jurong, the red lights on the port gantries glowing already at midday.

'Look, you'll only be gone a week but I'll give you teaching relief for two.'

I struggled up from the blob. 'Pyongyang here I come.'

I had never been to North Korea but my expectations, formed on Youtube and some even more reliable sources, were realistic - that is to say, low - and nothing during the flight from Singapore via Hong Kong and Ulan Bator, nor the drive into the city, nor my arrival at the Yanggakdo Hotel led me to imagine these expectations might be exceeded. My guide was one Mr Pak.

Now, in his seminal 1984 text Abuses of Socialism are Intolerable, Kim Jong Il stated that:

'If writers, in creating works, make the essential features of a class vague on the plea of preserving the individualistic features of a character, they will violate the principle of realistic typification and distort human character.'

However much Mr Pak would object to it, the individualistic features of his that I should like to preserve at the expense of typifying his class were a very nice metallic green tie, a deep love of cigarettes, a brown Louis Vuitton man-purse, and cheekbones so defined that birds could have perched on them. He met me at Arrivals and took me to my hotel in a comfortable Volvo sedan.

*

The next morning I dutifully boarded the shuttle-bus to the Pyongyang Institute of Science and Technology (PUST), sat through the Keynote, milled about with the other delegates during the (instant) Coffee Break, then delivered the Plenary lecture. A full day of Seminars, Panels, and Visits to Historic Sites had been planned but I slipped onto the first shuttle back to the Yanggakdo and spent the afternoon deep in the grey velour of the hotel's Blowfish Lounge, drinking rare Cuban rum and watching Scottish football on Chinese TV.

Partway through the footballing masterclass that was Cowdenbeath vs Killmarnock, Mr Pak came rushing in. 'Dr Connor, the Pyongyang tour. The bus is waiting. I went into your room. I looked in the lobby, gymnasium, massage parlour!'

'Sorry,' I said. 'I'm not feeling well.'

'Is this medicine?'

'For a certain kind of malady.'

'Malady? What malady?'

'Don't worry, Mr Pak, don't worry. It'll pass. I'm enjoying the best hospitality. Methusalem rum. Upmann cigars. Velour that disappeared in the early eighties. A recently live feed from Europe. Look, I've even got a spittoon. I have nothing but good things to write on TripAdvisor.'

Still believing I had some ailment he could help cure, he suggested local pain remedies that I could purchase in the hotel convenience. He wrote down the names of these things in Hangul, then bowed out of the lounge, promising to be back tomorrow, imploring me to get better so as not to miss any more of Pyongyang's attractions.

When the match went to half-time I took out my sketchbook. I started out as an art student, and it was only once I'd failed completely to make a career of it that I went into text-generation. I get my students to sketch sometimes. I teach a course on the modern novel and every semester we start with GF's Madame Bovary, the novel non plus ultra if you ask me. It's the perfect vantage point for looking both ways - back down the ages to the dust clouds of the epic and the white horses of romance, and all the way forward to the theme parks of post-post-modernist-ish--ism. As ARG put it, 'with GF, everything starts to vacillate'.

(Of course, no one in the department agrees with me. Neil, for instance. As I said, he only ever reads Finnegan's Wake. The novel reached its height there, he says. Reading anything else is just your own lack of ambition. He started a Finnegan's Wake reading group recently called Finnegan's Wake's Wake; they covered twelve pages in the first three months, an average of a page per meeting, which, apparently, was disturbing progress for Neil. 'We're like botanists flyin over the Amazon in a fookin Learjet.'

In the first class of the term, my students and I read aloud the first two pages of Madame Bovery and then draw Charles's hat, the one he's wearing when he first shows up for class. The key passage is:

'It was one of those hats of the Composite order in which is found elements of the bearskin, the chapska, the bowler, the otter, and the cotton nightcap, one of those poor things, really, of which the mute ugliness has depths of expression like the face of an imbecile. Ovoid and reinforced with whalebone, it began with three circular sausages; then, separated by a red band, there alternated lozenges of velour and rabbit fur followed by a sort of sack that finished with a polygon of cardboard covered with complicated embroidery and from which hung, at the end of a long, too-thin cord, a small tassel of golden strands. It was new; the visor gleamed.'

The idea for this exercise came to me when I was reading VN's Lectures on Literature, which includes some of the sketches he made in the margins of his lecture notes: the beetle Gregor Samsa, Bloom's route through Dublin, a hansom cab from Jekyll and Hyde, and, in the all-important chapter on Bovary, a sketch of the hat. In the following class we go on to draw Charles and Emma's wedding cake as well.

It was never my original intention, but over the years I've come to adopt these drawings as a sort of rough psychoanalytic tool. We do the exercise in our first class and I watch through the semester for all the signs that were intimated in those first drawings. It was clear to me, for example, that Gavin was low on self-esteem, socially flaccid is not, perhaps, an exaggeration, and having trouble meeting girls and still to come to terms with the bullying he'd suffered in military service.

This one is an actual sketch of Kresentia's brain. Her ideas sprout as quick as an acorn, and I suspected her from the very outset of a bipolar disorder. 'Visor thing LMAO' does, however, show that she found the humour in the passage. I think GF would be pleased.

This is Kai's contribution, with self-portrait at bottom right. It remains to be seen who will win out between Ringo Starr, Adolf Hitler and Alfred E Newman as his dominant role-model. Markus was a true visionary and would have got an A+, had he not forgotten the visor.

With all of its romantic associations, things got more interesting when we moved on to Charles' and Emma's wedding cake. It was clear from Elly's drawing (at left) that she liked heavy metal, had ADHD, and would eventually die at high speed, poor thing.

