VLVL(11) Heard it on the X

[Toby G Levy]

Continuing the summary of chapter 11...

While the police are busting heads, the students mill about and some of
them on the outer fringes of the melee approach the tallest person they
could find to find out if he could look over the crowd and find out what
was going on.  That person was a math professor named Weed Atman who was

"preoccupied with the darker implications of a paper on group theory
he'd just been reading."

As we will see later, Weed's relationships created a complex matrix of
intersecting groups, and he was rightly brooding on how the laws of
mathematics were affecting his personal relationships.

Weed begins to free-associate mathematical thoughts, but is shaken when
he sees the damage the police are inflicting. He leads the group
of students around him away from danger.  When they attempt to assign
leadership qualities to him he says "I'm just tall, that's all."  This
is a blues reference. Jimmy Reed was one of the most popular bluesmen of
the 1960s, and his hit "Big Boss Man"  contains the putdown of the
Bossman, telling him that "You're just tall, that's all."

Weed wound up at the apartment of a radical grad student named "Rex
Snuvvle." Pynchon makes unmerciful fun of Snuvvle's  radicalism in that
the purity of his quest of truth drives him further and further from the
movement.  Snuvvle attempts to radicalize Weed, but the laid back Weed
was more interested in the drugs, the music and the women.

The music came from the notorious pirate Rock and Roll station XERB,
which blasted fifty thousand watts of rock and roll from Mexico to an
amazingly large area of the southern United States.  This was where
Wolfman Jack created his legendary persona. In 1975 ZZ Top released a
song "Heard it on the X" memorializing this and other boomers from
Mexico.

Snuvvle created a committee called ADHOC (All Damned Heat Off Campus) and
got Weed to be one of the leaders.  Somehow the movement managed to
thrive on campus.


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