The uniquely odd thing about this doodle in particular was that five days later, there was a … follow-up? Remix? Pseudo-Engrish-style knock-off?… in one of the other rooms on the 3rd floor. Reasonably different handwriting, too. This toast looks much more benign– sympathetic, even– the kind of toast that can’t bring itself to smile at your misfortune, but wishes you well as you study. It’s also a little wonky, looking almost more like a bear than toast.

Speaking of bears, the same day Nice Toast showed up, a creepy oneappeared one floor down. In classic Doors style, this bear greets the observer, professes its love, and inquires about the observer’s name. In different handwriting, the bear also asks what the best thing about 29-year-olds is. (Answers are welcome in the comments.)

It’s not a follow-up in quite the same way, but another bear appeared in a Crerar study room about a week later, seemingly born out of a chemistry diagram. It’s a different style bear, and the handwriting (what little there is) seems different, but I wonder if the doodler saw the earlier bear and was (perhaps subconsciously?) inspired. As things to doodle go, bears are by no means the most common– that award would go to depictions of humans, and/or their body parts. In fact, the only previous bears in my collection date back to May 5, 2008: a smoking panda and a bear crawling on all fours.

If you look at the graffiti, however, there are two repeated iconographies of the UChicago-student relationship: being eaten, and anal sex.

Two of the three representations of the UofC eating students portray the school as a fish, one with rows of sharp teeth going after a brain, and another toothlessly devouring circles. A third shows UofC as Pacman, juxtaposed with a panicked cloud labeled “soul” in the first frame, and considerably expanded after eating the soul in the second frame.

I’ve only seen the being eaten iconography on the A-level (all-night study space) of the Reg. But the examples of the anal sex iconography come from two different places: the blackboard in one of the Crerar study rooms, and the study room in the Breckinridge dorm (“at least Harvard uses lubricant“).

I can’t date the Breckinridge piece more specifically than sometime before last Thursday*, but all of the other pieces come from early spring quarter– around the time procrastinating fourth-years are sweating over their BA papers while other undergrads are out enjoying the sun. Perhaps, then, the choice of imagery should come as no surprise.

* The piece probably dates from well before that, given the number of replies. That said, the graffiti there goes back a number of years, so it could still conceivably be from early spring quarter. The Breck study room is amazingly thick with graffiti, and will be the subject of an upcoming blog post. For a preview, check out the set on Flickr.

Recently, though, I found it covered in Chinese– then covered again in different Chinese, and then with the addition of what appears to be Persian. Unable to read either myself, I enlisted the help of the amazing typographer Muiz Anwar, the awesome programmer/designer/independent scholar of Chinese Peter Behr, the immensely cool grad student/photographer/knitter Lauren Osborne and the very talented artist Matthew Felix Sun. Sometimes it takes a village to write a blog post.

Spring and miscellanea

March 4, 2010

春江水暖鸭先知 is a Song dynasty line by Su Shi. “when the brook thaws in spring, the duck is first to know.”

悠悠我心 is a fragment from a well known couplet, meaning something along the lines of ‘lingering in my heart.’ (alt. translation ‘relaxed my heart’)

红帽子
Red hat

红色革命
Red revolution

绿帽子
Green hat, and a symbol of the cuckold; general rude phrase.

Literary graffiti

March 5, 2010

Whiteboard 1: A beautiful woman

减一分太短
增一分太长
不朱面若花
不粉肌如霜
色为天下艳
心乃女中郎

Peter explains: “This is a poem by the Tang Dynasty poet Bai Juyi 白居易. It is supposedly about female beauty. Line by line, it goes roughly like:

Trim an inch* and the whole becomes too short,
Add an inch and the whole becomes too long.
Her face needs no vermillion to be like flowers,
Her skin needs no powder to be like frost;
Colors as beautiful as anything under heaven,
And a heart like a gentleman among ladies.

(Translation by Matthew and Peter)

Matthew comments, “[The last line] seems to say that this woman has a heart like that of man, a misogynist point of view. People have made fun of the first two lines – is she tall or short? The poet wanted to have both ways.”

Whiteboard 2: Military ode

Matthew says, “The first relates to history of Han Chinese fighting off nomadic invaders and the second expresses sentiment that in China the militant heroes are of the things past and people are being too soft. Both are quite ‘heroic’ in tone but also nationalistic.”

Peter adds, “On cursory inspection this is an old ballad. ‘a guest came from the east, and told me of matters in Jianghu,’ etc. normally, though, it seems that the fictional locale of Jianghu (江湖) is usually replaced with Shenyang (沈阳), and this version has other minor variations from this example I found.”

