one trace over the line

"Man, this is the way to travel," said my classmates. They leaned over to turn the volume up on the radio, humming along with the rhythm section and kind of moaning the words, "One trace over the line, Sweet Jonas, . . . One trace over the line . . ."

One trace! You poor fools! Wait till you see those goddamn Agrs! I could barely hear the radio . . . slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with an iPod turned all the way up on "Sympathy for the Devil." That was the only MP3 we had, so we played in constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And also to maintain our rhythm on the road. A constant speed is good for GB milage -- and for some reason that seemed important at the time. Indeed. On a trip like this one must be careful about GB consumption. Avoid those quick bursts of pseudo-formalism that drag blood to the back of the brain.

...the tendency is to push it as far as you can

The admissions committee had also given me $300 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous books. The trunk of the car looked like a mobile library. We had two Leaves of Grass, seventy-five pages of The Communist Manifesto, five sheets of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, a salt shaker half full of O'Connor, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored Updikes, DeBoises, Sagans, Lao Tsus . . . and also a quart of Lovecraft, a quart of Dylan, a case of Borges, a pint of raw Eliot and two dozen American folk songs.

All this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed driving all over Travis County -- from Manor to Westlake, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious book collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that worried me was the Eliot. There is nothing more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an Eliot binge.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky 
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

And I knew we'd get into that lofty stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next gas station. We had sampled almost everything else, and now -- yes, it was time for a long stanza of Eliot. And then do the next hundred miles in a horrible, slobbering sort of spastic stupor. The only way to keep alert on Eliot is to do up a lot of American folk songs -- not all at once, but steadily, just enough to maintain the focus at ninety miles an hour through Barss and Lasnik.

...to facilitate the learning process

Then it was quiet again. My classmates had taken their backpacks off and were pouring coffee on their chests, to facilitate the learning process. "What the hell are you talking about?" they muttered, staring up at the board with their eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish eyeglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to derive." I hit the books and aimed the G.B. Shark toward the shoulder of the classroom. No point mentioning those Agrs, I thought. The poor bastards will see them soon enough.

It was almost noon, and we still had more than a hundred pages to go. They would be tough pages. Very soon, I knew, we would all be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Graduate Registration for the fabulous Fall 2005 was already underway, and we had to get there by the 29th to claim our sound-proof suite. A fashionable academic journal in Austin had taken care of our admission, along with this huge red Minimalist convertible we'd just rented off a lot on the Drag...and I was, after all, a professional student; so I had an obligation to cover the class, for good or ill.

maybe you should derive

"He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a linguist." -- paraphrase of Dr. John(s)son

We were somewhere around Barss and Lasnik on the edge of syntax when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should derive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the board was full of what looked like huge trees, all merging and joining and diving around the theory, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Linguistics. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn Agrs?"