There are, of course, some obvious differences between the media of the library wall and a postcard intended for a Postsecret exhibition on campus. Most significantly is the issue of audience. A secret written on a specially-designated Postsecret postcard is meant to be seen as part of the exhibition; a piece of graffiti in the library stacks, at least when I started the project, could only expect to be seen by other students occupying the same study carrel (and not even everyone– I remain amazed at how people can fail to notice details in the world around them, like writing on walls.) The public/private distinction has become less clear over time, as Crescat Graffiti has gained notoriety. I intended the publication of the book in November 2009 to be the culmination and end of this project, fearing that my “going public” with my graffiti-collecting habit might influence potential graffiti-writers. I know it’s had an impact. I’ve found a piece of graffiti written specifically for me (seriously, please, don’t do that, I won’t post it). I also wonder if the recent hijinks of the Advanced Poetry Workshop were in any way inspired by this project (I hope not). I’m still a little surprised every time I’m reminded I have fans, but in a sense it’s only a reminder that what I’m documenting now is in some way different than what I started off documenting.

In any case, this evening’s exhibit featured confessions that were intended to be presented to the public in the context of “art”. The prompt being Postsecret rather than the sorts of things that come to mind when studying, there were significantly fewer complaints about the academic aspects of school. This does not, however, preclude expressions of self-doubt regarding one’s achievement: two people were concerned about their qualification for their upcoming jobs. The question of employment seemed like a significant theme overall, also present in a postcard from an almost-PhD who couldn’t find a part-time summer job worth it. In contrast, employment has never been a major theme in the library graffiti, other than in the iconic “This is for six figures and a hot wife“.

There were postcards about sex, of course, but less by way of penis drawings. Race was a more prevalent theme (liking/disliking particular races, concerns about being perceived as racist, etc.) than in the library; while it’s a more common theme in (men’s) bathrooms, the postcards presented it with less venom. That said, maybe more strongly-worded postcards were censored. Particularly interesting was the portrayal of sexuality. I’ve written about homophobia in the graffiti before, but the postcards in the exhibit were devoid of such sentiments, and instead there were a number of postcards expressing surprise at being attracted to someone of the same sex (despite identifying as straight). Again, one wonders whether some degree of censorship was involved in weeding out the sorts of comments that are relatively common in the stacks.

There was at least one postcard that I’d group with the “meta” graffiti (remarking on a marker fetish), and UofC students’ inclination to directly quote literature and song lyrics– a rather rare tendency, looking across a variety of university library graffiti corpora– also appeared in the postcards, with a quote from The Lion King and a response to Cher’s inquiry about belief in love after love.

The overarching focus on the social life at UofC brought out confessions about not having a best friend, obsessing over one’s future wedding, and hating one’s sorority sisters, in addition to comments about the complexity of love that wouldn’t be so unusual to find in the stacks. My favorite category of graffiti, intellectual commentary, wasn’t well-represented at all, but there were more than a few heartwarming pieces. I’ve posted selected examples from the entire exhibition here.

(6/2/11 addendum: Janel Jin, from the ArtShould Board of Directors, clarified the question of censorship for me: “We received over 200 postcards over the past weeks, and only did not display maybe three or four – these were taken out because they either negatively mentioned another student by their full name, or were simply lacking in content (intentional image/text).” Thanks, Janel!)

• Marx won a competition between him, Smith, and Wendell Berry. What the basis for the votes was is unclear; I assume “general awesomeness”.
• At least one person has been horny in the Reg. Thanks to UChicago Hookups, this can now be appreciated by the world at large, including those unfamiliar with bookstacks.
• UChicago: where knowledge of the names of non-Latin alphabets is a prerequisite for understanding our racism. New t-shirt, anyone?
• The evolution of man: Homo Economics.
• An exploration of metrics for one’s life, including love (courtesy of “Rent”), AIDS (is that response really necessary?), or, just measure your penis.
• Someone mastered chemistry. Someone else remains in the dark.
• Love was secret, and necessary for action.
• A woman announced her pregnancy. In the bathroom. In Arabic.
• I wonder if they’re not teaching cursive in schools these days.
• A discussion of the joys of being young and alive spun off in various directions, including homophobia and an appreciation of Latin.
• “To Delmore Schwartz” was joined by numerous other bits of celebratory, religious, and absurdist verse.

