Plywood and graffiti – 'this world uncertain is'
Laura Crossett - The Daily Iowan
Issue date: 10/3/02 Section: Opinions
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Academic Graffiti is the title of a book of poems by W.H. Auden that sat, among several thousands of other tomes, on the living room shelves when I was a child. (Given the number of the tomes, there were also bookshelves in the bedrooms and along two whole walls of the library, the room for which my mother had bought the house we lived in).
At the time, I did not know it was a book of poems (nor did I know who W.H. Auden was), and I never bothered to find out, perhaps because I grew up in Iowa City, in a world populated with both academics and graffiti (for what were the slips of paper with scribblings that my father had left behind in all of his books, or the quotations that my mother had taped up on index cards around her desk at work, or pithy sayings that professors seemed to like to affix to their office doors, if not a form of graffiti?), and thus felt I had no real need to see more of it.
I have still not read Auden's book, but I am still, after all these years, in the academy, and I have developed quite an interest in graffiti, academic and otherwise.
Most recently, I have been following the graffiti on the plywood wall that currently surrounds the Old Capitol.
At the beginning of the school year, some enterprising soul went out, presumably at night, with a can of black spray paint, intent upon informing the campus of the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of U.S. sanctions in the past decade. (Currently, that number hovers somewhere around 1 million. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of State in the Clinton administration, was asked about the number of dead Iraqi children — according to UNICEF, approximately 5,000 die each month as a result of sanctions. "The price," she said, in measured tones, "we think, is worth it." I am not quite sure what price she was talking about — can you put a value on the head of a child? — or what exactly it was that was worth it — the sanctions, intended originally to cripple and disarm Saddam Hussein, do not seem to have had this effect).
At the time, I did not know it was a book of poems (nor did I know who W.H. Auden was), and I never bothered to find out, perhaps because I grew up in Iowa City, in a world populated with both academics and graffiti (for what were the slips of paper with scribblings that my father had left behind in all of his books, or the quotations that my mother had taped up on index cards around her desk at work, or pithy sayings that professors seemed to like to affix to their office doors, if not a form of graffiti?), and thus felt I had no real need to see more of it.
I have still not read Auden's book, but I am still, after all these years, in the academy, and I have developed quite an interest in graffiti, academic and otherwise.
Most recently, I have been following the graffiti on the plywood wall that currently surrounds the Old Capitol.
At the beginning of the school year, some enterprising soul went out, presumably at night, with a can of black spray paint, intent upon informing the campus of the number of Iraqis who have died as a result of U.S. sanctions in the past decade. (Currently, that number hovers somewhere around 1 million. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of State in the Clinton administration, was asked about the number of dead Iraqi children — according to UNICEF, approximately 5,000 die each month as a result of sanctions. "The price," she said, in measured tones, "we think, is worth it." I am not quite sure what price she was talking about — can you put a value on the head of a child? — or what exactly it was that was worth it — the sanctions, intended originally to cripple and disarm Saddam Hussein, do not seem to have had this effect).
