Sunday Sundries, 226

1. AOTW--Oh, have tailgaters been bothering me lately. I know ... I know ... I'm being a jerk by going only five mph over the posted speed limit, so you have every right--don't you?--to get as close to my rear bumper as you possibly can in the (vain, vain, vain) hope that I will speed up. Your hand gestures are equally (in)effective. (And it's not hard to lip-read in my mirror the things you  are saying to me.) Sometimes I wish I had one of those cars James Bond drove--with a missile-launcher I could employ for these AOTWs.

2. I finished one book this week--and started reading a series, too.

     - I've been a reader of books about George Armstrong Custer since I was a boy--when my parents (alarmed that I was reading only comic books and the Cheerios box) subscribed to a little book club for me--Landmark Books (by Random House). I actually read some of them--though the one about Martin Luther was a bit ... much ... for the Me of Then. One of my favorites was Custer's Last Stand by Quentin Reynolds (1951--I was 7 that year), a book I read multiple times.

In subsequent years I've read most (all?) of the major books about Custer and the Last Stand--and I still have a shelf lined with them.

I've been to the battlefield several times, to his birthplace (New Rumley, Ohio) several times, to the town in Michigan where he lived (Monroe--several times). Etc.

Anyway, so when this new book appeared--The Other Custers, 2018, by Bill Yenne--I knew I had to buy it (I did) and consume it (I did). Although the focus is on his family--ancestors, relatives, siblings, descendants--it is hard for Yenne to ignore Autie (the family name for G. A. C.). It's somewhat like describing the sparrows at an aviary--while a golden eagle is swirling around your head.

Still, I learned a lot. I'd known that Autie was not the only Custer to die at the Little Bighorn (several did--including a brother). But it was satisfying to read the stories of all the others in his family and to hear about descendants that are now alive. (One wrote the Foreword--George Armstrong Custer IV.)

So ... a good book for Custer-freaks (like me)--not so sure about general readers. Yenne is a thorough, determined writer--though not always a--what?--graceful one.

     - I've launched myself on a not-so-little reading project, something I'd hoped to do for a long, long time but have just never managed to do: read James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales--all five of them. I believe I've read only The Last of the Mohicans, though, in boyhood, I read multiple times all five of them (in Classics Illustrated comic-book form!).

As many of you know, the novels all feature a character whose birth name was Natty Bumppo, a young man raised by the Delaware, a man who, as he moves through his life, earns other names: Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, etc. Cooper follows his hero from young manhood to his death--but he did not write the novels in the order of his hero's age; in fact, Deerslayer (written about his youth) was the last to appear.

But I am reading them in the order of the hero's age. The chart below--stolen from the Web--shows the original dates of publication, but the books are listed in the order I'm reading them.

• The Deerslayer (1841)
• The Last of the Mohicans (1826)--yes, I'm going to read it again
• The Pathfinder (1840)
• The Pioneers (1823)
• The Prairie (1827)

I've got all of the titles contained in two volumes published by the Library of America, and I should finish Deerslayer by the end of this week (all are long and wordy--and Mark Twain famously pilloried Cooper, as I'll discuss a bit in a later post).

3. We had a great Mother's Day yesterday--brunch at an Indian restaurant here in Hudson (Jaipur Junction) with our son, daughter-in-law, and two grandsons, then back to our place for cards and gifts and laughing. Stories rolled around the room like bowling balls. And memories of mothers gone ...

By the way, I wondered how old my grandmother Dyer had been when she died in 1960. I checked. She was only 67, seven years younger than I am now. I was a sophomore in high school when she died, and I'd thought she was ancient.

Perspective ...

4. Last Word--a word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ....

     - from Oxford English Dictionary

autoschediaze, v. intransitive. To do something hastily and without preparation; to extemporize, improvise.  (Rare) [AU-toh-SKEDJ-iz]

Forms:  18– autoschediaze,   19– autoschediase.

Origin: A borrowing from Greek. Etymon: Greek αὐτοσχεδιάζειν.

Etymology: <  ancient Greek αὐτοσχεδιάζειν to act or speak offhand, extemporize, to act, speak, or think unadvisedly <  αὐτοσχέδιος personally near, hand-to-hand, offhand, improvised ( <  αὐτοσχέδον (adverb) near at hand, hand-to-hand ( <  αὐτο- auto- comb. form1 + σχεδόν near: see schediastic adj.) + -ιος, suffix forming adjectives) + -άζειν, suffix forming verbs from nouns or adjectives. Compare earlier autoschediastic adj., autoschediastical adj., autoschediasm n.

1852  T. De Quincey in Eclectic Mag.  May 34/2 To auto-schediaze, or improvise, is sometimes in effect to be forced into a consciousness of creative energies, that would else have slumbered through life.

1894 Contemp. Rev.  65 187 Youth appears to autoschediaze, as a rule; to write by aid of chic, rather from a deep foundation of literary knowledge.

1933  J. N. Ruffin Celebrated Crown Trial  iv. 102 Taking advantage of the time while the clerk was hunting for a document, [Demosthenes] autoschediased.