Given the current media frenzy over UChicago Hookups (now eduHookups– they’re going to have a great time with that at Brown), it seems fitting to close this post with a beautiful combination of aspiration and horniness, from the 4th floor women’s bathroom in Cobb, courtesy of Sarah Holzhausen.* “I want to have sex with what I want to become.” Anyone seen a post looking for “my future self, or someone like future me?”

* Yes, I take submissions! E-mail quinn [at] crescatgraffiti [dot] com with photos of university graffiti and where you found it.

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)
and then subsequently, by Jabberwocky in its entirety.

While one student recommends appreciating the joy of being YOUNG and ALIVE, another laments the temporary nature of graffiti, and a third dismisses the entire conversation with “Quit being gay, study!”. (See full size.) Meanwhile, someone else is just kidding.

In the 5th floor women’s bathroom, I discovered “I’m pregnant” in Arabic, translated by Lauren Osborne who wonders if the writer just took a pregnancy test, and the wall was the first “person” she told. I’ve also discovered that Barbie studies in Crerar science library. There’s some elaborate gremlin heads in the Reg study carrels, not far from some ruthless copyediting of another student’s “hip” graffiti (see full size).

Perhaps my favorite so far from this fall is a serious response to what was probably just a whiny Why is Latin so hard?: “b/c they don’t print it with diacritical marks. (it really would be much easier if they did”. Lamenting the absence of macrons in Latin texts not written for learners: I’ve never seen the likes of it elsewhere.

Speaking of the uniqueness of UChicago graffiti, I’m putting together another “analysis” of my enormous corpus of graffiti data, now including material from a variety of universities. Ever since I started examining graffiti from outside the University of Chicago, I’ve had the sense that there’s something unique about the graffiti we have here, but I’ve never tried to quantify it. So now I’m going through each piece of graffiti from each university, classifying it (and weighting certain classes differently depending on their frequency across the entire corpus– orthographic corrections and intellectual commentary count for more than sex or complaining about classes), and assigning a score of 1-3 (1 is for a single word or expected phrase, 2 is for a more fleshed-out thought, 3 is for something with a twist– be it insight, wordplay, or something that makes it memorable). The plan is then to divide the total score by the number of pieces of graffiti, to determine the “interestingness” of each university’s graffiti corpus. One could argue that my metric privileges the UChicago graffiti, but I really am trying to be objective, and I’d like to hope that we can all agree that there really is something more interesting about “Holbach your marks, you’re going to ruin the Staël” than “Fuck you”.

Tangentially (and without having any sense of what the outcome will look like), I’m also working on determining the source of the various music, movie, TV and literature quotes found in the graffiti corpus, to see the differences in genre and media distribution on different campuses.

I’m hoping to have both done by the end of this month, so stay tuned.

Meanwhile this summer, I’ve tracked down graffiti at Brown, Arizona State, University of Colorado, and McGill (where they love to deface the “don’t eat or drink in the library” signs– photos still pending.) I’ve seen cows offering themselves up as meals in Lithuania, a disturbing conflation of Internet Explorer with the internet in Albania, and graffiti ranging from your standard-issue penis to political commentary in a verb conjugation chart in Kosovo.

But the Reg– the library that started this whole project– has remained devoid of graffiti… until last week, when it cropped up somewhere I’ve never seen it before.

I received an anonymous tip that someone had spray-painted something of a mural on one of the concrete walls between the Reg and the Max Palevsky dorm. Spray paint? A whole mural? This I had to see.

It’s in a hidden-away corner that could have perhaps escaped notice for quite some time, were it not for the fact that it’s partly visible from the north-facing windows of the Reg.

Motifs of smoking and sperm with faces seem to join the scenes on the north and east concrete walls; between the two stands a Triforce. The north wall begins with JWOWW, before moving to a sperm-with-face that looks like he’s been staying up too late studying or something. The major work on the north wall is some kind of genie (or perhaps Nietzschean superman) with smoke pouring out from between his lips.

On the other side of the triforce on the east wall, the mural picks up with three sperm-with-faces: one in a baseball cap, one confused and badly in need of a dentist, and one that appears to have picked up the cold that’s going around.

From there, the mural gets increasingly bizarre, featuring an overenthusiastic smoking alien that appears to be falling in love with a human with an early 90′s haircut, who can only think of “Yo” to say in response. It’s a little hard to tell where the mural goes from there, beyond some bright, colorful shapes reminiscent of 70′s cartoons, but there’s plenty of hearts so maybe things end well for the alien-human couple.

