Watermelon Carving

Takashi Itoh may be the world's most famous watermelon carver, enough so as to have his works called for in three different continents. Come watch the laws of supply and demand at work.

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Top 50 Music Videos Of 2006

DoCopenhagen lists 2006's top 50 music videos available on youtube. Be prepared to loose hours of your life.

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A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant

Les Freres Corbusier, the theater company behind Brooklyn's Hell House, return with Dianetic take on the holidays in their critically acclaimed play "A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant.

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Most Dangerous Christmas Toys

Not so sure you love your kids? Than consider investing in one of Radar Magazine's 10 Most Dangerous Play Things of All Time (note that a cougar on PCP is not one of them).

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Nerdcore For Life Trailer

A documentary about nerd-based rap, filling in the niche of things-on-the-internet-that-fill-me-with-prepubescent-shame. The moment when the kid in the mask explains rapping through a D&D metaphor--and I was able to follow...it's reasons like this I don't keep a gun in the house.

The Saddest Song in the World

While persuing the AV club's blog The Hater, I came across the following article:

Nokia recently commissioned a physiologist to conduct research on the subject of music and emotions, and he came to the exact same conclusion as my sister did after watching Richard Dryfuss teach some kid how to play the tuba during the turbulent 60s: Turns out, music does make you feel things. Who knew?

But the science didn't stop there. The physiologist went on to test physical responses to a number of songs in order to determine which songs make people the saddest, and which songs make them feel the most exhilarated.

The saddest song was The Verve's "The Drugs Don't Work." (Sadness was measured by decreased heart rate, not by the number of tears you're crying on the inside.)

The most exhilarating song (i.e. the song that causes the biggest increase in breaths per minute) was Blur's "Song 2."

Yes, this study took place in the UK.

Grab a tissue and have a listen to both the most and least blue songs in the world.

LINK (to the original article)

THE SADDEST



THE MOST EXHILARATING

Ray Harryhausen Creature List

Harryhausen remains the oldest school gangsta.

Golf Ball Destruction

Okay, I love to see things destroyed by projectiles. Sue me.

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Marvel superhero versions of peanuts characters

I don't know geek times geek is, but this has got to be pretty close.

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Vintage Colt 45 ads

From the last ad: "You can always go out at get you a 45 [a malt liquor and a revolver] in each hand and have yourself a good time." I can't shake my head long enough for these to even start making sense.

Diabetes ho!

The vital statistics:

Standard creme egg : Height : 2" Girth : 4" Weight : 40 g Calories : 175

Creme de la creme egg : Height : 8". Girth : 16.5". Weight : 2.25 kg (about 5 lb)Calories : estimated 10000

Interested? Do-it-yourselfers, please direct your eyes to Pimp My Snack, the website basking in the fact that gluttony is still a cardinal sin.

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28 Days Slater

Every February Mario Lopez undergoes a horrible transformation and becomes Bayside High's A. C. Slater. Like most things in life, this is due to a chip in his brain. Check out the rest of the episodes at Team Tiger Awesome.

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The Good Word

WWLLCJD: What would L. L. Cool J Do?

And the most important advice you'll ever recieve is...

Game over, man! Game over!

I should probably feel bad for the detail in which I recognize these games.

Voltswagon Yin and Yang

Care of neatorama.

Knuckling Under

Knuckles are the license plate of the tattoo industry--capable of communicating messages limited to eight digits or less. Given this restriction, take a look at what some enthusiasts have put together.

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Hoo-ray for Bollywood

I sort of wish Axel Rose had picked up any of this guys massive funkadellics for his act rather than his pathetic microphone-snake-dance.

The distinction between laughing with and laughing at getting thinner and thinner

Here’re some funny clips from the blooper reel of Bill Dance’s Fish Talk TV show.

Scrabble

If you’ve never seen Zefrank and the show, you don’t know what you’re missing. After a recent news of the highest scoring scrabble game hit headlines recently, we have little choice to but to pay attention to the ethnography of scrabblites. Watch and take notes.

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Worst. Halloween Mask. Ever.

Princeton’s John Delaney has posted a collection of famous death masks, giving us all that awkward pleasure of knowing what it would feel like to French kiss an unwilling Jonathan Swift.

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six foot twenty, made of radiation

I LOVE George Washington. I want him to be the first president of my heart!

You should take a look at Creased Comics, the production company for this cartoon, as well. They’re responsible for other little gems like this:

Take a look in the archives for more.

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Recipe for an Oedipal Complex

I don't know what I'm more sickly fascinated by--the fact moment of fruit on veggie softcore porn or the convincingly Michael Bay action scenes. I guess it's okay if a version of Oedipus wants to make you claw your eyes out.

Sometimes the best thing about a blind date is knowing you'll go down in flames

frim the site:

The singles below are real people with real issues. Some are overweight. Others are crippled by debt. Quite a few live with their parents. But they all have one thing in common: They are available. And they've put themselves out there with the hope of finding someone willing to accept them at face value. So, please, scan their profiles. You may not get exactly what you want, but at least you know exactly what you're getting.

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The stocking stuffer of psychological scarring

Nothing says Happy Holidays like a photo of sweet little toddlers screaming at Santa. Kick back and laugh at someone else's pain.

