"Waldrop, Howard - Winter Quarters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Waldrop Howard)

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Did I remember Arnaud?
It was while we were all—me, Dr. Bob, our colleague Dr. Fred Luntz the archaeologist, Susie Neruda (nйe Baxter)—undergraduates here, at this podunk branch of the North Carolina state university, just after the turn of the millennium, that Arnaud showed up. We assumed he was French, maybe Belgian or Swiss, we didn't know, because he didn't talk. Much, anyway. He had that Jacques Tati-Marcel Marceau-Fernandel body type, tall and thin, like he'd been raised in a drainpipe. He was in the drama department; before we knew him, we knew of him.

About half the time we saw him, he was in some form of clown dйshabille or mime getup. We assumed it was for the acting classes, but a grad student over there said no, he just showed up like that, some days.




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"Does he do anything special?" I asked Dr. Bob. "Did Susan say?"
"I don't think so, or she would have. I'm assuming he mostly puts out fires inefficiently and throws pies with accuracy, unless circuses have changed a great deal since my time."




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For what do we remember Arnaud?
It was in November, his first semester, and he was out on the east mall passing out flyers, in full regalia: a polka-dot clown suit, clownwhite, bald headpiece, a hat the size of a fifty-cent flowerpot. He had a Harpo bulbhorn he honked as people came by.

The flyer said:


HITLER THE MAGNIFICENT!
An Evening of Transformational Sorcery

JONES HALL 112

7 P.M. NOVEMBER 8th

Well, uh-oh.




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It wasn't an evening, it was more like fourteen or fifteen minutes.
It wasn't sorcery, but it was transformative: it transformed him right out of college. To say that it wasn't well received is bending the language.