What Creates a Culture of Graffiti?

In a bathroom stall today at the university where I teach, I found myself looking a bit sadly at four blank walls. In grad school, the library bathrooms were filled with graffiti - women's voices proclaiming, counseling, dissing, and querying. There was always something to ponder, scoff at, lament, admire. I wasn't in the library bathroom today, so to be more scientific I suppose I'd better venture over there, but I'd be surprised if I encountered any ink.

Maybe it's because this school is primarily a commuter campus? Maybe the range of students, including many who have full time jobs and/or families, include fewer who are going to turn to a random wall for advice about art, school, health or love?

Except I don't think of stalls as random walls. I think of them as communities of sorts, early versions of Internet message boards or comment threads.

Maybe this perspective and my love of bathroom graffiti comes from my experience at the University of Chicago in the late 90s. There, it wasn't just the library bathrooms that were filled with musings; in the basement of Ida Noyes Hall, which housed the campus bar, movie theater, and rooms used for everything from Social Dance classes (fulfilling a PE credit!) to annual events like Blues and Ribs, I found one of my favorite scribbles: "For a good time call Avogadro's number 6022141..." (etc.). That probably epitomizes U of C's self-congratulatory nerdiness, but there were other good ones too, including paeans to Ira Glass. I wish I'd taken better notes, frankly.

Over time I added my own words to those walls. In the Reynolds Club (the student center), I wrote down lines from a Lucille Clifton children's book: "And Everett Anderson knew/his father loved him through and through/And whatever happens when we die/Love doesn't stop/And neither will I." Why? I don't remember, except for some reason I'd read that book and loved it. I saved the Derek Walcott line "The classics can console, but not enough" for, of course, the Classics building bathroom. And on the eve of the 2000 election, I photocopied a New York Times editorial that argued why people should not vote for Nader but instead, Gore. I highlighted what I considered important sentences and taped the editorial inside stalls around campus.

I'm not that young woman anymore; for one thing, I'd be far more aligned with those Nader voters I feared and loathed. For another, I get that there are other ways to express oneself and to connect with a community. There are other ways to be vocal and anonymous (while, um, being more sanitary), now.

But I'm interested in why some women's rooms are so quiet. And I still love when I find one that's not.  

Old Home Week

Hi! Long time no write here! Thanks for returning with me...can't say how often I'll post now that I'm in school again, but I hope to be at least as prolific as I was in 2010 :)

One of my new professors is an alum of the same college as I, the University of Chicago. I knew this because I read his bio, and at the new student/faculty potluck, I bounded over to him to, well, basically interview him about his experience there and regale him, unsolicited, with mine. (I was there for undergrad, '97-'01; he was there for a PhD, '98-'05). Despite my eagerness/earnestness about meeting a fellow U of C-er (Alumni Association, take note: I REFUSE to refer to this school as "Chicago," the way you would like us to in your recent-ish re-branding campaign. Chicago, to quote Sandburg, is big-shouldered. You U of C, wonderful and flawed as you are, really aren't that wide), I think I comported myself reasonably well.

But as I was leaving his office hours today, I couldn't resist asking, "Were you there when Homi Bhabha and Toni Morrison got stuck in the Classics building elevator?" Homi Bhabha was (still is, but he decamped to Harvard not long after the elevator incident) a renowned theorist. My friend Katherine liked to say his name and wave her hands around to show what a big deal he was...to other people who actually, you know, had read him or taken classes with him (I don't know if he even taught undergrads). And Toni Morrison was a visiting professor one quarter and was similarly unreachable to us. So this elevator snafu was a minor amazement for Katherine and me, that two such luminaries could be so...stymied. I think I might have even saved the little blurb that ran about it in the campus paper.

Maybe it wasn't the most professional way to exit a professor's office. But
there's just so few people in the world I can ask that of! And fewer still who will answer with a satisfying, "Yes." I couldn't resist the chance to combine history, nerdiness, and inside-baseball glee. There should really be a name for alumni connections that, however trivial, are so precise as to make you feel like yes, I really was there. A lifetime ago, I was a student there.