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Who says heroin use doesn't promote a healthy sense of humor

From the site:

As if you need another reason to love Iggy Pop, the veteran rocker (and his band The Stooges) have the single most entertaining concert rider TSG has ever obtained. The document--all 18 pages of which you'll find below--describes Iggy's requirements in terms of amplifiers, security, lighting, stage set up, and dressing rooms. But unlike most similar documents, Iggy's rider is written in a rollicking, stream-of-consciousness fashion that delivers multiple laughs per page. Apparently written by roadie Jos Grain, the Iggy rider is peppered with witty gems, tasteless asides, and typos. For example, in describing how Iggy's dressing room should be made to "look less like a typical rock & roll dressing room," the rider suggests that promoters "just let someone loose with a little bit of artistic flair...Er, do you know any homosexuals?" Explaining the need for two heavy duty fans, Grain notes, "So that I can wear a scarf and pretend to be in a Bon Jovi video." Also, don't miss the backstage requirement of a Bob Hope impersonator for Mr. Pop. (18 pages)

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The most educational video you'll watch today

This BBC series parodies the 1970s "For Schools and Colleges" programs, especially ITV's series "Experiment." Take a look on Youtube for the rest of the series.

One non-sexual Trojan containing a reservoir of seamen

The Chasers War on Everything tests whether in fact we have learned from anything, whatsoever, from history. Answer: not really.

And now for something completely stolen...

You may or may not have guessed by the recent change in subject matter, as well as the six month hiatus, that things are changing here. We here at the Erik Leavitt staff have had a revision of the blog as less narcissistic and more Erikphiliac—all Erik’s interests all the time. We’ll be trying to post links and videos of interest with some frequency as the Erik staff robs mercilessly from the research done by other websites. Come bask in the immorality!

Almost to the stalking stage...

The crush I've been developing for Nellie McKay remains unalleviated by her amazing live performances for NPR. Checkout her acoustic piano work for "Live at Studio 4A."

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Fulfulling every BB gun's desire

Maybe it's the fact that I've never really outgrown an angry fire-starting adolescent, but I can't help but be drawn to this striking collection (pun...sort of intended) of high speed photography. Wallow in the beauty of golf club and .22 bullet blowing stuff the hell up via.

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English lesson for Japanese Tourists

Thanks to Youtube we have access to even the strangest of videos, including emergency English videos for Japanese tourists. This may be the perfect self-defense video against robbers confused my kerchief placement and terrified of awkward choreography.

Cirque de Seoule

The year in middle school that I realized I was the only kid to still wear Velcro shoes for lack of being able to tie a bow was the same year I realized smarts were never my strong suit. Stupid is not the right word, but when I act as smart as I’m convinced I am the situation usually ends with me explaining to the police how I burned my eyebrows off.

Still, I’ve managed to keep up some illusions of wearing smarty pants by couching myself in the study of a few specific areas—a tactic as deceptively effective as slipping into an anatomy lab by wearing by black pajamas with a painted skeleton on the front. If a gorilla can learn sign language I figure I should at least be able to sound smart when blathering my way through an English class.

So here’s an irony: I just got a B- on my undergrad introductory lit course midterm. It’s one of those courses in literary dread: we read stories about depressed people crushed by the system and relate it to lit theory about the ideology of dread. We discuss the brief historical implications of the stories and skip over the artistic content of the story, which is like reading up on the history of turkey basters before throwing out thanksgiving dinner.

When I walked out of the midterm I knew I’d aced it with the same confidence I have leaving the bathroom knowing I didn’t pee on the seat. I knew my essays were solid and insightful and my short answers took the basic ideas we’d talked about in class and interacted with them. I forgot basic college rules though: don’t be the only guy not to wear underwear underneath your toga at the party and avoid original thought at any cost. It’s not always the case, but it seems to come up all too often in English Lit courses: professors like it when you parrot their lectures back to them.

This is knowledge, as Confucius defines it. “One who knows the Tao is not the equal of one who loves it, and one who loves the Tao is not the equal of one who takes joy in it.” Joy is the most basic tenant of Confucianism. He speaks about self-cultivation which comes through learning and the basic respect we offer other people. If learning is just knowledge, it is no different that trying to see farther into the distance by standing on your tip toes rather than walking up the hill next to you. We need to move beyond knowledge, he says, learning and its practice needs to bring us joy. What brings joy is not simply memorization but interacting with knowledge and making it part of yourself.

Not that we much respect this attitude. We call it amateur, which is accurate—literally to love or a lover. Its something I’m likely at fault for in my own teaching. Still I guess it’s the only way I’m willing to learn things anymore, it’s the only thing worth my time that respects the material. It would be like being in a relationship and refusing to give your girlfriend any personal information. That isn’t a relationship; at best that’s a booty call. So I guess this is a very long way of telling my professor to go fuck herself. What it comes down to in the end is that I have a blog and she doesn’t, and if I say she has a vestigial tail and an extra chromosome, folks are going to side with me. I did the same thing with the permanent marker in the bathroom stall beside the class room so if anyone questions whether or not she is a “stupid head,” they need look no further than my crude drawing.

Korea, meet the first amendment—the one that gives me the right to make an ass of myself.

Seoul Mate

Despite my night terrors and overpowering body odor, the official’s here saw fit to assign me a roommate. While I don’t know who was born first, we definitely make up the oldest members of the program. Recognizing this the maintenance crews here have installed bars next to our beds incase our hips are too bad to get up in the morning, and my desk has a hook to hang my colostomy bag from. (My fear of one day getting a colostomy bag and having some jackass friend squeeze all the fluid back into my body was alleviated a few months back when a nursing student explained that the nozzle attached to the bag itself is designed to be in intake only. Now the only thing holding me back is the hesitation of trying to find the urethra department of the medical supply store).