I’m no art history scholar, nor particularly literate in pop culture, so I welcome any explanation of what Jersey Shore, sperm-with-faces, smoking, aliens, 90′s hairstyles, 70′s cartoons, and the Legend of Zelda have to do with each other. If you want to see the full mural, you can check it out behind the Reg while it lasts, or in the photo set.

ASU library graffiti has three unique and striking features:

1. The number of messages consisting primarily or exclusively of frat names
2. The high frequency with which gay and fag are used as insults
3. The amount of scratches — not drawings, but animalistic scratches on the desks

Frat names

I was astonished at the prevalence of the genre of graffiti consisting of one or more sets of frat names– without any context, or at best, with an associated negative judgment, often phrased in homophobic manner. The dark wood study desks on the upper levels of the library are covered in this kind of graffiti, and I quickly grew tired of photographing it. Taken collectively, frat names would be by far the most frequently used “word” in the entire graffiti corpus. There’s nothing unique about frat names (even, much to my chagrin, at the University of Chicago), nor the combination of frat names and homophobia (even, again, at the University of Chicago), but the extent to which it appears to be the dominant form of “discourse” at Arizona State is stunning.

Homophobia

Consider for a moment, if you will, the top five words from the corpus:

1. love(s) – 34
2. fuck(s/er/a/in/ing, etc.) – 27
3. gay(s) – 12
4. fag(s/gots, etc.) – 12
5. like(s) – 11

I think that pretty much says it all.

It would’ve been interesting to explore the men’s bathrooms at ASU, to look for private examples of racism, antisemitism, and misogyny to contrast with public homophobia like at the University of Chicago. Alas, skulking around men’s bathrooms at my home institution is one thing, and doing so at other universities is entirely another.

Scratchings

ASU is not lacking in drawings of genitalia, but the phenomenon of assorted scratches is not one I’ve seen elsewhere. Perhaps it is on account of these seemingly-feral students roaming the building that those interested in pursuing serious study are caged. No joke. The equivalent to the private study carrel found at other universities is a small caged room that could pass as an inmate’s cell.

Attack of the space felines

One day while spending two months at ASU, my husband came across this graffiti narrative in a classroom. “Literate” might be slightly overstating the case, but it does have a certain spark of creativity, doesn’t involve any frat names or homophobia, and I think it makes for the least depressing conclusion to this post:

To many puppies Are Being Shot in The dark

That’s because the horses can’t buy anymore ammo for the farmers.

Else, the puppies simply could not afford to pay the new taff tariffs on electricity imposed by the draconian rule of the Cilk, space-felines from a distant galaxy. After the Clik snuffed out our sun, the genocidal execution of the puppy-dogs had to take place in the dark. For you see, the Clik simply hate candles.

In just three hours combing through the study areas in the Rock stacks, I collected over 500 pieces of graffiti– a number that took me about six months in the corresponding areas of the Reg. What’s the difference? Even though the Rock and the Reg have similar setups, (wood study desks and adjacent white walls) students at Brown tend to write on the desks, where at UChicago the majority of the graffiti appears on the walls, which are much easier to clean periodically. The result: desk-as-palimpsest, with some graffiti in areas of the desk that are less likely to be worn down by other people’s books and papers apparently persisting for 15+ years.

This is the first time I’ve been able to collect such a sizable corpus at any university besides UChicago, and Brown being an Ivy League school makes for a fairer comparison² than, say, UChicago vs. Arizona State. If you want to explore the corpus yourself, here’s the photo set³ and the transcription of the English graffiti.

The spaces

There a lot more desks at Brown than UChicago– on most floors, they’re lined up in rows. Like at Berkeley and Mount Holyoke, it appears that at least some of the desks are reserved for individuals. Unlike Mount Holyoke, few of the desks are decorated, and I found only one note threatening anyone who might encroach on the space. (Don’t mess with Masumi’s desk. She’ll eat you.)

Similarities?

As I was walking through the library, madly snapping pictures (I maxed out my 4 GB memory card in the first hour and a half), a number of whimsical gems stuck in my mind. Recent UChicago graffiti additions haven’t been doing much for me lately; when I think of the corpus, the banal leaps to mind first. The novelty of the Brown graffiti made it seem fascinating and profound by comparison. The discovery of a hieroglyphic play on words seemed like a particularly striking similarity to the UChicago corpus.

But looking at word frequencies across a transcribed data set provides a more dispassionate view onto the data. Upon greater reflection, it seems like there are more differences than similarities between the sets of graffiti. The picture that emerges is of UChicago as a school of (at times gleefully) unhappy, critical students eager to one-up each other in intellectual (or less-intellectual) debates, whereas Brown leads more towards the hedonistic and happier, expressing their sexuality.

