Violence

One piece of data that I gathered, wrote about, but ultimately chose not to publish in the statistical analysis for Inkling was the use of “kill” in UofC graffiti. It comes up nine times, and in each case the suggested violence is self-directed: Kill… me (5x), yourself (2x), myself (1x), us (1x).

Violence is also a recurring theme in the Berkeley graffiti I found– the most recurring theme, in fact. “Kill” was the #1 most-used word, but almost none of the violence was self-directed. “Nerds” were the most common target of violence (3x), but “idiots” and “vilifiers” [sic] were each represented once. One of the “kill nerds” did have the addition “yourself”, though that strikes me as retaliation more than an indication of a culture of self-directed violence. The death of lawyers is also wished for in one piece.

The data set for Berkeley is so small, I hesitate to draw any conclusions based on numbers. Still, it seems worth pointing out that in one (incompletely documented) visit to the Berkeley library, I found 5 instances of “kill”, where I’ve only found 9 in 2+ years at UofC. Though perhaps people are just feeling violently towards nerds these days, who’s to say.

Identity

Identity, particularly as connected to ethnicity and/or religion, is not a hot topic in UofC graffiti. There’s [heart] Black, but that’s more than a little ambiguous (Lewis Black? The color? . There’s a reference to Jews that involves stereotypes. And someone once confessed to having sexual preferences other than their own ethnicity. It really doesn’t come up much, and when it does, people don’t really leap on it.

At Berkeley, the opposite appears to be true. Even writing the name of an ethnicity or religion (which inevitably invites people to comment) seems to be its own genre. Each sub-bullet below shows the modifications or additions:

• Catholics rule!
  • Though they aren’t “hip” w/ Berkeley
• Hindu rule
• Everybody wants to be black
• I Love being African!
  • Cool!
  • Liar lol no one does
• black powerless hatred [this is hard to read, I'm not 100% sure of it]
• I love Koreans
• Asian pride
  • White + Asian pride
• Asians rule
  • Asians drule
  • Asians ^{will never} rule
  • Asians ^{will never} do rule
  • Asians are fags
  • Asians FAG
  • Asians F^LAG

Vaginas

At UofC, the penis is the undisputed king of genitalia. In fact, you have to go to the secondary female sex characteristics– breasts– before you can find a body part that’s drawn at all. In the text, too, there are only four references to vaginas, compared to 17 penis references.

Berkeley’s distribution of genitalia references is much more egalitarian. Yes, there are two doodles of penises. But there’s also a stand-alone doodle of of a vagina. (There’s also a doodle of a naked girl, but hers is not included so I don’t think it quite counts.) Between “pussy” and “vagina”, female genitalia is referenced four times in my Berkeley graffiti sample– whereas there is only a single reference to penises.

The difference in content when compared with, say, the Arabic graffiti, is pretty striking. Perhaps a chart of some sort is called for, one of these days.

Working hard

The graffiti to the right, from the Regenstein stacks, the small text on the left reads “It’s possible to succeed. You can do it!” with the giant response “Fuck you you asshole.”

Found in a Crerar study carrel: “I’m gonna study like a crazy maniac . . . Until the day that I become a surgeon! -Who?”

From a whiteboard on the A-level: “I’ll be sleeping at the library today. Tomorrow? Probably as well.”

From a study cubicle in the Reg: “Let’s try our best. -I want to excel. -Be kind. [Let’s be kind to others.] -Let’s not compare ourselves to others.”

Hardly working

To the right, from the A-level of the Reg: “Lee Jung Hyun = Pork Ribs. I love it. I wanna eat her. – Andrew = Huge intestines. The most delicious.”

Another A-level whiteboard: “Let’s play on the weekend!!”

Finally, on an A-level whiteboard, next to the famous “Winter is the suck” haiku, is a much saucier piece of Korean: “You need some spanking, DanBee Kim.”

Further trips into the stacks have shown that graffiti is indeed written on the study carrels, and it’s the blackboards on the second and third floor study rooms– rather than the whiteboards on the first floor– that are the better analog to the whiteboards in the all-night A-level space in the Reg.

I also recently marveled at the complete lack of German graffiti. This still seems to be the case* in the Reg, but so far it seems that German is the #1 non-English language in Crerar.

This morning, I found the following prayer on a blackboard:

My dear God in heaven,
For the day I give you thanks. For this space, I give you thanks. For my success, I give you thanks. For the time I give you thanks. For all that I give you thanks.
-Me

I Googled a couple excerpts to check, and it doesn’t appear to be a (verbatim) quote from anything in particular. It may, in fact, be heartfelt. An irony-free prayer of thanks to God– I’ve never seen such a thing in the Reg, where despair, sharp retorts, and Nietzsche are the preferred form of self-expression.

Granted, not all the German graffiti is so profound or touching; we’ve also got the numbers 6-10 and what I understand to mean six pebble (yes, without the plural ending).

