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.

Meanwhile this summer, I’ve tracked down graffiti at Brown, Arizona State, University of Colorado, and McGill (where they love to deface the “don’t eat or drink in the library” signs– photos still pending.) I’ve seen cows offering themselves up as meals in Lithuania, a disturbing conflation of Internet Explorer with the internet in Albania, and graffiti ranging from your standard-issue penis to political commentary in a verb conjugation chart in Kosovo.

But the Reg– the library that started this whole project– has remained devoid of graffiti… until last week, when it cropped up somewhere I’ve never seen it before.

I received an anonymous tip that someone had spray-painted something of a mural on one of the concrete walls between the Reg and the Max Palevsky dorm. Spray paint? A whole mural? This I had to see.

It’s in a hidden-away corner that could have perhaps escaped notice for quite some time, were it not for the fact that it’s partly visible from the north-facing windows of the Reg.

Motifs of smoking and sperm with faces seem to join the scenes on the north and east concrete walls; between the two stands a Triforce. The north wall begins with JWOWW, before moving to a sperm-with-face that looks like he’s been staying up too late studying or something. The major work on the north wall is some kind of genie (or perhaps Nietzschean superman) with smoke pouring out from between his lips.

On the other side of the triforce on the east wall, the mural picks up with three sperm-with-faces: one in a baseball cap, one confused and badly in need of a dentist, and one that appears to have picked up the cold that’s going around.

From there, the mural gets increasingly bizarre, featuring an overenthusiastic smoking alien that appears to be falling in love with a human with an early 90′s haircut, who can only think of “Yo” to say in response. It’s a little hard to tell where the mural goes from there, beyond some bright, colorful shapes reminiscent of 70′s cartoons, but there’s plenty of hearts so maybe things end well for the alien-human couple.

I’m no art history scholar, nor particularly literate in pop culture, so I welcome any explanation of what Jersey Shore, sperm-with-faces, smoking, aliens, 90′s hairstyles, 70′s cartoons, and the Legend of Zelda have to do with each other. If you want to see the full mural, you can check it out behind the Reg while it lasts, or in the photo set.

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“.

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.

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.