As my roommate has friends and a more prolific blog than myself, I thought it might be useful to link to his sight. I think I use more fart jokes that he does on average, he’s got me on actual useful information. Check it out.

Seoulitary Confinement

I feel bad for student academics. A diet of top ramen and boxed wine keeps them anemic and brittle, and a constant intake of theory papers makes it early impossible for them to interact with normal people the way that tear-wrenching body odor might for inhibit your chances on a first date. Therefore, when I saw a notice that a Korean student needed someone to proofread her papers, I sent off an e-mail.

At the time I didn’t know it was a doctorial thesis, but she said it was on Chinese Erotic Literature which at least sounded intriguing. Reading a literary analysis of Chinese Erotic Literature is approximately as erotic as a cold shower where Michele Foucault pulls open the curtain, punches you in the spine, then squirts shampoo directly in your eyes.

My only joy so far have been some of the choice lines that don’t exactly translate:

“Probably he can be a Phallus.”

“The text is rich in lecherous flavor”

“Yanli did not like any kind of exercise, even ‘the best indoor exercise’”

"Both natives, Jiaorui and Yanli, are no less pure than aliens"

"Qiqiano succeeds in establishing herself as a Phallus"

In establishing myself as sort of a phallus, I am at least getting paid for this—the equivalent of about fifty bucks. I’m on my twelfth editing hour now, which officially dips the wage per hour below the minimum. The irony that I had to pay to come to Asia and compete with the sweatshop kids sewing Gucci wallets is not lost on me, especially since Michael Moore filmed me hunched over the thesis for six and a half hours. At least I think it was Michael Moore…it was a sweaty guy in a hat with a camcorder, which is also the qualifications to work on a porno set. Technically with the low pay and the general exploitations of my labor, I should be working on a porno set too.

Steer clear of the blood pudding

Yes, in much the same way as they farm rape here, they also have what may be the worst theme restaurant known to man. I can decide if Cafe AIDS is a tragic mistranslation, or if in a failure of marketing strategy they're trying to draw the business of the terminally ill. Only the the awkward looks when I ask to buy a t-shirt will tell.

Raging Bull

“You can totally call bullshit on that. Now say it with me: ‘I totally call bullshit on that.’” I’ve only been talking to my Korean RA for fifteen minutes and already I’m preparing him for a violent ass-kicking. All the Korean students I’ve met here at Yonsei or other Universities have been not only painfully polite but are enthusiastic to practice their English with a native speaker. When they can’t find a native speaker, they talk to me.

Once, in high school, a friend and I silenced a German exchange student for an entire quartet by only speaking gibberish to one another. “Melt polka doting tree sheep sheep the tree?” I’d ask. “I car the ran…very mighty,” he’d answer while making little chicken bobs with his head. The more I think about it though, my average conversation is all that far from this display.

When their access is denied me, I can only think of big words. “Et tu, Brute?” I might say when my RA stumbles sleepily into the last bathroom stall, “a somnambulate vexation!” It isn’t my intent to be a jerk, so it must be in my genes.

Part of the problem is the explanations seem to clarify little. “Isn’t saying ‘bullshit’ very rude?” my RA asks. “Yes, but that’s kind of the point. It’s like a friendly rudeness—like sarcasm.” He gives me a confused look; he doesn’t know ‘sarcasm.’ “It means to say one thing but mean another.” He understands this: “oh…like lying.” Here’s where things get complicated. I could sit him down and explain that sarcasm (from the Greek meaning to cut the flesh or bite the lip in rage) is saying one thing and meaning another but in a way so obvious—typically determined both in levels of absurd sincerity as through tone of voice and body language—the listener detects both the untruth and the teasing associated with it. “Yeah,” I say, “kind of…”

Of course the longer I’m here the harder it becomes to recognize English. Normally this would be balanced by my picking up Korean, but really it’s more of a Robinson Crusoe style linguistic isolation. Today my professor asked me a question and I ignored him, assuming he was speaking Korean which no one does to he dopey bald white guy. “Erik” he said, and I looked up the way a dog does when you call it’s name. I’m in constant competition with man’s best friend while I’m here: I’ve got opposable thumbs but I’ve retrieved no one’s slippers , so I don’t know who’s in the lead.

Selling my Seoul

“I can’t believe this place has finger print ID scanners to unlock the doors but no elevators.” The guy at the front door of the dorm had a point; technically we get into our group housing the same way that James Bond enters MI5 but I still have to huff my groceries up five flights of stairs.

Technological priorities seem a bit skewed here. A cell phone isn’t a cell phone unless you can watch TV on it and the panel in along side the toilets here don’t do anything other than make noise (which makes it like a harmonica for bowel movements), but I’m not supposed to flush my toilet paper. I saw the same toilet paper rule in a semi repair shop in Wyoming, but when the Tiny—the ex-con working on my car—had finished half a liter of peach schnapps before nine AM on a Thursday I figured that the plumbing was thumped together with the same craft and skill as Tiny used to make toilet wine while in the box.

Hence I worry a little bit about the fact that I sold my retinas to Seoul science community for about $11.50 or about one non-supersized extra value meal per eye. Technically I just sold images of my irises; still I’m not without case to worry. They always told me that the eyes were the windows to the soul, and wearing contact lenses then staring at the sun might cook your soul like an ant. Based on what movies have taught me, the human iris is more individual than a finger print and can be used to make super-cyborgs with a human lust for murder. Right now the harmonica-toilet people are constructing ERIK 2.0 with a kung fu action grip and, for some reason, a penchant for break dancing. Also, if it is a Korean robot, I’ll start dressing like an out of work superhero (e.g. wearing my underwear on the outside of soiled sweatpants). Any day now I expect to wake up handcuffed to an office chair surrounded my scientists and military personnel. Or at least with a chip in my brain than can command me to kill.

