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.

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.