Here’s a tip for the administrators that run the Georgetown campus tours: do not let prospective students get anywhere near the cubicles in Lauinger Library. They are defaced with some of the most vile and ineloquent scribble, and it reflects quite badly on our supposedly enlightened student body. If the desks must be defaced, we could at least do it with a touch of artistry. Though there exist some rare gems – and I’ll include those below – in general, Hoyas just don’t seem to have a knack for cubicle scrawl.
The irony is that around campus, we seem to be a well-spoken, fairly open-minded and politically correct group of students. Yet somehow the dark confines of the library cubicle can draw out all of our mumbling inner devils. The first thing you notice is the sheer amount of hate – against Mormons, gays, Jews, blacks, Arabs, jocks, Christians, accounting class and a guy named Mike L. who seems to have broken a lot of hearts.
Politics and foreign policy are inevitably on display, but only in short, bitter sound bytes. “Bomb Iraq” appears on more than one cubicle desk, not to mention the mother of all possible preemptive strikes, a “Bomb China” scrawl. The Israel-Palestinian debate garners slightly more thought-provoking statements. One side writes a blurb, then another person draws an arrow to a rebuttal, until the desk starts looking like a spider web of small clips from the Hoya Viewpoint page last year.
The Middle East dialogue is actually quite mild compared to the Lauinger Gender Wars. The trenches stretch as far west as the Durkin Collection in Pierce all the way to the east side of the fourth floor cubicle banks. Suppressed scribblers of the gender wars pull no punches. “Why are all the – very few – attractive men either taken or assholes at this godforsaken school?” To which somebody else replies, “Because men are like bathrooms . taken or crappy.” Though perhaps guys deserve the treatment. The above sequence was inspired by a “women = cooks and mommies” equation. Elsewhere, women are referred to as “snobby princesses” and “shallow bitches.” One aspiring proverb-maker on the fourth floor writes, “Love is the delusion that one woman is different from another.” You get the feeling that a good majority of these scrawlsters look no farther than their computer screens for a little female interaction. (No wonder more people are bringing their laptops to the library.)
The most diabolical weapon of the Lauinger Gender Wars is the dirty sexual reference. Oral sex, in particular, is the fait accompli of a lot of cubicle scrawl. These are not just small, passing remarks. We’re talking exhaustive detail – even some diagrams – and a ton of insulting language. It’s difficult to know if people are expressing hate, desire or a little of both. But in any case, it doesn’t seem very healthy. The Corp would do well to install a therapy annex to the new coffee place on the second floor – call it Midnight Hug.
With all of our sprawling scrawl and festering fellatio, we should be glad nobody pays any real attention to this stuff. Imagine if U.S. News figured scrawl into its school rankings matrix. Georgetown would fall back to No. 174, right behind Meadow Ridge Elementary School. College counselors would forget about teacher-student ratios, and start asking how many cool Dylan quotes are scratched on the classroom desks. The bathroom stall at Afterwords Cafe would be considered a bastion of higher education.
There is, of course, another very post-modern way to look at the vapid scrawl of Lauinger Library. Maybe the four-letter minimalism is a kind of poetry that many of us simply can’t appreciate. The ever-quotable Simon and Garfunkel have a song called “A Poem on the Underground Wall” about a lonesome man in the dark recesses of a subway tunnel. “Now from his pocket quick he flashes/ the crayon on the wall he slashes.” He proceeds to scribble a four-letter word that will probably seem dirty and crude to all those who pass by it, and yet in that one captured moment there is all the excitement of literary revelation. Maybe it’s the surrounding world that is dirty and crude.
Wistful interpretations aside, Lauinger is not without its fair share of credible and entertaining scrawl. The so-called “Grout Wall” of the Pierce Reading Room bathroom always featured some nice double entendres scribbled in between the tiles, until it was all washed away this past semester – a neo-book-burning, if you will. Song lyrics are also big, from artists like The Strokes and Tupac Shakur. You can even find a little 19th-century poetry if you look hard enough.
Random declarations are fun. One guy (I’m assuming he was a guy) was honest enough to write, “I’m in the market for a good circumcision.” Another offered what can only be considered a public service announcement, “The dining hall puts babies in the hamburgers.” Then there are the crazy observations that you can’t help but think of as thinly-veiled philosophical statements, “In game shows some people take the trip to France but most people choose the washer-dryer combo.” And even real philosophers get some play in the cubicles: “God is dead.” – Nietzsche; to which somebody else replied, “Nietzsche is dead.” – God.
Brian Levinson is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and can be reached at levinsonthehoya.com. CAPITAL LETTERS appears every other Tuesday.