If you see me break-dancing back in the US, ask me to pet a kitten. If a tiny kitty doesn’t immediately melt my heart, shoot me in the face with a shotgun. You should take the kitty out of my death grip first though; because if you don’t cry when a faceless robot crushes a kitten I don’t know who to call the real heartless killing machine.

Factoid

"According to a Cornell University study, 70 percent of students earning a Ph.D. in the humanities will be on welfare for at least a year within five years of graduation. "

Sweet. My years of eating Velveeta has been preparing me for a life of government cheese.

Rain Drops Keep Burning Through My Head

The rainy season has started here, and each night I go to sleep with the sounds of it wetting my window and clattering down our roof. Campus is one if the few places in Seoul where trees exist; there are no parks here and no room for greenery on the sidewalks. The drizzle brings out all the greens against the glass and brick. Of course, it’s acid rain. All the locals use umbrellas even in the slightest mist, as the chemicals in the condensation will bleach hair and mush clothing. On a sunny day Seoul is never really sunny; a thick haze fogs over the sky. If I so desired I could stare into the sun with little fear of repercussions, and after days outside my skin shows no signs of tanning. It’s an eerie effect, and one of the girls in my class claims it’s setting off her seasonal depression disorder. The students from Pittsburgh and Los Angeles swap smog stories and settle on this being the worst they’ve ever seen. As a good Midwestern boy I can pretend that this is humidity.

My class work does keep me plenty busy, which reminds me how much I’m experiencing Korea as a student rather than as a traveler. Most of my cultural experiences take place around trying to do really ordinary things here, like buying bananas at a fruit stand or using the subway. Most of the Asian-American students have some kind of family or family friends over here, so they have someone to sherpa them around town. This also means they get to take part in more cultural activities here, which for everyone under thirty means hitting the nightclubs 5-7 times a week. I’ve been avoiding this scene like the plague.


























Already the population density bothers me here: every street and store is crowded with people; it’s on par with maneuvering around the Minnesota State Fair. Now imagine if the State Fair took place around one of the onramps to I-94. Calling the drivers here aggressive is like calling a pitbull attack uncomfortable—it doesn’t really capture the severity of the situation. Everyone runs red lights here and I have yet to see a single stop sign. A bus may try to turn left from the far right hand lane to the far left hand lane of a perpendicular street, then get caught in traffic and completely block an intersection.

To balance this people have started driving motorcycles on the sidewalks. Any normal person would just drive on the shoulder of the road, but space is at too high a premium to have a shoulder here. This also means that cars will pull onto the sidewalk and park. Sometimes people move, sometimes they are pushed forward like the cowcatcher on a train might move them. Walking the four blocks to buy cereal means twenty minutes of knocking into people and breathing in their body heat while cars lurch past and around you with little to no conception of traffic laws. Factor in the smog, the neon billboards, the ooze of music out of every story and the rumble of a thousand conversations and I have no reason to head out to a bar: I have every unattractive quality of the night club scene at my doorstep. At least that makes me feel better when someone spills their drink on me then pats my ass, though.

Tae Kwon Doh!

When I told one of my Korean friends that I was going to Tae Kwon Do so I could get kicked in the face, he gave me a funny look. Of all the US exports here, sarcasm apparently isn’t one of them. It’s a joke because no one in their right mind would want to repeatedly risk someone’s shin breaking their nose four days a week. Or so the logic is suppose to go.

And I admit to a certain logiclessness in my own training. In the two and a half years I’ve spend intermittently training I’ve moved from Tae Kwon Do to So Bahk Do Karate to Boxing and finally back to Tae Kwon Do. When it comes right down to it, none of these are very different in application—the ways a body launches a fist or a foot is basically the same across the board in the way that using a fork is the same across the board. That is until you try eating spaghetti using your fork mashed potato style. There’s a whole crapload of nuance that goes on with each of these styles, which is what kills me. More than just learning something completely new it involves unlearning something old, and more importantly it means I always go in over-confident and have to get that confidence crushed. Its kind of like going on a blind date with a model who only speaks Pig Latin, but your friends only mention the model part and her “interesting” personality.

Fortunately all of the classes are taught in Korean so I have a reason to look confused. I’ve really perfected the side-cocked look a dog gives you when you bark at it. This might be why one of the black belts has started communicating with me by the “bad dog” whacking system using a paddle across my knee. For all the language and rhetoric classes I’ve taken, for my studies on persuasion and sophistry, being hit by a paddle is one of the most swift and influential modes of communication I’ve ever seen.

But at least I got a picture of myself trying to look tough on a mountain.

America Rules Again

With the 4th of July just past, I only thought it appropriate to post a link to one of my favorite articles, which has a new resonance to me these days.

I'll have a new post for ya'll soon, likely this weekend.

Open to interpetation

Every day some researcher sets a rhesus monkey in front of a row of buttons. One of these buttons will drop a nugget of food out a shoot and the monkey will munch happily. The other two usually have electrodes attached. Every day I enter the cafeteria here on campus, I test whether or not I am smarter than a rhesus monkey by pointing to the Hangul characters I believe equal vegetables and rice. Somedays I’m right on, and days like today I get a bowl of super-sonic-diarrhea-pork which is like attaching an electrode directly to my small intestine.