有客自东来
语我江湖事
闻客闲言做冷笑
独对青灯难入眠
酒近十杯心愈寒
弹铁金樽前
鸣蜇低徊星月残
浩气激栏杆
昔日中原狼烟起
侠士凛然扶汉室
问寰宇几许好头颅
狂刀枭首九万九
胡虏血染一江山

There is/are a guest/guests from the east
Telling me affairs of adventures
Listening to guest(s)’s gossip, I sneered
Facing monkish lamp alone, I could not sleep
Near ten cups of wine finished, my heart grew colder
Flipped weapon in front of a gold beaker
Chirping insects’ sound hovering low, while the stars and moon are fading
Noble spirit collides parapets
In the past when middle land [meaning Han China] was covered by invasion signs of wolf-dung smokes
Paladins resolutely propped up the House of Han people
Asking the universe: How many good heads?
The crazy knife beheads ninety-nine thousands
The blood of those nomadic northern Hu bandits, dyed red the country, in one whole piece

(Translation by Matthew)

Whiteboard 3: Just plain depressing

太史至此亦不言
仰天一长叹
五千年来有豪杰
胸臆不平便仗剑
十步杀百人
直洗块垒间
今世安乐绝武功
九州不闻风雷动
情怀只合当生意
口腹蜜剑竟好汉
茶糜大戏夜夜歌
众人醉卧流苏帐
千载英雄事，不值一文钱
专诸聂政皆堪笑，好叫智者一算盘
易水河边看易水，易水潺潺意沉沉
断弦无故人

Come to this, Taishi [a title of an ancient high ranking office holder] became silent as well
Looking up at the sky, a long sigh
There were heroes in the past five thousand years
Whenever there were grievances, they relied on swords
Marched ten steps and slaughter hundred
Washed out the unjustness and gloom
In today’s peaceful world, martial arts disappeared
Nine prefecture [China] don’t hear the movement of storm and thunder
Feelings only suitable for trivial life
Poison in honey is the route to become heroes
Night after night rotten banquet and entertainment
Inside tassel canopy, lie the drunken masses
Thousands years heroes achievements, not worth a penny
Both Zhuanzhu and Niezheng [ancient heroes who assassinated tyrant and autocrat] can be sneered at, thus calculated the wise
Looking at River Yi [Another great hero assassin, Jingke who acrossed River Yi to try to kill the tyrant King of Qin, who became the 'First Emperor' of China] by the bank of River Yi, River Yi murmured and aspiration sank
Instrument string broken [also means the death of wife] and no more old friends

(Translation by Matthew)

A Persian pick-me-up

March 10, 2010

The literary Chinese took up only three of the four whiteboards. The fourth whiteboard remained blank for days, until I came in to find it covered in what seems to be Persian. Lauren helped pick out the Arabic loanwords for me, and Muiz took a stab at the rest (with the caveat that he wasn’t sure about some of the possibly-Persian words). Regardless, it’s a turn for the cheerier after the previous Chinese whiteboard:

بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Bismillah, Ir Rahman, Ir Raheem
In The Name of God, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful

…ءان شاء االله نجاح
InshAllah najah…
God willing, the success of the…

…هرهاي ماريا افراح…
…H(a)rhay Maria Afrah…
…(???) Maria enjoy…

جرج…
…(G)re(g)
…Greg

“God willing, enjoy the success of (?) Maria and Greg”

A few days later, everything was erased and replaced by a few notes for a problem set.

And this quarter, the room is reserved for a virtual anatomy course, and remains locked and empty almost all the time.

* In the original, ‘fen’ (=1/100 chi, 1 chi = 1/3 meter)

The difference in content when compared with, say, the Arabic graffiti, is pretty striking. Perhaps a chart of some sort is called for, one of these days.

Working hard

The graffiti to the right, from the Regenstein stacks, the small text on the left reads “It’s possible to succeed. You can do it!” with the giant response “Fuck you you asshole.”

Found in a Crerar study carrel: “I’m gonna study like a crazy maniac . . . Until the day that I become a surgeon! -Who?”

From a whiteboard on the A-level: “I’ll be sleeping at the library today. Tomorrow? Probably as well.”

From a study cubicle in the Reg: “Let’s try our best. -I want to excel. -Be kind. [Let’s be kind to others.] -Let’s not compare ourselves to others.”

Hardly working

To the right, from the A-level of the Reg: “Lee Jung Hyun = Pork Ribs. I love it. I wanna eat her. – Andrew = Huge intestines. The most delicious.”

Another A-level whiteboard: “Let’s play on the weekend!!”

Finally, on an A-level whiteboard, next to the famous “Winter is the suck” haiku, is a much saucier piece of Korean: “You need some spanking, DanBee Kim.”