Evelyn (below), bright and bouncy Evelyn, was, I guessed, open to a brief fling. Woohoo! (VN did, after all, exhort us to 'Caress the details').

And Sarah...

Sarah was not open to a brief fling. Sarah, not without long-term perspective, not without sexual curiosity and incipient motherly yearnings, would actually fall in love with me and, in time, come to see me as lover and father-figure. All of which it would take some particular delicatesse to explain to my wives. Yes, plural, but not simultaneous. My affair with Sarah, chugging down its secret, parallel track would last longer and ultimately take me further in a spiritual sense than any of my quickly derailed marriages.

Did I know all this in advance, just from one or two ink sketches? There comes a time in everyone's life, at least once, I believe, when pesky fantasy and game reality conspire to astound one's stolid expectations. I can't look back on this image without a twinge of mixed tenderness and horror.

'You're my objective-correlative,' Sarah would say, appropriating a term from JJ, whom we also read in the same course.

'Christ is my Karenin and you're my Vronsky.'

'I'm the Consul and you are my big brooding Popocatapetl.'

'I am Emma, and you are everyone else.'

Once my relationship with Sarah was well and truly over, I... sorry, it ended, but I wouldn't be inclined to say it ended well. Once my affair with Sarah was finished, I never remarried. I liken this situation to that of a pilot. If one has ever taken an hallucinogenic, no matter how many years prior, one will not be allowed to pilot a commercial or military aircraft. One will not be given the direct responsibility for anyone else's well-being. At times of great stress, there is, apparently, too great a risk of hallucinogenic and possibly debilitating flashbacks.

Enough of Sarah. There'll be more time for flashbacks later.

Back to my own sketchbook. The bartender had brought me a copy of a Pyongyang newspaper earlier, and leafing through it I'd come across a photo of Kim Jong-Un and his note-taking generals inspecting what looked like a candy cane factory. This image came to mind along with the hat of Charles Bovary and I started a caricature of those generals, each of them reduced to an enormous peaked cap. At the centre of the drawing was a beaming Kim Jong Un - enormous head, wacky hair, tiny body - driving a toy Mercedes-Benz through the generals towards a crowd of emaciated, cheering peasants. It wasn't terribly original, I agree, but I thought it was rather well-executed. Inspired by this success, and the neon fish above the bar, I did another caricature, this one of KJU as a smiling fugu puffer-fish on a plate in a sushi restaurant. The five diners at the table - Putin, Obama, Abe, Xi, and Park - are all flinching as they reach for it with their chopsticks. When the bartender came back to bring me another Korea Libre, I had to bundle my sketchbook - a surefire way to get myself shot - away.

The next morning I was on to my third carajillo by the time Mr Pak showed up. He had begun to suspect that he was underestimating my jadedness. He took a stance directly in front of Sarpsborg vs Haugesund. Was I going to spend every day drinking alcohol in front of soccer? What kind of behaviour was this for a professor from a prestigious university?

'Assistant professor,' I said.

He was responsible for me. He would have to give a report about the sites we'd visited and the cultural activities we'd participated in. I had only a short time in Pyongyang and I had done nothing!

I leaned to my left to see the screen beyond him.

'Dr Connor, wouldn't you like to visit the Arch of Triumph? Or the Korean Revolution Museum? They have much captured American artillery.'

'Thanks, but no tanks.'

'What about a visit to Pyongyang Department Store #1. There are clothes, electronics, tableware. What about taking photographs of the Tower of the Juche Idea?'

'Sorry, I don't have a camera.'

Mr Pak was aghast. 'No camera? Has it been lost? Stolen?'

I told him offhandedly that I didn't own one.

He cringed. It was more than a cringe in fact, it was Nosferatu-like the way he stiffened and shriveled: shoulders creeping up, eyes wide, head tilted to one side. Now, finally, after twenty years of guiding foreigners around Pyongyang, here was real cause for suspicion. He backed away, sliding into a lounge chair, his gaze fixed on me. His breath started getting laboured and he fumbled for his cigarettes.

'I'm allergic to sightseeing, that's all,' I said. 'When I read pamphlets and panels and helpful screens I can never remember a thing. Taking photographs doesn't help somehow. Wow! Did you see that free-kick?'

He didn't look convinced by my alibi. His breath was coming heavy and pained. He lit up the cigarette and it seemed to ease his breathing.

'My wife had a camera,' I said in a kind of conciliatory way. 'She liked taking pictures.'

Mr Pak was only slightly reassured. 'But you must take back colour photographs of our beautiful city.'

I picked up my pencil. 'Maybe I'll do some sketches instead.'

He frowned. He wasn't convinced.

'What? What's the matter with a sketch?'

'There is too much possibility for error,' he said.

He sat there a while longer, breathing and smoking - more or less the same activity for him - then burst out with: 'Soccer! You like sports. Shall we go for a visit to the stadium?'

'In March?'

He got up and paced, head down, right hand glued to his chin, index pointing at his nose. After three tours of the lounge he stopped and snapped his fingers. 'The Grand People's Study House. It has extensive collections.'

'Of tracts, right? Kim's tracts on tractors? Kim Junior's tracts on cinema?'

'You write books. The Grand People's Study House is the biggest library in all Korea. Over thirty million books are there. Plus extensive collections of rare books. I think a scholar will be interested in such old and rare books. Maybe ones you will not find anywhere else.'

It was clearly a ploy, but I was starting to feel sorry for Mr Pak. I didn't want to get him into trouble. In three days I'd be on a plane back to the lights and relative normalcy of Singapore; God only knew what sort of medieval twilight of reports and self-criticism sessions I would be leaving Mr Pak in.

And, after all, I thought, wasn't it a fairly damning verdict on your priorities if you couldn't be tempted away from the television by thirty million books?