Rarity and novelty
I do some weird stuff sometimes. As some of you may be aware, I have an odd habit of seeking out the castoff books of yesteryear, a sort of odd neo-antiquarianism. I suppose it all started with that book of suicide notes, …Or Not to Be, compiled my Mark Etkind. For whatever reason, I found the idea of the suicide note as literature fascinating, and I paid like eight bucks for the book on half.com. It seems to still be quite firmly out of print, and the lowest used price on amazon.com is $42, so I suppose I did alright if I treated this as an investment. The point for me isn’t the return, though; it’s the preservation of something that society would rather forget. My most prized book thus far is still the Dune Encyclopedia. It was a collection of essays on the Dune universe written from the point of view of historians about 5000 years after Leto II’s death. Though Frank Herbert reserved the right to contradict the history that it presented, he found it ultimately a source of amusement and enlightenment, and he authorized the printing. He died soon after the 1984 printing, though, and, since his son Brian Herbert is intent on milking the potential Dune history through a new series of novels, it won’t be printed again during the lifetime of the Dune copyright. I think this is highly unfortunate and a great loss of insight into a fascinating world.
Today my collection has moved into the political realm with the arrival Lynne Cheney’s Sisters. It’s a historical fiction about the subjugation of women in the frontier American West and the lesbian relationships that provided their escape. I can’t yet speak about it’s quality, but the attraction it held for me was the fact that it will never be printed again not due to market forces, but rather because it’s become undesirable to the author. Maybe it’s because the wife of a Republican vice president doesn’t want to be associated with homosexual romance, or maybe it’s because it raises questions about the influences on her daughter’s choices in life, but whatever the cause, it’s a suppressed piece of recent literature, and that’s what, to me, makes it interesting. It’s also probably the most I’ve ever paid for a single book—I can’t remember how much that doorstop of a theory textbook cost, which might be the winner,—and it’s certainly the most I’ve ever forked over for a trade paperback. This book better be good.
In other news, I think I’ve figured what it is that bugs me about driving on SR 400. Suburb people are dumb. For some background, I first brought a car to Atlanta while at Tech, so I cut my Atlanta driving teeth on the downtown connector and surrounding ground roads. I learned pretty quickly which times were bad to drive, traffic-wise, but even with heavy traffic, certain behaviors make the trip more pleasant for everyone. I noticed this especially on the last time I drove to the airport during rush hour: rather than rushing up to the bumper of the person in front of them, everyone tried to maintain a steady speed, and traffic moved along at a constant 25mph or so. It would have made an industrial engineer weep for joy. Now, I’m not saying that city people are free from their own stupidities—I think that about half the times I’ve been on the controlled-access portion of SB SR 13, I’ve seen someone try to exit onto I-85 from the left lane—but in general people just expect there to be traffic at certain times, and they can deal with it gracefully. 400, on the other hand, chokes in traffic, whatever the anomaly. Today I saw on one of the DOT signs the following message: “ACCIDENT ON SR 400 SOUTH, 2 MILES INSIDE 285. 4 LEFT LANES BLOCKED.” Now, there are actually only three lanes at that point, so I read that to mean that whatever disaster occurred was also blocking the ramp for the poor suckers trying to get on at Glenridge. My reaction, of course, was to get the hell off 400, and I halfway expected to end up in a wreck, or at least a near miss, in a panicked rush for everyone to get off at Abernathy. I was the only one to get off. While making a nice, untrafficed right turn towards the other southbound roads of Sandy Springs, I could clearly see a growing jam of unmoving cars starting just beyond the on-ramp. What the hell, people?