These days mine is a world of pointing and frowning. I find stores where I can pick things up and bring them to the counter, and I avoid routes that require me to remember street signs. I demonstrate everything with my fingers: how many, how much, when to go and when to stop. Here I am a pasty and talentless mime bumbling through the metroscape. I wonder if Koko the gorilla has this problem.

All of this might be fine if I didn’t find it necessary to flail my hands and arms about while speaking in English. To the non-native speaker it I must appear to be in a state of constant seizure with my spastic limbs and eyes rolling into the back of my head. Mixed with my voice coming in and out of a falsetto and the occasional clicks and beeps, I can’t be too far off from the medieval madmen accused of St Vitus Dance. This means it’s only a matter of time before I’m staying in a room the state springs, complete with three meals trays a say slid into the safety slot of a padded cell.

At least the monkey gets to choose when he gets the food pellet.

Under where?

Most of my morning’s here start the same way: perplexed. From the grope for my alarm clock to the ache of sensory data while I shuffle down the floor bathroom, in that first half hour of awareness proved profoundly more difficult than the rest of the day. That feeling may have peaked this morning when I stumbled into my usual shower stall to find my underwear hanging from the curtain rod like mistletoe.

Not that this spot is so unusual; we’re all too demure here to really get into flagging our genitalia at each other so most of us prefer the option of dressing/undressing in the privacy to a shower stall. My underwear tends to find a home on the curtain rod next to my towel. After that though it tends to find a home on my body.

I can imagine two scenarios. I may have forgotten to put my underwear back on after I got done showering, which if true is awfully depressing. I’ve been putting on my underwear for twenty-five plus years now; I consider myself kind of an expert. I didn’t expect problems this late in the game. Also, at no point during the whole of yesterday did I realize I was going commando, a fact which one trip to the bathroom or well-placed itch should have revealed.

Option number two is that someone broke into my room, leaned over my wallet and my laptop to get into my laundry bag, fished free a pair of day old boxer shorts. Obviously he would have spent the day with them, likely wandering around campus with them draped over his arm, maybe splitting an ice cream cone or riding bicycles through the park. After a movie and a candle lit dinner and—just maybe—a kiss good night, he draped my underwear over my usual shower stall the way a movie serial killer leaves clues for his investigator.

Neither option really comforts me, but at least now I have a reason to learn the Korean word for deadbolt.

Now I can both go to school and not have class

Today marks the end of my first week of classes. The semester here at Yonsei University is six weeks during the summer, although you wouldn’t know it from the course load. The summer still represents a full semester (sixteen weeks) worth of classes which means that although these are undergraduate classes, the workloads are closer to graduate level. Factor this into the larger time spent actually in the classroom and that means I spend the hours between 8pm and 1am hunkered behind my desk. I’m paying for this and I don’t get graduate credit for anything I do here, so this is my vacation and makes me nerd enough for my lunch money to be magic stolen out of my pocket while fate itself gives me a wedgie.

About twelve weeks into a sixteen week semester, my brain starts to give out. My underwear starts showing up on me backwards or I’ll bike away from my office without my house keys. I imagine its like trying to fit two gallons of coffee in a two-cup pot—at some point the old stuff just sloshes out the side. Given the fact that I’ll start back to classes about a week after I get back I figure that means at the current rate I should start a hysterical weeping binge right about at fall midterms, and probably while I’m teaching.

With this in mind I did what any rational adult would do: I dropped a class. Rationally was never really my strong suit though as the classed I dropped was my Korean language class. This is important as apparently the only tattooed, bald men in Korean culture are gangsters, which explains why the locals have made a point not to knock into me while walking down the street. I had planned to learn phrases that would help me avoid death like “frowning means I am confused, not angry” and “I found religion in prison.” Now, though, I have sentenced myself to five more weeks of pointing at pictures of food in restaurants and crooking my head like a dog whenever I don’t understand someone.
















The rest of the undergraduate life is coming back to me though, especially the eternal quest for a free meal. This Sunday, for instance, I went to the campus church because they promised complimentary pizza after the service. Generally I avoid church, as it always seemed to be like standing under God’s magnifying glass and I’ve seen how well that works out for ants. This service didn’t seem much like the one I remember from my parochial school days, though. First off, they include power point presentations now, and I guess I’ve never thought of someone explaining divinity through a pie chart before. Stranger though, was the fact that they showed cartoons. Or one cartoon, rather, which while it involved god and the genesis myth, I suspect it was intended as a parable about environmentalism rather than religion. I mean, Adam and Eve stab God in the brain with a spear. Let me repeat that: Adam and Eve kill God—the transcendent, omnipotent—when they get mad and hurl a spear through his face. Afterward the diecide, they proceed to turn all the animals of the garden into pimp-a-licious hats, which I can except save that at the end they release the animals back into the wild after raising them from the dead. I’m no theologian, but the ability to destroy the universe and power over life and death seem to be a few of the job requirements looked for on a deification CV. Offering hungry students pizza, on the other hand, is merely a step towards sainthood.