Perhaps the one thing students at both schools share is a dislike of organic chemistry.

Organic chemistry

In the Reg, students languish under the cruel hand of “o-chem“. In the Rock, it’s “orgo” that strikes fear into the hearts of students. And, as at UChicago, there’s always some masochist who enjoys it.

Insecurity

Despair is a theme so common in UChicago graffiti that it has its own photo set with over 70 photos. Students worry they aren’t smart enough, and are drowning and doomed. In the Brown graffiti corpus, one student wondered why they were accepted to Brown, and another student needs to be smarter, though those are the only examples of such sentiments.

At Brown, students seem pretty happy with the school; someone even wrote it a goodbye note. There’s no meme of “be happy” (suggesting happiness is an unrealized state) like at UChicago, and while there was one conversation about depression, it was by no means a pervasive topic.

Given that smiley and frowny faces often serve as a form of punctuation rather than being a meaningful indicator of overall state of being, I hesitate to bring it up in this context. For what little it may be worth, though, where UChicago has almost a 2:1 ratio of smiley to frowny faces, the ratio is 5:1 at Brown.

Homophobia

I’ve written about anti-LGBTQ graffiti at UChicago before, and Brown provides an interesting point of comparison and contrast. There are 8 examples in the public Brown study areas, compared to 12 in the corresponding spaces at UChicago; that’s about even, since the UChicago corpus has about twice as many words.

At UChicago, there’s greater variety in the words used (fag, flamer, gay, homo, homosexual, lesbo); at Brown, there’s only “gay”, “fag[got]” and “homosexual”. There’s one use of “lesbian” Furthermore, while “fag” was used less than “gay” at UChicago, it outnumbers “gay” in the Brown corpus.

Brown and UChicago sport nearly identical pieces of graffiti, where anti-LGBTQ language is used as a counter-response to someone responding to the word “retarded”; at UChicago, it’s “gay“; at Brown, it’s “faggot“. At Brown, Backgammon is for fags only, a “good fag suck” finds its way into some bad collective poetry, and “faggot” is used as a generic insult.

However, three of the eight pieces were subsequently censured by other students. “Why are there so many homosexuals at brown? is followed up by “Stop homophobia”. “Butt-chugger – GAY” has the incredulous reply “Really? In here!?”. And “NO GAYS” is rejected by a number of individuals: “U R Sick”, “no hatred”, “No ignorance”.

There’s a couple other pieces of graffiti at Brown that refer to LGBTQ individuals differently from those pieces mentioned above. A response to one piece about “hot chicks” asks “Are you lesbian?” without any apparent pejorative implication. A follow-up to a piece of graffiti about the directionality of penis bending states “Queers Bash Back“; if there was any initial anti-LGBTQ bashing, though, it’s been worn off the desk. Finally, one piece illustrates reproduction vs. pleasure, where pleasure is initially defined as ⚢ ⚣. Although a reply disagrees, there’s no homophobia in the response.

Sex

The topic of sex is perhaps the most significant point of divergence between UChicago and Brown. On one hand, UChicago has more penis drawings, even when accounting for the different corpus size. On the other hand, it seems like Brown has more of everything else.

Chicago has 43 sexually-focused words out of 9209– .4%. Brown has 70 such words out of 5352– 1.3%. For a comparison, see the following chart. Please keep in mind that the Brown corpus is about half the size of the UChicago corpus:

(% is percentage of the total uses of the word that are sexual, for those words that also have a non-sexual meaning. “Penis” and “Vagina” also include uses of “dick, cock, dong” and “pussy, cunt”, respectively.)

As you can see above, UChicago and Brown have a comparable amount of fucking (slightly more sexually at UChicago), but there is a great deal more sexual sucking at Brown. In fact, almost half the sucking at Brown is sexual, whereas both “fuck” and “suck” are used sexually only 16% of the time at UChicago.

UChicago has more penis references, even when taking the relative corpora sizes into consideration, but vaginas are referenced about 8x more often at Brown than UChicago.

The gems

Perhaps I’ve been a bit hard on Brown graffiti in this blog post. The fact is, walking into a study area covered in graffiti gave me a taste of the thrill I first felt when I started taking pictures in the Regenstein Library. It gave this project a much-needed jolt of life and made me want to write a blog post for the first time in over a month.