My current office arrangements make it easy enough for me to duck upstairs for a couple minutes right as the library opens, at least on most days, but Crerar starts filling up early and the study rooms with the chalkboards appear to be in high demand. Not every day is a hit, but expect exponential growth in the Crerar Library graffiti corpus in the coming months.

* I recently came across one line of German, prefacing the rest of the quote in French. I’m not sure whether to count it as “legitimate”. On one hand, I find myself wondering if there’s some connection, perhaps, to a French translation of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”. On the other hand, I wonder if the German is in response to my assertion that there was no German graffiti in the Reg.

It’s not that politics are absent entirely from the graffiti; since I started taking pictures in September 2007, I’ve found eight pieces that relate to politics. There’s one discussion about the United Nations and two post-election pieces about Obama, but the majority of political graffiti sprung up in the run-up to the 2008 election.

The United Nations

There’s an ongoing discussion about the UN in the B-level men’s bathroom. Of all the possible reasons to object to the United Nations, American nationalism seems to be the only one in play:

Obama

Former neighbor, faculty member, parent to children in UChicago’s primary school, and current President. That said, UofC is also the school building the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics, a decision which led to an outbreak of graffiti elsewhere on campus.

Those two positions can be summed up in the following two pieces of graffiti:

Listen and read all you liberal Obama (socialist) – the American Lenin – loving hippies of UChicago. “If you let the gov’t run the Sahara desert, in 10 yrs. it will be out of sand.” (or something close to this) – M[ilton].F[riedman].

2008 Election

The biggest outbreak of political graffiti related to the 2008 election. Someone expressed dislike for Obama as early as November 2007 (and possibly quite earlier; I picked it up on my first pass through the study carrels that November, and can’t guess how long it might have been there.)

In October 2007, there was some speculation as to the size of Hillary Clinton’s dick:

A little over six months later, as she was clinging to the remains of her campaign, she appeared again as the Black Knight from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and General Custer on an A-level whiteboard.

I don’t usually keep an eye on the graffiti added to the posters that line the stairs going down to the student-run cafe in the library, but this piece of graffiti transforming a stupid ironic poster (an ad for some kind of concert, if you’re able to read the tiny, tiny print at the bottom) into a political statement about Sarah Palin literally made me laugh out loud:

However, my very favorite piece of election graffiti comes from an ardent Nader supporter, who at some point in 2007 carved “Nader ‘07″ into one of the wood study desks in the stacks… having forgotten that the election wasn’t for another year.

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of youth apathy towards politics, stemming from a perception that nothing one says or does will make much of a difference. I think the frequency and nature of the graffiti largely supports that assessment of youth attitudes.

The United Nations discussion seems like someone’s pet issue– I can’t think of any particular event recently that it’s likely to be reacting to.

The post-election pro-Obama graffiti could be attributed in part to a sense of local pride. The anti-Obama framing of the Milton Friedman quote is phrased in such an extreme way that it seems equally possible that the whole thing is meant ironically. Even if it’s serious, I’d argue that the focus of the graffiti is Milton Friedman, more than Obama– the timing (early May) doesn’t coincide with any particular milestones, though it’s shortly after the navel-gazing marking the first 100 days of his presidency, and perhaps that was what triggered the outburst.

Regardless, presidential elections are perhaps the one situation where participation in politics yields immediate, visible results, if only in the form of a staffing change in the highest office. If there’s ever a time for the cynical and disenfranchised to be writing political graffiti, the run-up to a presidential election seems like the most likely candidate.

We’ll see what happens in 2012.

Perhaps to counteract the aforementioned slur, the acrimonious discussion of the UN has been augmented with the thought “I want to see more American Acceptionalism”.

A discussion of pregnancy has sprung up opposite the philosopher wordplay; there’s been two opinions over who wears man thongs (one of which tangentially involves Das Kapital), and there’s four drawings of penises and the only two vagina drawings I’ve found. But all that is what you expect to find in a bathroom stall, and nowhere in the same league as the wit and wordplay that made the B-level men’s room great. Personally, I find it sub-par even compared to what you generally find in the stacks and study carrels, and it reminds me why I generally avoid latrinalia.

As Q said to Captain Picard in the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “All good things must come to an end” and this is the end of the saga of the B-level men’s room, as far as I’m concerned. I wish it could have been painted over in its prime, before it was touched by ugliness. But so it goes.

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

Peter Behr, a UofC alum, identified the first piece as a notable passage from Dream of the Red Chamber (红楼梦), one of the Four Great Classical Novels (四大名著), “which posits a cyclical relationship between concepts that can be construed as meaning emptiness (空), perceived reality (色), and actual reality (情).”* For someone studying alone in the stacks, spending hour after hour in silence, perhaps exploring postmodern theories of this and that, I can imagine how those ideas might resonate.

Peter, furthermore, notes a typo: “our rushed artist committed a small typo in the upper left hand corner, 由 instead of 自.”

