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 [...]
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 [...]
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Korean isn’t in the top five for non-English languages with the most graffiti, but it’s well-represented for a language with relatively few students. (See A look at non-English graffiti for details.) I can’t even decipher the Korean alphabet, so David Yung Ho Kim and Jessica Choi have helpfully translated the graffiti I’ve been accumulating over [...]
Friday, February 26, 2010
Over the last month, I’ve come to realize that my initial assessment of Crerar’s lack of graffiti probably didn’t take into account the cyclical nature of library graffiti. It’s exploded since then, leaving me to think that Crerar graffiti might be washed clean in December, just like the Reg. Further trips into the stacks have [...]
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
The other day, a baby boomer coworker asked me about politics in the graffiti. Was there protest graffiti after the recent Supreme Court ruling on corporate spending in elections? “Of course not,” I replied, surprised that he’d even ask– though it’s something I’ve heard from other baby boomers before. It’s not that politics are absent [...]
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
It’s been about a month since I last wrote about the B-level men’s room (first post can be found here, last month’s update here, though I’ve been back a couple times since). The decline has begun: philosopher wordplay has descended into more penis drawings and an attempt to turn an anti-gay slur into a pun. [...]
Friday, February 12, 2010
This week in the stacks, I stumbled across two pieces of Chinese graffiti different from those I’d encountered previously. While most Chinese graffiti has been written horizontally, these pieces gave the impression of being written vertically, in neat rows. Peter Behr, a UofC alum, identified the first piece as a notable passage from Dream of [...]
Amidst the classrooms and offices of Eckhart Hall lies the large-ish room with large windows and two quirky balconies that houses 55,000 “research level monographs, scholarly journals, and selected textbooks in computer science, mathematics, and statistics”. Who studies there? My husband did a stint as a student assistant in Eckhart Library, and as he recalls [...]
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