My favorite pieces of graffiti tend to be ones that don’t fit well under any header in a blog post highlighting the major trends at a given school. There’s ellipsis turning into bubbles from the mouth of a hungry fish. There’s Go Go Gadget Shroud of Turin, which feels like it should be an item in UChicago’s famous Scav Hunt. There’s “I used to believe but now I’m incredible“. There’s a quote from W.H. Auden’s “The More Loving One“. But I’d like to close with an adapted quote from Rumi:

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are so many ways.

¹ This seems like a trivial point, but it’s not a given. Just wait until I write about Arizona State University’s graffiti.

² UChicago folks may be quick to mention that Brown is the lowest-ranked of the Ivies (#16 in the current rankings– compared to UChicago at #8). A good case can be made that rankings say very little, and UChicago was a more interesting and quirky place before the administration started making the changes that improved our ranking. There’s probably something to the idea that Brown’s image doesn’t include the intellectual firepower of UChicago; nonetheless, I think it’s hard to argue that it’s not a peer institution, all UChicago elitism aside.

³ There’s a fair amount of French, German and Greek graffiti, if anyone wants to help out with the translation. Just comment on the Flickr photo or e-mail me.

We’ve got some sort of battle scene between UChicago archers and Princeton wizards. Of course, the outcome of their petty battle hardly matters, since they’re about to be crushed by a reference to “Dr. Strangelove” (1959). (Personally, I wonder if it’s a successful reference if you have to say what it’s a reference to. Furthermore, if you’re going to be a know-it-all and include the release date of a film, you might want to make sure you get it right.)

While the B-level men’s room has traditionally had a striking number of vagina drawings, with a “severe lack of penis drawings“, currently the penis reigns supreme as the only genitalia represented in the stall. The penis is accompanied by the guardian angel of the stall, who has a goatee.

Some of the graffiti writers appear to be displeased with the latest turn of events:

Assholes,
Kindly refrain from “Cleansing” UChicago of its only bit of Charmin. (i.e. reg graffitti)

But not everyone sees this as a crisis:

They always crimp our style. But don’t be so Krauss. They’ve Freid so much space up to Fostor new puns!

If you find yourself missing the last round of intellectual wordplay, head on over to the B-level men’s bathroom graffiti page– I’ve got everything documented up through April 13, 2010.

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 it’s written with a determinative it’s usually written with the “town” determinative (which looks like a circle with bisecting lines drawn inside of it). So the writing here contains a bit of a contradiction: it’s strange to see km.t written with the “foreign land” determinative because it was often used to determine words that are names of other countries or words that have a connection to “desert”, or “upland” (which is desert, in the case of Egypt); and km means “black”, km.t (with “town” determinative) literally means “black land”, i.e. the alluvial land of Egypt–the parts of Egypt that were inundated by the Nile when flooding, and was used by the Egyptians to refer to their country, or that part of it that was cultivable.

* Check out the article in Spiegel Online, “Graffiti in Uni-Bibliotheken: “Wir haben’s am Morgen zweimal gemacht“.

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.

I’ve been keeping up with it, and below are some trends. If you want to follow the latest UChicago graffiti, I’ve also put together a new combined RSS feed for all the photo sets.

Déjà vu

It was November 2007 when I last saw a quote from some douchebag. Lo and behold, it reoccurred on one of the concrete pillars. And remember the sad tale of love during finals week? I recently found it restated more generally as Academia vs. Love. The very end of last school year brought T.S. Eliot to the stacks; within this last week, Emily Dickinson arrived.

Color

There’s always been some color in the Reg graffiti, but recent graffiti writers have embraced the liberal application of highlighters and Sharpies. Consider this shadowing on Tang Dynasty poetry, a decorative star (or stars), as a replacement for italics in citation, or just to set off the center of a pretty flower.

Classic UofC

A wall covered in econ graphs and equations, with a translation for the rest of us: “Your stock went down“. A cantankerous reaction to love in the stacks, and a response reflecting on the purpose of library walls. A drawing of breasts and a penis, crossed out and “censored by sex“. Senatus Populusque Romanus made an appearance. One graffiti writer illustrated the value of drawing the line somewhere. The Reg stacks are full of people providing (un)solicited advice, but so rarely do the advice seekers provide feedback. And finally, have you ever considered what your choice of apple says about you?

A reminder

As I’ve stated elsewhere on this site, I don’t endorse writing graffiti, and I’d hate to be the cause of property damage. If I come across graffiti that’s clearly been written specifically for me, I won’t publish it.