Korea Got Seoul

Our guides have gone on and on about the Korean ability to counterfeit brand name merchandise: they have shown us their Rolexes and explained the hand full of pocket change it took to get them. I think I finally understood this concept on the last day of the tour when we went to Everland, which is the RC cola equivalent of Euro Disney. Their mascots are two anthropomorphic rodentish critters that may well be named Smicky and Sminnie. The idea is this: take Peter Pan’s Never Never Land and flip it around into the non-copyright-infringing Everland and the themepark builds itself. As Everland is the reverse of Never Never Land, the thirty-year-old employees all have to wear the garish costumer newborns wear for Halloween. (Considering the teleology of Everland has kept me entertained for days: every child here is given an ulcer and a job in middle management, and every time you say “I don’t believe in fairies” there’s a call for the cleaning staff to bring a bag of sawdust to the teacup ride or a “protein spill” as they call it in the industry). Everland also has different sections including America Land, which consists largely of cowboys and the Blues Brothers. When you consider the rampaging bull and the prominence of poorly dressed men wielding guns, this isn’t so far off. Everland itself is more like its own America Land: all the signs are in English and corndogs and pizza find their way into everyone’s hands. One restaurant listed itself as specifically “Korean Food,” when in reality everything they serve here is Korean food so the sign loses some of its utility. So after spending the afternoon navigating flume rides and children in animal hats, the tour buses dropped us off at the dormitory.
















It’s been nine years since I checked into my first college dormitory: Dupre Hall at Macalester College. Dupre had many architectural distinctions, being both hurricane and riot proof and the showerheads being only five feet off the ground so students can’t hang themselves from them. You might have a bloodmark on your ceiling from a student sitting up too fast in his lofted bed and scraping his forehead across the ceiling, or the obvious stomach acid ring that vomit leaves on a carpet. It had all the charm of a crematorium equipped with bunk beds. Here in Seoul my air conditioning, which even though the room is small enough for me to the door, closet, either desk, the window and—if I stood up and opened it—my neighbor’s window makes this the very best dorm room I’ve ever had. I never really understood the importance of air conditioning until I walked around Seoul for a while. It’s an effect numbers can’t communicate. Part of the Korean experience is learning how to sweat in totally new places, like from your teeth and under your fingernails. Fortunately the twenty year old “Culture Shock” book I read stressed Korea’s formal dress, so I have four kinds of long sleeved shirts but only one proper t-shirt, which means if I ever want to masquerade as a Baton Rouge used car salesmen I have endless options.



















I have spent my time since going to orientation meetings and collecting a few necessities like peanut butter and instant coffee. I know it’s very touristy to comment on the local products, but I’m not savvy enough to figure out a lot of the marketing techniques. Going to the supermarket is like an illiteracy awareness program: the world is filled with squiggled lines you have no hope of understanding. What makes a package appealing becomes a bit perverted. Without the ability to determine what flavors of ramen exist, I bought the one that most resembled a box of tide. When I couldn’t tell which coffee was caffeinated, I liked for the drawing of the shivering, sweaty man splashing tap water on his face. I have to buy books for class on Monday, and I will likely use the same methodology there.

Tour, Day 2: Gyeonju

It still feels like yesterday I was behind the steering wheel screaming because my learners permit had no way of stopping the oncoming traffic from likely killing me. Its almost been two years this august that a bureaucratic mistake gave me a driver’s license, and while I still have the haphazard driving skills of the average seventeen year old I still lack the romance of driving. I pickup remains a pickup no matter how pretty paint job and a BWM is too near a Porsche for me to tell the difference. When I heard the news then that we were going to the Hyundai plant followed by the beach and a ceramics shop, you can imagine the sparklers that didn’t go off in my eyes.














Fortunately we were treated like third graders, which surprisingly made things okay. Hyundai gave us each a toy car—the kind you pull backwards across the floor and it zips forward. Much like a real Hyundai I have no idea what to do if the oil light goes or a tire flattens, but I can get it to scoot awkwardly forward.





















I also haven’t played with ceramics since I was a high school student looking for an easy A in my schedule, so I forgot how unskilled I am with clay. “If you are a good potter, then you are a good masseuse,” my teacher said, referencing the even and even pressure through the fingers and hand. By my bent bowls and lopsided vases demonstrate dates gone horribly wrong. Seeing Shilla Kiln’s master ceramicist Yu Hyo Ung work with clay, on the other hand, is like watching a magic trick—the fast, relaxed way someone might pull a coin from behind your ear. There was a lot of “just do it like this” while in a single gesture he makes a tea pot already full of Oregan Chai. An enormous amount of things in Korea seem to operate on the principal of magic, kind of like the way my tourmates keep manifesting cell phones and Farrah Fawcett haircuts. Sadly, without a crossroads to sell my soul at, I crafted an ashtray the size of a bisected bowling ball. I have the feeling this might be a metaphor for my efforts in local cultural endeavors: lumpy and heavy handed.

Tour, Day 1

Tragedy strikes; that’s its nature. I expect tragedy whenever I start traveling: I picture all my clothes circling around a Nepalese luggage conveyor belt, or my wallet making its lonely way from me in the back of a taxi. Usually I’m way off base and I end up with no more trouble than a screaming baby in the seat behind me or a dirty hotel room. Since neither of those were the case on this trip, I almost missed my three day field trip. My taxi driver from the hotel mixed up the university with the local military base, a fact I did not discover until my cabbie zoomed away from me on the corner. I did manage to flag down a second taxi who got me to the school while twice telling me I was a “handsome boy.” When I say he got me to the school in time I mean just in time—the taxi skidded in front of the departing tour bus the way cops block off a road in Jerry Bruckheimer films. By that time I had missed an orientation meeting and fee Yonsei visors, but I much prefer a seat on a bus and a translator to coral me.

