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.

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.

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.

Resident head, photographer, and Drupal guru Avi Schwab gave me a tour of B-J, which has its share of “normal” graffiti scattered around the bathrooms and brick walls*, but there were two places that were clearly being used for a sort of commemorative ritual: the Tower, and the Linn House lounge.

The Tower

At the top of Chamberlin House lies the Tower, where students have been signing their names since at least the 1970’s. Notably, the signatures commemorate Becky Burd and Patti Dickson’s gender-integration of the Tower, which apparently happened as recently as 1993-1994. (Strangely, the second women in the Tower didn’t arrive until three years later.)

Linn House

The Linn House ritual of residents signing their names in the lounge is of more recent origin; the first names date back to 1983. It seems that the original practice was for students of any year to write their names, but as I understand it, currently it’s a privilege reserved for fourth-years.

Unlike the Tower, the Linn House lounge is an organized and planned commemorative space: there’s a painted background, and while the student signatures are free-form (in terms of handwriting, phrasing of name/nickname, etc.) they’re more or less written along horizontal lines.

This alumni memorial is so large that it’s filled up one large wall, and now continues on the other side of the room. The background of the first two columns of names is a book; across the room, more recent students have to make do with a humble piece of notebook paper.

So where are they now?

One of the things that fascinates me about UChicago graffiti is the possibility that some of these pieces I’ve captured were probably written by people who will go on to do important, or at least interesting, things with their lives. Most graffiti is not signed; where names do appear, it’s usually just first names. Will the writer(s) of the hieroglyphic sex graffiti become world-renown Egyptologists someday? Will our lovesick student win a Nobel Prize someday?

Of all the varieties of graffiti, I find name-signing to be among the least interesting. The one upside is that it makes it easier to find out what happened to people. Thanks to the wonders of Google, I can tell you that:

• Patti Dickson– one of the first women in the Tower– got her MD, and is now an Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Medical Genetics at the Los Angeles Biomedical Research Institute in California.
• Marisa Westervelt– one of the second women in the Tower– is a lawyer in California, specializing in business litigation matters, particularly securities litigation.
• Kerwin Olson, who was in the Tower in ‘87-’88, is the Program Director for Citizens Action Coalition, “Indiana’s oldest and largest consumer and environmental rights organization.”
• Zlatko Batistich was in the first class of Linn House students to write on the commemorative wall; today he’s a documentary and fine arts photographer in Bergen County, NJ.
• Erica Adelberg, as of 1997 (14 years after leaving Linn House) lived in New York City, where she was a portfolio manager and vice president in asset management at Goldman Sachs.
• Temby Caprio (Linn House 1987) is a Sector Advisor in the Division for Education, Health, and Population Policy in the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, after winning an award for her dissertation on “Women’s Film Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany: Female Spectators, Politics and Pleasure from the Fifties to the Nineties” from the Coalition of Women in German.
• Veena Reddy (Linn House, 1988) is a Regional Legal Advisor at USAID doing work in Kazakhstan.
• Loukia Sarroub (Linn House, 1990) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education at the University of Nebraska- Lincoln.
• Megan Whalen Turner, (Linn House, 1983), writes fantasy novels for young adults, and is notable enough to merit her own Wikipedia page.

To find the names of more alumni, check out the full-resolution photographs: wall 1, wall 2, wall 3.

* You can find the full set of B-J graffiti on Flickr

The Breck connection to graffiti goes deeper than an outbreak of vandalism a few years ago. During winter quarter finals week, Louis Wasserman tipped me off to the graffiti in the Breck study room– packed tightly into the nook between the shelf and study desks, and quite possibly not painted over by facilities since the building re-opened in 2004.

The study room has more than a few gems, and a survey of the contents deserves its own blog post, but one aspect that had me intrigued was watching the possible birth of another legend.

Let’s return for a moment to Davin Reed. Louis recounted to me the story explaining the origin of the name:

Davin Reed was a Breckinridge first-year, a long time ago, save that after Orientation Week, he decided that the UofC wasn’t right for him. He disappeared shortly thereafter, but mail kept showing up for him. Eventually, the front desk people who take the mail began asking, “Who is Davin Reed?” Thus, Breckinridge legend was born. Our Scav team was named after Davin Reed ['Sophonisba¹ Does Gary: The Davin Reed Experience²'] all the way back in 2004.

I knew that the Davin Reed meme was related to Scav Hunt, but only because I was in college at UofC “all the way back in 2004″. Still, I had no idea about what the story was with the namesake. Walking into the Breck study room as an outsider– much as any first-year might– I came across a number of pieces of graffiti that called to mind the Davin Reed meme.

It’s common enough to refer to people by name in graffiti (“Good morning, Nate sucks“, “Allen R. Sanderson = genius“, “I spanked Sonia on her bottom“), but coming across four pieces about the same individual in the same study room leaves a different impression– particularly when they’re pretty positive, as graffiti goes.

I asked Leann Pace, the Resident Head who kindly showed me to the study room, if this “Bruno” character was, in fact, a real person. I figured there was maybe a 33% chance “Bruno” was someone totally imaginary (maybe the students gave a name to a favorite gargoyle on a nearby parapet), a 33% chance “Bruno” was a real, familiar, but non-human figure (a Resident Head pet cat, perhaps?), and a 33% chance that a human “Bruno” existed, most likely at some vague, distant time in the past. Maybe he was Davin Reed’s roommate? In fact, Leann assured me that not only is “Bruno” a real human, he’s also a current resident.

If the Chicago Maroon correctly identifies him as a third year, it’ll be Scav Hunt 2015 before the actual presence of “the Bruno” in Breckinridge is attested only through the graffiti record– assuming Facilities doesn’t paint it over between now and then, causing this budding legendary figure to vanish from the collective dorm memory.

I’ll have to check back in spring 2015 to see if Breck is fielding a “Sophonsiba <3 Bruno" Scav Hunt team.

¹ Sophonsiba Breckinridge, namesake of the dorm/house, is a fascinating character. Check out this essay about her life and work.

² The 2009 Scav Hunt also included the Breck team “Davin Reed is People!” For more past team names, check out the increasingly-outdated official Scav Hunt results page. Blast-from-the-past highlights include the Salisbury House “Mad Cows” in 1996, and Burton-Judson’s “Viagra Falls” in 1998.

If you look at the graffiti, however, there are two repeated iconographies of the UChicago-student relationship: being eaten, and anal sex.

Two of the three representations of the UofC eating students portray the school as a fish, one with rows of sharp teeth going after a brain, and another toothlessly devouring circles. A third shows UofC as Pacman, juxtaposed with a panicked cloud labeled “soul” in the first frame, and considerably expanded after eating the soul in the second frame.

I’ve only seen the being eaten iconography on the A-level (all-night study space) of the Reg. But the examples of the anal sex iconography come from two different places: the blackboard in one of the Crerar study rooms, and the study room in the Breckinridge dorm (“at least Harvard uses lubricant“).

I can’t date the Breckinridge piece more specifically than sometime before last Thursday*, but all of the other pieces come from early spring quarter– around the time procrastinating fourth-years are sweating over their BA papers while other undergrads are out enjoying the sun. Perhaps, then, the choice of imagery should come as no surprise.

* The piece probably dates from well before that, given the number of replies. That said, the graffiti there goes back a number of years, so it could still conceivably be from early spring quarter. The Breck study room is amazingly thick with graffiti, and will be the subject of an upcoming blog post. For a preview, check out the set on Flickr.