Further trips into the stacks have shown that graffiti is indeed written on the study carrels, and it’s the blackboards on the second and third floor study rooms– rather than the whiteboards on the first floor– that are the better analog to the whiteboards in the all-night A-level space in the Reg.

I also recently marveled at the complete lack of German graffiti. This still seems to be the case* in the Reg, but so far it seems that German is the #1 non-English language in Crerar.

This morning, I found the following prayer on a blackboard:

My dear God in heaven,
For the day I give you thanks. For this space, I give you thanks. For my success, I give you thanks. For the time I give you thanks. For all that I give you thanks.
-Me

I Googled a couple excerpts to check, and it doesn’t appear to be a (verbatim) quote from anything in particular. It may, in fact, be heartfelt. An irony-free prayer of thanks to God– I’ve never seen such a thing in the Reg, where despair, sharp retorts, and Nietzsche are the preferred form of self-expression.

Granted, not all the German graffiti is so profound or touching; we’ve also got the numbers 6-10 and what I understand to mean six pebble (yes, without the plural ending).

My current office arrangements make it easy enough for me to duck upstairs for a couple minutes right as the library opens, at least on most days, but Crerar starts filling up early and the study rooms with the chalkboards appear to be in high demand. Not every day is a hit, but expect exponential growth in the Crerar Library graffiti corpus in the coming months.

* I recently came across one line of German, prefacing the rest of the quote in French. I’m not sure whether to count it as “legitimate”. On one hand, I find myself wondering if there’s some connection, perhaps, to a French translation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. On the other hand, I wonder if the German is in response to my assertion that there was no German graffiti in the Reg.

One day last year, that changed. A student covered the Crerar elevator with sheets of paper, taped a box of pens near the buttons, and invited other students to adorn the elevator with graffiti. “Neil sucks/blows” appears to be a running theme. (And I thought it was Nate who sucks!)

Crerar is the easiest data to start with– for the next couple months, until we move back to the Reg, my office is based out of Crerar. What’s more, last week I got a tip about some good graffiti in the men’s bathroom in Crerar but the logistical issues involved in the Crerar men’s bathrooms make that the topic of another post.

About the library

Crerar is the “science library”, home to “more than 1.4 million volumes in the biological, medical and physical sciences as well as collections in general science and the philosophy and history of science, medicine, and technology”¹.

Who studies there?

As a former student, my impression of Crerar is that it’s where the “serious” science students go to study. (This in contrast to all the folks writing “I hate chemistry!” on the walls of the Reg.) This would include your serious pre-med types, med students, and science grad students. Unlike the Reg which is pretty deserted in the early morning hours, by 8:30 or 9 AM the big open study room on the first floor of Crerar already has more than a few patrons.

What are the study spaces like?

The first-floor study area (made up of rows of tables) seems to be well-attended, but the second and third floors also have plenty of tables and a few study carrels mixed in with the bookstacks.

There are a lot more tables than carrels, and there aren’t nooks with study desks built into the walls like the Reg. On one hand, that’s bad news for graffiti, but the lower amount of foot traffic in certain “public” areas (like the staircase between floors) makes them more feasible targets for vandalism than the equivalent in the Reg.

Where is graffiti written?

The tables appear to be graffiti-free, and I could only find two pieces in the carrels. The major loci of “graffiti” are the blackboards and movable whiteboards in and around the study rooms. The bathrooms are also home to some graffiti.

Graffiti content
Alliterative socialism

There’s a (possibly single-person) alliterative meme following the pattern of “[Socialist-related] [social event]“. “Bolshevik bash” is the “flagship” phrase that appears on a carrel, on the stairs, and in the center of larger piece of graffiti in the women’s bathroom (see right, click for larger version):

• Bolshevik bash
• Communist cavort
• Soviet sleep-over
• Marxist mingle
• Proletariat potluck
• Collectivist cookout

Motivation

The one and only (non-Bolshevik) piece of graffiti in the study carrels is written in Korean, and reads: “I’m gonna study like a crazy maniac. . . . Until the day that I become a surgeon! – Who?”

More soothing is a piece I found written in lovely cursive on the blackboard of a green study room, reading simply, “do not fret”. (Click for larger size.)

Doodles

There’s something about doodles and whiteboards. Like the A-level in the Reg, the whiteboards in Crerar appear to be a magnet for strange, non-academic drawings. Did you know that Crerar hosts the meetings of the Secret Chemistry Club? And most girls go through a phase of loving ponies… granted, not usually around the same time they’re possibly studying for the MCATs.

Special thanks to Andrew Lee Chen for the tip about Crerar bathroom graffiti, and to David Yung Ho Kim for translating the Korean.

* I’m not counting Harper, which doesn’t have books anymore, or Mansueto, which is a giant hole in the ground at the moment.

¹ About the John Crerar Library