Between the cab driver and my tourmates, my appearance has cone into question a number of times. “Are you half Peruvian?” someone asked over lunch today. Recently my genetics have come into question by a number of observers who question if I’m Basque or Mexican or Italian or Greek. I keep having to explain that I come from the land of the people of the see-through skin—Norwegians and Swedes who yellow instead of tan. I’m German/English, both peoples with a heritage of pastiness. But half-Peruvian…this is a first. Part of this might have to do from the askers. The majority of the student body seems to sprout from California and at least three quarters of the group Asian, so I may begin to appear more ethnically diverse in a country Caucasian minority. Like how I would look better if I hung out with the tragically homely all the time. Or how people look better when they hang out next to me. Hey, wait a minute…















The rest of today I spent at the “Korean Folk Village” (http://www.koreanfolk.com/) which included a traditional Korean haunted house and a demonstration on how to grow traditional Korean rape:























They grow snake’s beard too, but that seems only mildly less troubling. More photos below. I may try to set up a photo bucket program to you can all marvel at my photographic non-artistry.

photographic proof that I'm not dead

The planets must be in alignment and sunspots free of ecclectic activity, because I finally got my photobucket site to work. Right now it consists of pictures from a three day bus tour (they also offered a three hour tour by boat, but the last time I heard about one of those it didn't work out so well). Check back to this occasionally as I'll likely be changing the order around a bit and adding things. Here's the address: http://s83.photobucket.com/albums/j281/eleavitt_2006/

Welcome to Korea

I always thought it would be a little appropriate to die in Seoul, like kicking off in Hell North Dakota. Despite my best efforts though, my plane landed without crashing. More people speak English in Korea than in Idaho, according to my informal airport statistics. What’s more impressive is that without a common tongue Koreans become celebrity doppelgangers. I saw a Korean J Jonah Jameson and a Korean William Defoe. I tried to get a picture with Korean Sean Pen before he decked me.

The trip to the hotel itself was relatively painless as well. The Hotel June comes equipped with a special “tourist restaurant” that serves Cesar salad and fried chicken. The hotel room itself, though, is a different story.



All the power is linked to a hotel key that you have to wedge on a pressure plate like Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. This tends to be a popular architectural option in fantasy video games, none of my tour books mention this (or contain the phrase “do you speak English” in Korean for that matter), so I bumbled around what I hoped was really my hotel room like a caveman in an eighties sitcom. To further complicate things, all of the buttons for the lights are in a single universal panel, the kind they have in the horror film about the automated house that goes crazy and kills everyone who lives there. Yes I’m sleeping in a crazy room. Why else equip every room with a “simple descending life line.”


Some things to know about your Korean hotel room: if you don’t close the bathroom door before playing with the Bidet, toilet water will shoot onto the bed fifteen feet away. I know it’s very chic for Americans to make fun of Bidet, but my actually has a butt massage feature. There’s no air conditioning, but I get all the free butt massages I can stand with my room. If I hit a button and a hooker-bot drones out of the wall, I’m writing AAA about the best hotel ever. I already get both regular and bathroom slippers and a bath robe with super tiny sleeves, which make things twice as hospitable here as at home

Although I’ve been unintentionally training for the jet lag by staying up until six AM every night, I’ve had six non-consecutive hours of sleep in the past fifty and I am beat. More soon, or when I get to somewhere to plug my laptop into.

Fight or Flight

If my plane crashes due to a California condor sucked into the jet engine or if I drink twenty-seven cups of airport cappuccino and my heart explodes, my luggage will stand as a time capsule of my neurosis. I’ve packed coat hangers but the wrong replacement shaving cartridges, an iron but no pillow. I’ve jammed sunglasses into one water bottle and cold coffee in another. So long as my shirts are clean and pleated, I apparently don’t care if I look like a hip yet sleep deprived Grizzly Adams.

With the majority of my hair being scraped off every day, I have to get inventive with the shaving methods I prefer. Last night at the store my preference was apparently Lady Gillette which regardless of their silky, nick free finish will not jam into my Norelco Mach Three. This means I will either be shaving my head with my nose hair trimmer, or carefully smoothing my scalp with a replacement blade pinched between a pair of tweezers. My phrase book doesn’t list useful phrases like “please gesture towards the hygiene section of you’re store--I’m a moron,” so I have no soon hopes of remedying this issue.

The actual preparation and process of traveling supersizes my average level crazy. I won’t sit with my back turned to my departure gate in case the flight attendants somehow Houdini the 747 out from under me. The urge to phone every I know is almost irrepressible. When I get on the plane I’ll hunch in my isle and row playing the sit-next-to-me/don’t-sit-next-to-me game with every person I see, which will determine the skill and vigor I put into my oh-god-our-elbows-are-touching game later on. At the very end I will shoulder my way through people to stand in front of an empty baggage claim for twenty minutes, keeping an eye of the geriatric in the wheelchair to make sure she doesn’t snatch my suitcase.

This doesn’t take into account the language barrier and my own ability to bluff it like I could in Europe. The little Korean I already know I picked up in Tae Kwon Do classes, which gives me the ability to both offer and receive spinning face kicks. All of my spin kicking abilities would not hire a taxi to my hotel, no matter how totally awesome my form. I also have the ability to mechanically count to ten while doing jumping jacks, which may aid in looking like the crazy prisoner when I get picked up for vagrancy. So even though I’m still in hunkered in the Boise airport sprawled across the flight gate like a failed protest, in some small way I’m crouched in a East Asian making toilet wine with catsup packets and nutrasweet.

It’s nine AM. I’m going to find a bar and see if I can split a drink with one of the pilots.

