Eric Blommel (AB Philosophy ’92) recalls:

1. I shit, therefore I am shit.
2. For a good time, call… another school and transfer!
3. [Written on the TP dispenser] University of Chicago Diplomas. Take one.
4. The entire text of “Jabberwocky”, each stanza in different handwriting.
5. [In a girl's stall] Nature abhors a vacuum…that’s why I lost my virginity.

Twenty years later, GianCarlo Nardini remembers from Eckhart math library “Life is like a bowl of cereal. No, life IS a bowl of cereal.”

The library may frown on graffiti, but Caitlin Wylie’s admissions essay won the hearts of the people over at Admissions. To answer a question about why she wanted to go to UChicago, Caitlin (class of ’08) wrote about the graffiti she saw when visiting as a prospective student:

I knew the University of Chicago was for me when I entered the
Regenstein Library. The book smell, the computer tables, the little
study booths, and the silence all seemed pretty typical, until I
wandered into the biggest room I’ve ever seen. I tiptoed down the
infinite rows of tall metal bookcases with my jaw dropped in
admiration. After a while I reached a wall with lonely desks set into
it, and the area was so isolated that I felt a little uneasy. Then I
noticed the writing on the blank wall in front of every desk. The
millions of messages were wonderful, witty and insightful and unusual
and sarcastic. An entire physics problem spanned one wall, floor to
ceiling. There were whole conversations that obviously spanned months
of correspondence between U of C students. There was a drawing of a
gravestone bearing the words, “Here lies the hope that I will ever get
my paper done.” I love that U of C students, famous for heavy
studying, take breaks from their books to leave words of encouragement
and entertainment for their comrades. The attraction of U of C is not
the partying-proficiency of its students, but their dedication, focus,
and ability to have great fun discussing the subjects they love,
verbally or on library walls. In high school, class topics do not
travel outside the room, but, as far as I can tell, discussion and
education happen all the time at U of C.

I’d love to hear more graffiti stories from alumni– feel free to drop me a line at quinn – at – crescatgraffiti.com or post to the Facebook page.

The second row of hieroglyphs in the image to the right (click to see larger) were written on the wall in blue pen. Beneath those hieroglyphs, a comment that Hieratic sucks.

Were this written at any other university, I’d figure someone was just doodling birds, eyeballs and candy canes. But this is UofC, home of the Oriental Institute, where first-years can take “Intro to Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs” to fulfill their language requirement. Almost certainly, these had to be actual hieroglyphs.

So I printed out the photo, asked a coworker for a recommendation for an Egyptologist (naturally, he knew one) and dropped by the office of said Egyptologist. Glancing at the paper, with a chuckle he translated it off the top of his head, transliterated it, and re-wrote the text in better handwriting (the first row of hieroglyphs).

This piece of graffiti reads ỉw ỉr.n.n st m dw3t sp sn*, or, “We did it twice in the morning”. To be fair, the “it” isn’t specified– maybe they built two pyramids that morning– but I’ll leave the interpretation up to the reader.

* The dots are morpheme boundaries; the “3″ is how Wikipedia saves you from having to install a font that has the actual grapheme in a private use area, since it’s not yet part of Unicode. Seemed reasonable to me.

Organic Chemistry is Voodoo Witchcraft

The story behind this is actually the story of how I became a physics major. As a first year, I worked under a particularly demanding chemistry professor with whom I had a rather unhealthy relationship. Over the summer before my second year, my friends were convinced that I was suffering battered wife syndrome as no matter how much abuse he threw at me, I could not but find him and his Russian accent extremely attractive. However, push came to shove (although our relationship did not have the opportunity to develop to that point, if you know what I mean) and I subsequently quit the lab early in the summer. Yet, come Autumn Quarter of second year, I learned to my dismay that he was my professor for organic chemistry, which took us through more of the awkward staring contests. Suffering enough abuse from both him and the damned course itself (I was never meant to be solving synthesis reactions), I withdrew from organic chemistry on the day of the final and became a physics major instead. Winter quarter came and I came across a Science article that explored how a canonical chemical reaction does not actually behave the way organic chemists described and this work was described by a physicist. I was so giddy for the next couple of days, but then I ran into my ex-boss/professor/something-unspecified in the elevator up the GCIS. It was a tense moment of silence. I broke it with, “So… did you read the new Science article about the SN2 reaction?” He stared stonily at me and said, “What of it?” “Well… it’s funny how my discipline pretty much just disproved your discipline.” The doors then opened and I walked out. That night, I celebrated by writing out my feelings in the bowels of the Reg.

LOLCats

The story behind this one is not as long, but it’s just as entertaining. A friend of mine and I were extremely sleep-deprived in the Reg and she had a linguistics presentation the next day. Her project was on lolcats and lolspeak, and being a big fan of Aristotle’s theory of function and rhetoric, we aptly named the PowerPoint Presentation. What started out as a serious outline quickly devolved into a free-for-all for the whiteboard. We then resorted to inside jokes. The “I’m a bottom” comment… I don’t think you’d like to know

Bad grades

As to what inspired that witty aphorism, I haven’t the foggiest idea.

I discovered today that I misunderstood the story behind this piece of graffiti, one of my favorites. My impression was that Sid Branca had written it. The story behind it, in fact, is even better: apparently she said it really loudly on the third floor one day (breaking the silence of the reading room, that gravest of sins) and someone else wrote it down on the wall of a study carrel. I guess she didn’t even know that someone had done that until she came across the photo on Flickr.

I’d love to hear the story from the transcriber’s point of view. Did Sid’s statement express what the transcriber too was thinking about the girl in question? Did it just sound like a terribly pithy quote worth memorializing?

When Alexa’s current roommate, Loranne, showed her the book she recognized the graffiti she’d written and wanted to set the record straight.

The graph from page 42 was written in response to some obnoxious guys who were in the adjacent cubicle, loudly discussing their inability to get laid. As such, Alexa’s note was to them, rather than to herself.

On a more heartwarming note, the graph from page 103 has a happy ending. While Mike caused a precipitous decline in how fun the Reg was in January 2008, today Mike and Alexa are dating.

You can find a few more fun whiteboard graphs from Alexa that I couldn’t fit into the book here.

Shoe repair guy, by Swamibu

But Val Archambeau suggested on the Crescat Graffiti Facebook page that it might be a reference to “Pretty Little Mistakes” by Heather Mcelhatton– a grown-up choose-your-own-adventure novel where you end up working as a cobbler in Italy in one storyline.

I kinda hope it’s a coincidence. Too many times I’ve Googled phrases from creative-sounding graffiti only to discover they’re (possibly somewhat mangled) quotes from songs or movies.

It also makes me wonder if the exhortation to chant with the monks in Tibet also comes from somewhere other than the tortured mind of a college student.