• 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.

I’ve decided to aim for writing something monthly for the blog, with the thought being that 12 meaningful posts that I’m interested in writing are better than 52 posts where I don’t have time in-between to explore a topic to the extent I’d like, and end up just throwing something together without much care or interest.

I’m still taking and uploading weekly photos, and will be sharing brief updates, anecdotes, and highlights from new graffiti on the Facebook page. And if I’m feeling inspired, I may on occasion write more than once a month. But that’s the plan, and it’s a necessary change if the blog is going to see its first anniversary. Thanks.

But if you try to go to crescatgraffiti.com in China, you get “Page not available“, along with a bar asking the user if they’d like to translate the (unavailable) English-language page into Chinese.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit puzzled. The site has nothing to do with the Chinese government and very little to do with politics, and there’s only one piece of graffiti that mentions Tibet. Maybe it falls under websites that contain “obscenity, pornography, and criminal activity”– admittedly, the inherently-criminal UChicago graffiti does include plenty of content that is arguably obscene and/or pornographic.

Go figure.

(P.S. After posting this, I noticed today’s date. No April Fools here, though, folks…)

One of my absolute favorite pieces, and one of the first graffiti pictures I took:

The less-romantic follow-up advice:

Subtle longing:

Love in the time of H1N1:
‘I get flu-like symptoms when Shawnty ain’t around’

A very special UofC kind of love

Simply put

Be his Valentine

In conclusion

Okay, so there was only one contest entry (other than what I did to my own netbook), but it would’ve taken something really amazing (like actually implementing any of the AV Club’s suggestions) to top Camilla’s entry. At some point soon, I’ll be posting Camilla’s pattern for the “Go to Italy” stitching so you can make your own.

I’m still accepting submissions, though: send me a graffiti remix, and I’ll send you a couple graffiti buttons and a copy of the book. Instructions are still up on the remix page.

• Differentiating walls from whiteboards from study carrels
• Date
  • Quarter
  • Year
  • Month? Day?
• Granularity
  • Word-level
  • Sentence level?
  • Graffiti-post level? – you could do things like count average number of words in a piece of graffiti
• Writing implement?

I could do any or all of these, but I wonder how many of them are going to yield any actual interesting results.

Then there’s the question of format. I was initially thinking public Google Doc spreadsheet, but I prefer doing my data crunching using XSLT, which suggests XML. (And I find it easier to go from XML to spreadsheet than the other way around.) That said, if I’m going the XML route, I’m doing my own schema– no doubt there’s a way to encode all of the things I want using TEI, but I’d prefer to have at least an ounce of sanity left by the time I’m done with this.

The data set will be free for anyone to use, so if you’ve got preferences (other than using TEI) or suggestions for what metadata I should include, do leave a comment.

The Writing on the Wall: Quinn Dombrowski documents the Regenstein Library’s graffiti

by Emilie Shumway, photo by Sam Bowman

The University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library is one of the largest research libraries in the world, with over 7.7 million volumes in its collection. But books aren’t the only worthwhile reading material in the building—anyone who walks the perimeter of the bookstacks can’t help but notice the scribbled musings, large and small, that find their way into the library’s private study areas.

While these complaints, pleas, and words of advice have been quietly appreciated by some before their inevitable whitewashing by the library’s janitorial staff, Quinn Dombrowski, a library staff member who graduated from the University in 2006 with a joint BA/MA, has been working hard since the summer of 2007 to document and preserve the quiet desperation of the university’s overworked students. Her prolific Flickr page is home to nearly eight hundred photos of Reg graffiti, which have caught the attention of the LA Times’ “Jacket Copy” book blog and Chicagoist, among others.

Dombrowski says she got the idea shortly after she was hired at the Reg. While wandering through the stacks with her camera and looking at the books, she began to pay more and more attention to the quirky words on the walls instead. “They’re really a window onto the authentic UofC culture,” she explained over coffee. “It’s very stereotypically geeky. There’s no attempt to gussy it up for prospective students.”

With exceptions, much of the graffiti is by turns amusing and touching. “I’m in love and it’s finals week,” someone has noted, expressing with simplicity a sweet and easily relatable complication. Someone else informs the reader plainly, “I dislike Frankenstein.” Many of the more interesting scrawls come from the interactions that blossom from one initial comment: “Why can’t I get higher than a B on a paper?” one exasperated student queries, and impatient advice balloons out beside it: “You should write better,” someone explains, and someone else offers the longer recommendation, “I got an A- once. Maybe you should concentrate more and not write on walls. It shows you’re distracted.”

There is something unique, Dombrowski says, about the UofC’s graffiti. Her project has brought her a new interest in library graffiti, and a recent peek inside the University of Michigan’s library revealed “a lot more love and sex and frats, but very little in the way of the charming graffiti the UofC is known for.”

Since her Flickr album began to receive more attention this year, Dombrowski has managed to present the graffiti in a number of new formats, from buttons to shirts to, more recently, a book—“Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur: Confessions of the University of Chicago.” Signed copies are on sale throughout Hyde Park, from 57th Street Books to Powell’s. Dombrowski has also announced a RegRemix contest through her website crescatgraffiti.com, in which she is encouraging people to restructure a sample of graffiti in some new format, with graffitied paraphernalia going out as prizes for the winning entries.

At present, due partially to her sudden exposure and a need to issue “preemptive disclaimers” about not ruining university property, Dombrowski has put graffiti documentation on the back burner for a while. Still, being no stranger to a myriad of pet projects, she has continued to find ways of amusing herself with her camera. “I’m really inspired by the South Asian book covers on the fourth floor [of the Regenstein],” she explains, referencing the colorful and often trippy books written primarily in a number of Indian languages. For each image, she makes an amused guess at the title of the book, based on the cover. There are already over five hundred photos.