Up Chuck and die

There is no appropriate way to try and describe teaching, no matter what Mr. Kotter says about the matter. Or maybe there is no way to describe my teaching. Each semester I seem to find some unintentional theme to my semester. Last semester, as my students read a poem about a married couple eating a baked ape that the wife may or may not have had slept with, someone said “this author is really morbid.” Strangely, they’d said that about every author we’d read that semester—the diary of a grave robber, the review of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with cannibal subtext. Usual freshman comp sort of stuff.

I’d really try to clean myself up a bit in the classroom; no stories about bears attacking my friend’s crack house or being propositioned by old German men on trains. Still, this only seems to go so far. For instance, a college invited me to her class to be ethnographically studied as a member of a community of poets. I can’t imagine that a room of Boise freshmen would be all that interested in talking to anyone at seven thirty in the morning, so I put on my best teaching outfit: a purple shirt and cowboy boots. I think I wore pants. I read them some poems and talk for an hour while they took notes. Describing the experience wouldn’t really do it justice. What might do it justice would be their excerpted comments from their essays:

"His choice of the color of his clothing sent a strong message--I am in touch with my feelings."

"I was scared for my life throughout the class. The guy seems as though he was one bad day away from shooting up the school."

"The drawl of the classroom is no more this Friday morning as Erik Leavitt, the Cheshire Cat Poet, vehemently translates Fragment 133 from black print to vivid illustration."

"With all this talk of bloody teeth and spiritual spittoons I think, 'that's too much, Erik Leavitt, too much.'"

"I think, as I often have in the past, why anyone in their right mind would get forearm tattoos. To have any kind of respectable job would require unbearable summer after summer in long sleeves, irritating questions at interviews, and the worst aspect, explaining them to your grandchildren. I soon came to understand Erik's take on the issue--Erik has little or no social conscience. Erik is a poet and suffers from 'poetic diarrhea.'"

"Poets have a certain stigma about them. You never talk to your mom on the phone about meeting a poet. They are not known for being cool or anything of that sort. The idea that I had of a poet was a beanie wearing hippie that would show up and want to recite a poem about how the clouds remind him of cotton candy. Thankfully, that was not the case."

Sting, an inspiration to all the zombie afeared

Here's the sting poster in my office from the last post. Stare deeply into his dreamy man-cleavage.

Official Denial Part 1

On WKRPin Cincinatti Less Nessman taped an office shaped square around his desk, an act which always made sense to me. I enjoy my cramped little spaces, from snow forts to sidecars; I'd probably be a candidate for autoerotic asphyxiation if not for a lack of mechanical expertise.

All the years I spent in cubicals I dreamed of having my own office. Not in a way that would make me work any harder to earn it, but in that way I'd like to master the unicycle without all that awkward practice.

In the acceptance letter for the teaching assistantship here at BSU, I found out I would finally get my own office. What the MFA department lacks in disposable income they make up for in irony though; my office is one of a number of converted apartments. If I so chose I could grade student essays in a bathtub or just kick back and lie on kitchen linoleum, which were all the same things I could have done working in my own apartments.

That being said, the office do lend themselves some character through the residue of junk left by former graduate students. Check a filing cabinet and it wouldn't be unusual to find a banjo and a barbe head snapped off at the neck. Whose lava lamp is that? Why is there mold in the coffee pot and is it safe to use? These seem to be questions no one has answers for. No one may have touched the reference books on the shelf since beta-max was all the rage, but I'm save from almost every kind of apocalyptic event:

The staff keeps "Zombie Killer" stashed behind the recycling bin for the day when the dead will rise up and crave the flesh of the over educated living. Professional wrestler Sting acts as an operational manual of sorts.

The fear of zombies abounds on BSU campus, and by abounds I've found two people who balance hammers on their doorknobs so no zombie will sneak in.

It's a little known fact that zombies are the number three reason college professors leave their jobs (following closely being a roadie for AC/DC and using up the half of their ass that they teach with). Hence we TAs are supplied with a croquet mallet and useful passage from the Zombie Survival Guide like:

"Solanum is the virus that turns humans into undead zombies...the disease is 100% communicable (with a 100% mortality rate). Although bites are most common, infection can be obtained through open wounds brushing against each other or being splattered with remains, usually after explosions...no one has recorded a test of sexual contact with a zombie but, through other cases, is a highly probable path of infection."

Seeing as a large undercurrent of my classes last semester dealt with cannibalism and veiled necrophillic references, this proves ominous. Then again, as a man who keeps a poster of WWF’s sting as a operational manual for a croquet mallet, ominousness abounds.

Houston, we have contact...

Call me Midwestern, but blogs always carried an narcissistic stink to them. It's the same sort of problem that sending out photos of yourself for Christmas gifts--it sort of says "look what a wonderful person I am." It's a loaded thought, and likely one incorrect. With that in mind, here I am typing out my wonderfulness. Not that this was my intent; sloth is a more accurate focus. I'm a lazy communicator and I can't keep up with all the folks I ought to be keeping up with. This blog, then, hopes to communicate some of what stumbling through a graduate program in Idaho is like.

I'm also traveling to Korea soon, and again I thought this would be cheaper than buying prints of photos for folks. It should help communication abroad: I hate mass e-mails but this format seems okay, so I try not to think about the logic.

I'll be posting some photos of Boise soon because I've grubbed my paws on my brother's digital camera and I need to make sure I can operate it without caveman-style grunting. I'll try to save that for counting on my fingers or holding an apple between my first and second toes.