Matthew Felix Sun kindly translated this passage:

Through emptiness, one sees lust
Because of lust, passion grows
Conduct passion to lust
Out of lust, one learns emptiness

The second piece, written on a different wall above the same study desk on the 4th floor, reads as follows (once again, courtesy of Matthew):

[On top of the page, a very large and light character:]
Mountain
[then]
The benevolent love mountain(s)
The wise love water

I can’t help but wonder what the author would make of those who love graffiti.

* Please also note a postscript from Peter, in true UofC alum style: “The problem with those words I defined is that their meanings are quite diverse and have shifted heavily over history. Indeed I believe 色, as it ‘grew up’ so to speak, came to mean physical desire, and now is ‘lust, sex,’ in addition to ‘color.’ 情, which is ubiquitous as the component to words such as 情况 (’status, situation’) and 事情 (‘thing, matter, event’), also means ‘feeling’ or ‘passion,’ as in 感情 (‘emotion’) or 情爱 (‘love, in the sense of relationships’). So if we take 空 to mean not physical emptiness but lack, loneliness, or emotional solitude, the cycle also works. I’m not a scholar of the book, and haven’t even come close to reading its entirety. But I will be cavalier and guess that Matthew’s rendering is immediately borne out of context (it is a love story, after all), while mine is an interpretation of subtext (and so again, caveat lector).”

Who studies there?

My husband did a stint as a student assistant in Eckhart Library, and as he recalls it, the patrons were generally of two varieties. There were the students whose expensive math textbooks were on reserve– these would check them out, work for a bit or take the book elsewhere, then return the book and leave. Then there were the serious math students who would sit and work for hours. The faculty also have 24/7 library access, and while my husband never experienced the situation, there’s a whole set of procedures for what to do if it’s time to close the library and a faculty member insists on staying.

What are the study spaces like?

The main floor has some tables and chairs– not very graffiti-friendly. However, two corners of the library have two isolated study cubicles each– for a total of eight, four on each floor.

Where is graffiti written?

Strangely enough, only one of the two study desks in each pair seemed to be heavily graffiti-covered. No particular pattern: sometimes it was the desk in the corner, sometimes it was the one closer to the center of the room. Some graffiti was scratched into the wood desk, but most of it was on the surrounding walls.

Graffiti content
Declarations of love

If you love algebraic topology, Eckhart is the place to write it. Apparently noncommutative algebra is sexy; so is Antoine. I’m not entirely clear if the object of love is human or math, but someone has also written in Chinese* “I love you / I have dreamed / [after the blue mark] Ha ha“. Also with an unclear object is this “official” declaration of love.

Math

I’m not at all a math person; interpretations of the math content by math people are more than welcome. I’m told this one might involve the Riemann zeta function. There’s a pretty generic-looking equation that might mean something profound to the right person. And “the math” involved in explaining what an English major is doing there involves dividing by zero. That might be funny to the right person.

Doodles

There’s a drawing of some sheep in a house, a drawing of a piano, the number 7, and some circles and squares (though at Eckhart, maybe that should be filed under “math” for its geometric content, rather than “doodles”). Someone also drew some kind of pirate “going phishing” (possibly Paul Sally, our local “math pirate”).

For the full set of photos from Eckhart, check out the photo set on Flickr.

* Thanks to Matthew Felix Sun for the Chinese translation!

The “analysis” considers:

1. Happiness, as measured in the ratio to smiley faces to frowny faces
2. Love vs. hate, with a spiffy Venn diagram of the objects of the aforementioned emotions
3. Sex: to what extent are ostensibly “sexual” words used in a sexual way?
4. Anatomy: a comparison of the frequency with which male vs. female body parts are drawn and/or referenced
5. Temporal fluctuations in love, despair, and sex graffiti

For my pedantic readers (including my beloved husband), or anyone else who missed the “pseudo-” part of the “pseudo-scientific analysis”, let me note that the sample size for any of this is too small to make any actual conclusions. Furthermore:

1. Smiley faces and frowny faces basically function as punctuation, and their scope is almost always limited to the statement(s) they accompany. I know they’re not an indicator of general happiness or unhappiness. But I couldn’t resist the idea of a smiley-to-frowny-face ratio.



2. Yes, it’s possible that people just write more love graffiti than hate graffiti, and the difference in graffiti frequency isn’t reflective of people’s private emotions. Please get over it.
3. I’d actually like to look into the frequency of non-sexual uses of the “sexual” terms mentioned in the post, across a larger corpus of English. Maybe there’s nothing special about the graffiti data.
4. There’s a graph depicting a vagina in the B-level men’s room, but I consider the B-level men’s room graffiti to be almost a different data set, and I didn’t include other material from bathrooms.
5. Including the graffiti from the carrels might change the conclusions about the temporal fluctuations of love, despair, and sex. But I really have no way to date those (I’ve gone to the carrels 3-4 times in 2 years) so… tough cookies.

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.