Recent works of fiction, including Neal Stephenson’s Anathem and Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, depict a future where traditional literacy has become a niche skill, and the general populace relies on simple symbols for written communication. An examination of the graffiti of Hayden Library at Arizona State University leaves one with the impression that such a scenario [...]
Brown University’s Rockefeller Library is reminiscent of UChicago’s Regenstein. They’re both rather ugly from the outside, they both have two basements, they both have nicknames (the “Rock” and “Reg”, respectively), and they’re both filled with graffiti mostly written in literate1 English.
In just three hours combing through the study areas in the Rock stacks, I collected [...]
Sometime between April 13th and today, the great purge came to the B-level men’s room in the Regenstein Library, clearing away the philosophical wordplay that made it truly the nerdiest place on earth. (Cue the sad trombones.) But fear not, the stalls are not bare– even though the graffiti has had no more than a [...]
The students responsible for the now world-famous* hieroglyphic sex graffiti have returned to express their love for Egypt.
I ran this one by my expert Egyptologist, and in addition to translating it they had some fascinating remarks about the characters they chose to render ‘Egypt’:
Egypt here is written with the “foreign land” determinative (hill-shapes) –when [...]
In the last couple weeks, there’s been a couple noteworthy doodles on the blackboards in the Crerar the study rooms that strike me as a bit creepier than anything I’ve seen in the corresponding A-level spaces of the Reg, or elsewhere on campus. The first was in one of the green rooms on the third [...]
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
It’s 5th week, which means more students are heading to the Reg to study for midterms. (Or not study, as the case may be.) During the last few months, the Crescat Graffiti blog has ventured beyond the Regenstein Library to explore the graffiti in Harper (mostly-not-my-gender) bathrooms, in far-flung dorms, in other campus libraries, at [...]
After some recent publicity in the University of Chicago Magazine and the Chicago Tribune, alumni have been e-mailing me with their own memories of UChicago graffiti. With their permission, I’d like to share them here.
Eric Blommel (AB Philosophy ‘92) recalls:
I shit, therefore I am shit.
For a good time, call… another school and transfer!
[Written on the [...]
In the 1960’s, before the Regenstein Library was built, racism wasn’t hard to find in the graffiti written in Harper Library and elsewhere on campus. Today, it has been driven into the “private” space of men’s bathroom stalls, along with a number of other comments that would likely be censured by other graffiti-writers, if not [...]
I was tipped off to a men’s bathroom in Harper– a building with a number of classrooms, the adviser offices, and an all-night study space– that was covered in graffiti, and with the help of some male door-guards (my awesome coworkers Ifeanyi Okonma and Avi Schwab), I was able to hit up all the men’s [...]
Also filed in Bathrooms
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Tagged 9/11, antisemitism, bathroom graffiti, capitalism, communism, democrats, Graffiti, modernity, Obama, politics, republicans, taxes, University of Chicago
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I was excited to visit Mt. Holyoke College on a recent trip, anticipating that an all-female student body might produce a different kind of library graffiti than I’ve seen at the University of Chicago or Berkeley. Indeed, I was not disappointed.
Their library is seven floors, though most of them are confined to a fairly small [...]
Fresh graffiti