This evening I dropped by the ArtShould Postsecret at UChicago Exhibition, to see how closely the content aligned with the graffiti I’ve collected at UChicago. The similarity between some of the graffiti and the well-known Postsecret project has struck me since I started collecting graffiti. On Flickr, I tagged many of the early images with [...]
Apologies for a silent winter quarter– the graffiti project tends to slide towards hibernation in the winter in general (I took no pictures at all in winter ’09), and it was compounded this year by heaps of stress and moving. Fear not, though, I still went to the stacks weekly, so let’s catch up on [...]
Saturday, November 6, 2010
It’s taken some time, but graffiti is creeping back onto the bookstack walls in the Regenstein Library. Most notable is the wall of poetry, where “To Delmore Schwartz” by Robert Lowell has been joined by an anonymous quote: Rejoice! O Man For your achievements are great and number as the stars (read both full size) [...]
I’ve got to hand it to Facilities: painting over the graffiti in the Regenstein Library at the end of last school year has done wonders for keeping the stacks pristine all summer and into the start of this school year. In fact, even now there seems to be only one piece of new graffiti on [...]
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 [...]
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) [...]
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 [...]
Fresh graffiti