Very Far Away from Anywhere Else Read Online Free PDF

men really looked like idiots if they went on saying women couldn't write novels. The trouble is, women have to be absolutely first class to get where third-class men get. It's weird. I guess it's the same thing as your levelers."
    Talking with her, I had worked out this theory, see, about what it was that made me feel so much an outsider. Why it is that people make heroes out of people who are good at sports or politics, but have this scorn and resentment against people who are good at thinking. Unless the ideas they think turn directly into money or power, in which case they're heroes again. Anti-intellectualism seemed to be part of it, but not all of it; it was this sort of pulling things all down to the level where everybody is the same, like ants, that I called "leveling," although these days it gets called by some fancy names like anti-elitism, and some really out of place names like democracy, names you shouldn't even say unless you're willing to think about them.

    "Male chauvinist levelers?" I said.
    "Yeah, right on," she said. Orville came back down the trail, running like a fourteen-inch-high pregnant cow, and got mud all over my jeans, and then got mud all over her jeans.
    "What kind of music do you want to write?" I asked her.
    She tried to tell me, but I can't tell you because frankly I understood less than half of it. I mean if you don't know pretty clearly what a tonal row is, you are not going to understand somebody explaining what's wrong with the theories about tonal rows. And I didn't want to interrupt her and make her explain, because it wasn't easy for her to talk about it at all, but she wanted to, very badly. She talked about order and humanity in music, and machine music, and random music, and I sort of understood that, but I didn't know enough about modern music to be sure I understood. But some of it I could make sense of, because it was very close basically to some things I'd been reading by some modern psychologists about identifying with machinery—people thinking of the world, and themselves, as machines. Schizophrenics now often do that literally. They have to be plugged into a power source in order to function, and they receive instructions from a Great Computer. Reading about them I had thought about some of the rock groups with their electronic instruments and mikes and consoles and the stage full of wires, and the auditorium full of people who plug in emotionally with them, all depending on one wire from the power plant. Who says schizophrenics are crazy?

    It was something along that line Natalie was after—getting music away from its dependence on machinery, but by machinery she also meant the big symphony orchestra and the big opera production. But she didn't mean going back to "simplicity," the folk singer with a dulcimer and a fake Kentucky accent. She said complexity was essential to high art, but the complexity ought to be in the music, not in the means of production. I said that sounded like Einstein doing it all with a pencil and some paper and his head, instead of a fifty-million-dollar accelerator; accelerators were very neat, but basically Einstein was even neater, and a lot cheaper. She really liked that. We turned back, and the sun came out and made all the wet forest look like crystal, and we went to her place, and she played me one of her compositions on the piano.

    She explained that it wasn't for piano but for a string trio, and she sang the violin part in places. It didn't really seem very complex, or anyhow not difficult; there was a beautiful short tune in it that kept coming back, or pieces of it would come back, when things got rough. She was very tense, nervous, playing it; she was high. At the end she slammed the cover over the keys and said, "The end's all wrong." And then she had to go across town to give a lesson.
    Natalie Field is very hard to describe. I guess anybody is. But typing up what I said about her into the tape recorder, I'm afraid it makes