"NOBODY TOLD ME THAT COLLEGE WAS THIS HARD!":

Venting in the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor Grad Stacks

1990ish to the present

During my first year of college at the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor I got in the habit of keeping my diary in my backpack so I could write in private when at the library. I also discovered the study rooms at the graduate library where students are able to sit in a small space with a window and study in relative peace and isolation. In November of that first year of college I wrote in my diary and from a stacks study room, "It's snowing outside right now...really pretty. What am I going to be? Who am I going to be? How many ---damn transitions are there?"

Although alone physically in these stacks I knew I was not alone spiritually, if you will. Other students like myself spent time in these rooms watching the weather and wondering about their futures as students and as people. We communicated to one another by "venting," writing on grooves in the vents. Venting catalogues more than two decades of texts.

These writers compose from a lonely place, a glorified jail cell/confession box sans a priest and mark time between adolescence and adulthood, finals week and summer vacation, winter and spring, a degree and the "real world," and loves lost and found. In doing so, they create an imagined community of readers and writers.

Classical rhetoric, which privileges the rhetor as the main agent for text production, is not irrelevant to venting as a rhetoric and as a cultural practice. However, ordinary writing like venting, particularly anonymous texts, is better understood as a system of composition in which the rhetor is one agent. Venting employs writers, readers, technologies and their ecologies collectively and in a non linear fashion to produce meaning. To use terms from the core text, the act of writing on those vents enacts production, reception, distribution, and representation all dependent on participants' collective participation in a larger ecology.

As one means of persuasion, I've put some images from the vents on these PowerPoint slides so that readers might imagine themselves entering the graduate library stacks and engaging with venting as a system of meaning in which they might participate.

The stack room. Some rooms have a view of the landscape outside, some do not.

Jennifer Sinor (2002) argues that ordinary writing, partly because it's so easily erased, "becomes a highly productive site for investigating how both writing and culture get made every day" (p. 10). Indeed this venting won't make it into the newspapers, and certainly not grade books or report cards. But nevertheless these very ordinary texts tell stories about what it's like to live in a particular time and place, who

might care and why.

The most common topic, or commonplace, for "venters" is a

distaste for final exams.

Rebecca E. Sameroff seems to hate exams of all types.

This writer went so far as to "vent" about an entire week of exams. A week of hell and also a day of hell are documented.

Writing about the graffiti produced by teenage girls in the middle school she studied, Margaret Finders (1997) claims that the girls' "graffiti" in the school bathroom about their love interests was "documented proof," of the girls' control over their sexual identities and also their "control over institutional authority" (p. 71). Similar dynamics might encourage venting in the University of Michigan graduate library stacks. Venters, in effect, develop topoi that showcase the management of their identities as students, but they also challenge the institutions

scripting these identities.

This reads: "NOBODY TOLD ME THAT COLLEGE WAS THIS HARD!"

This sentiment could entitle any or all of the commonplaces developed by venters who articulate struggles with college life inside and outside the classroom.

For the most part venters name and categorize the costs of conforming to expectations of educators, also likely parents, and probably the world out there. Some ambitions—for a vacation, sex, love or a glimpse at the sun—might have to wait till after that final exam.

The library stacks are obviously situated in a larger ecology, Ann Arbor, Michigan itself. In the city of Ann Arbor, graffiti and the defacement of buildings is considered an intellectual activity. In a less privileged community, graffiti might be rightly associated with crime and the threat of gang activity. Venters respond to and within a system that shapes not only their topics but also the values and expression of their genres.

The graduate library stacks are about one block from this cash machine.

Each vent has a history and destiny as an effective host for more than two decades of venting. The vents literally collect experience, and provide the ecology for making and remaking memories when venters reuse and remediate texts over time as rhetors and readers. The efficacy of these texts is bolstered and contextualized by a larger ecology, other similar texts, in a college town where graffiti is considered

important cultural work and thus a persuasive genre.

Years of cleaning crews at the library who have not not erased the texts on the vents are other agents in venting as a system. The cleaning crews may not compose on the vents or read them, yet they value venting tacitly by allowing its persistence. Readers can see how long their texts might stay on the vents, which in turn bolsters their persuasive power, their efficacy and potential for meaning.

At the same time, venting invokes and create audiences and therefore imagined communities of like-minded people. Venting 'makes people.'

Here one venter writes that he/she "might be in love." Another writer writes that he/she is worried about never being in love. This thought invites the reply, "Don't worry, I [love] you."

Weather is also a common topic for venters. A venter's choice to write about the weather is likely related also to her particular ecology, her luck at getting a seat in a study room

with a view.

Time and place shape topoi in the sense that a writer may make her way to the library in inclement weather—rather than sitting outside on the university's large grassy court yard, called the diag, on a warm day. Weather enables venting as a system. It acts as both topic and ecology.

When I was in college, weather was a big topic for venters as it is for the writer from 1993 and the other watcher of "frightful" weather who—we can guess—writes some time in December. In this sense vent texts act like mini-diary entries. Venting is, in a sense, a collectively written diary, a memory machine. It's a system for memory keeping and memory making.

The writer below memorializes her last year, of what we can imagine.

A venter "replies" to a writer who studied for the MCATs

March, 2001 by writing "4 yrs later, me too."

As a memory making system then venting bolsters an imagined community between audiences that also transcends time as particular rites of passages are recorded by venters and taxonomies are both developed and recycled, made new. Memories are potentially remediated at any time when an audience resurrects a memory in the present by commenting on a shared experience. For example, the writer who completed her MCATS 4 years previous to a fellow MCATer will not know that her particular rite of passage was shared by a fellow venter. Yet her memory is reused and has become something new—a burgeoning collective memory of MCAT test takers.

Venters' memories are thus artifacts that can be reused by others to produce new and other artifacts. As Holocaust scholar Gabrielle M. Spiegel (2002) writes of memory, "To the extent that memory 'reincarnates,' 'resurrects,' 're-cycles,' and makes the past 'reappear' and live again in the present, it cannot perform historically, since it refuses to keep the past in the past" (p. 162). Venting also refuses to keep " the past in the past" as finals keep happening and spring, once again, fails to show up early enough.

In Anderson's (1999) novel Speak, the main character Melinda uses graffiti in her high school bathroom to name her previously unidentified rapist, Andy Evans, under the topoi, "Guys To Stay Away From." Like the real MCATers, the fictional Melinda receives "replies" to her graffiti post and learns that other girls were also abused by Andy Evans. As Melinda describes these texts and her experience reading them, "[D]ifferent pens, different handwriting, conversations between some writers, arrows to longer paragraphs. It's better than taking out a billboard. I feel like I can fly" (p. 186). Melinda helps us imagine the psychological satisfaction for venters when reading co-constructed memories that name and affirm their experiences.

Conclusion Classical rhetoric is not irrelevant for understanding venting

as a rhetoric and as a cultural practice. Most particularly venting features the development of topoi as a means of persuasion and the relationship between audience and the development of topoi. But when rhetoric is reconceived as a part of a system, whereby authors as well as artifacts are agents in socializing others, like the defaced Ann Arbor cash machine, we're led outside the library and "outside of the box." There, we might better appreciate the potentially profound efficacy of ordinary, anonymous texts for readers and writers alike.