Behavior: Alfresco History

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As a sociologist, McLean, 40, is cautious about interpreting the significance of the erotic graffiti he has photographed in Paris. But in his conditional judgment they seem to reflect the stratified ethics of society. In an outlying working-class suburb of Paris, the erotic graffiti tend to be explicit and unabashed. In more affluent and inhibited neighborhoods, he found that erotic graffiti occur in less abundance and tend to be more restrained.

Too Few Recorders. McLean has left to other scholars a study of that other, nonpictorial graffitic form that comments, often pithily, on human affairs. That is a pity, because in its communicative role the editorial graffito is universal and has much to say to its times. After the Parisian student uprisings of 1968, for instance, the city's walls bloomed with anti-Establishment slogans

like RUN FAST, THE OLD WORLD IS BEHIND YOU. Of these transitory social comments there are all too few recorders. In the U.S., one of the more dedicated collectors is Allen Walker Read, 63, a professor of English at Columbia University who has been recording graffiti on an international scale for more than 40 years. Some Manhattan samples from Read's collection, which has never been published in full: GOD is NOT DEAD! HE is ALIVE AND AUTOGRAPHING BIBLES TODAY AT BRENTANO'S (110th Street subway station). And, in somewhat the same vein: GOD IS DEAD BUT DON'T WORRY, MARY IS PREGNANT AGAIN (96th Street); GOD is OMNIVEROUS [sic] -CHITLINS, BAGELS, PIZZA, EVEN ENCHILADAS (96th Street).

COITO, ERGO SUM (Greenwich Village).

NORTH DAKOTA IS A HOAX (116th Street).

NIETZSCHE IS PIETZSCHE (116th Street).

Read is saddened by authoritarian resistance to the graffito. "It catches a human being at a time when he's just casually and not deeply engaged," says Read. "This is very important. People are on guard so much of the time." In this sense Read regards the graffito as the purest form of human expression. It announces to posterity the existence of an insignificant human whose passage might otherwise go unnoticed, from the legend incised in 1804 on a Tennessee tree trunk—DANL BOON KILT A BAR—to the classic and bittersweet self-advertisement that can be found all over the world:

ROSE [or whoever] WAS HERE AND NOW IS GONE BUT LEFT HER NAME TO CARRY ON.