"Neal Stephenson - The Big U" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

natural resonating frequency of the main hallways, which were cut
into 64-foot, 3-inch halves by the fire doors (Klein and I measured
one while drunk), and therefore the resonant frequency of every
other hail in every other wing of all the towers of the Plex, and so at
these moments everything in the world would vibrate at sixteen
cycles per second; beds would tremble, large objects would float off
the edges of tables, and tables and chairs themselves would buzz
around the rooms of their own volition. The occasional wandering
bat who might be in the hall would take off in random flight, his
sensors jammed by the noise, beating his wings against the standing
waves in the corridor in an effort to escape.
The Resident Assistant, or RA, was a reclusive Social Work
major who, intuitively knowing she was never going to get a job,
spent her time locked in her little room testing perfumes and
watching MTV under a set of headphones. She could not possibly
help.
That made it my responsibility. I lived on EO7S that year as
faculty-in-residence. I had just obtained my Ph.D. from Ohio State in
an interdisciplinary field called Remote Sensing, and was a brand-
shiny-new associate professor at the Big U.
Now, at the little southern black college where I went to school,
we had no megadorms. We were cool at the right times and
academic at the right times and we had neither Kleins nor Fenricks.
Boston University, where I did my Master's, had pulled through its
crisis when I got there; most students had no time for sonic war, and
the rest vented their humors in the city, not in the dorms. Ohio State
was nicely spread out, and I lived in an apartment complex where
noisy shit-for-brains undergrads were even less welcome than
tweedy black bachelors. I just did not know what to make of Klein
and Fenrick; I did not handle them well at all. As a matter of fact,
most of my time at the Big U was spent observing and talking, and
very little doing, and I may bear some of the blame.
This is a history, in that it intends to describe what happened
and suggest why. It is a work of the imagination in that by writing it
I hope to purge the Big U from my system, and with it all my
bitterness and contempt. I may have fooled around with a few facts.
But I served as witness until as close to the end as anyone could
have, and I knew enough of the major actors to learn about what I
didn't witness, and so there is not so much art in this as to make it
irrelevant. What you are about to read is not an aberration: it can
happen in your local university too. The Big U, simply, was a few
years ahead of the rest.

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---First Semester---


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