• 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.

Most notable is the wall of poetry, where “To Delmore Schwartz” by Robert Lowell has been joined by an anonymous quote:
Rejoice! O Man For your achievements
are great
and number as the stars (read both full size)
and then subsequently, by Jabberwocky in its entirety.

While one student recommends appreciating the joy of being YOUNG and ALIVE, another laments the temporary nature of graffiti, and a third dismisses the entire conversation with “Quit being gay, study!”. (See full size.) Meanwhile, someone else is just kidding.

In the 5th floor women’s bathroom, I discovered “I’m pregnant” in Arabic, translated by Lauren Osborne who wonders if the writer just took a pregnancy test, and the wall was the first “person” she told. I’ve also discovered that Barbie studies in Crerar science library. There’s some elaborate gremlin heads in the Reg study carrels, not far from some ruthless copyediting of another student’s “hip” graffiti (see full size).

Perhaps my favorite so far from this fall is a serious response to what was probably just a whiny Why is Latin so hard?: “b/c they don’t print it with diacritical marks. (it really would be much easier if they did”. Lamenting the absence of macrons in Latin texts not written for learners: I’ve never seen the likes of it elsewhere.

Speaking of the uniqueness of UChicago graffiti, I’m putting together another “analysis” of my enormous corpus of graffiti data, now including material from a variety of universities. Ever since I started examining graffiti from outside the University of Chicago, I’ve had the sense that there’s something unique about the graffiti we have here, but I’ve never tried to quantify it. So now I’m going through each piece of graffiti from each university, classifying it (and weighting certain classes differently depending on their frequency across the entire corpus– orthographic corrections and intellectual commentary count for more than sex or complaining about classes), and assigning a score of 1-3 (1 is for a single word or expected phrase, 2 is for a more fleshed-out thought, 3 is for something with a twist– be it insight, wordplay, or something that makes it memorable). The plan is then to divide the total score by the number of pieces of graffiti, to determine the “interestingness” of each university’s graffiti corpus. One could argue that my metric privileges the UChicago graffiti, but I really am trying to be objective, and I’d like to hope that we can all agree that there really is something more interesting about “Holbach your marks, you’re going to ruin the Staël” than “Fuck you”.

Tangentially (and without having any sense of what the outcome will look like), I’m also working on determining the source of the various music, movie, TV and literature quotes found in the graffiti corpus, to see the differences in genre and media distribution on different campuses.

I’m hoping to have both done by the end of this month, so stay tuned.

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).”

Then, of course, things got ugly; instead of a comment about it being a cliche like the first time, we got a surprisingly vicious tirade that was subsequently dismissed.

But, just as nature persists in the form of grass growing through cracks in the cement, the determined poet can sometimes triumph over vitriolic rantings in the Regenstein stacks. Today, I found that the previous exchange had been crossed out, and in its place the next line of the poem was written– slightly misquoted, but that’s hardly the point.

And so the poem remained for months, until a week or two ago when Facilities appears to have stepped in to play literary critic, abridging the poem and getting rid of the commentary. (Why didn’t they paint over the whole thing? And why paint over the tiny commentary in pen? Was the painter fond of the poem? Did he like it better without the second half of the first stanza?)

Facilities may have spared the beginning of the poem, but the blank space they left behind was soon filled with the most vitriolic piece of graffiti I’ve ever seen in the library:

Fucking imbecile. With this bullshit, it’s no surprise you’re a liberal arts major. Enjoy living in poverty after college, asshole.

Less-than-polite retorts are nothing new. Pride in economically beneficial majors is nothing new. But I’ve never seen anything like this– and directed towards someone who copied poetry onto a wall! Did the writer fail the unit on poetry in junior high English? More than with most graffiti, I really wonder what was going on in the writer’s head on this one.