Sunday Sundries, 227

1. AOTW: Okay, this is hardly egregious ... but ... a woman's shopping cart blocked the entire aisle--while she was in an adjacent aisle on her cell having a Grand Old Time. She needs a cell ... in a jail!

2. I finished just one book this week, but, hey, it was a long one: James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer (1841), which I (possibly?) read many years ago--can't remember. And the reason I can't? Because I read the Classics Illustrated version so often in boyhood. So, did I read the comic and the book? Or just the comic? Wouldn't want to be asked that in court.

Cooper wrote five novels about Natty Bumppo (called, variously, Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, etc.), and The Deerslayer tells us about some adventures in his young manhood, and we witness the first time he kills a human being (a Huron). (Oh, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, Cooper actually wrote Deerslayer last in his sequence of novels.)

In this novel we see the aspects of Deerslayer's character: absolute frankness and honesty, racism (even though Chingachgook, a Delaware, is his best friend, he nonetheless believes in the superiority of whites), his fortitude (captured by the Huron, he willing submits himself to their torture--which never really quite comes off because of ... well, don't want to spoil it for you). He's also a crack shot, as a couple of Huron sadly learn moments before they die.

Cooper's sentences and paragraphs are a real tangled wood; you have to be ... patient ... willing to deal with it. But there are some rewards for the pruning and hacking your mind must do.

Oh, and we also see Deerslayer reject the advances of a young woman who, we are told, is flat gorgeous. He just doesn't love her--and he doesn't want to hurt her. (What a guy!)

Well, in future weeks I'll be writing about the other novels as I travel through them. Next is The Last of the Mohicans, which I have read (more than once): Hiram College, Kent State grad school.

3. Last night we drove down through the Cuyahoga Valley, checked out the blue herons nesting on Bath Road, then up to West Market Plaza, where I got some varieties of flour and rice at Mustard Seed Market, a scone and a Diet Pepsi at Panera, and two new books at Barnes & Noble: Ian McEwan's latest novel (Machines Like Me) and vol 2 of the proposed 3-volume bio of Mark Twain by Gary Scharnhorst.

Another name for our evening: Nerds' Night Out!

4. We're happy about the new episodes of Shetland available for streaming, and Unforgotten, too. We never really got hooked on Game of Thrones, but I wish all well who are waiting for tonight's final episode.

5. My sourdough starter went nuts in this warm weather. I mixed the bread dough before we went to Panera (breakfast) and the grocery stores, and when we got home, about two hours later, this is what I found:

In the winter it's usually not even reached the rim of the bowl by the time we get home!

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

     - from Oxford English Dictionary

aginer, n. A person who is against something; one who opposes a proposal, course of action, point of view, etc. Also more generally: a person having a habitually negative attitude; one who opposes any change as a matter of principle. Cf. againster n.

Forms:  19– agginer,   19– ag'in'er,   19– aginer,   19– aginner.

Origin: Formed within English, by derivation. Etymons: English agin, again prep., -er suffix1.

Etymology: <  agin, regional and colloquial variant of again prep. (compare forms at that entry) + -er suffix1.

 U.S. colloquial.

1905 Westminster (Philadelphia)  8 Apr. 6/2 We [sc. the Presbyterian Church] have not been an ‘aginer’ for a year past. We are ‘for-ers’: for the Church: for the home.

1944 Post (Morgantown, W. Va.)  9 Feb. 6/2 A grab bag for all the aginners in the country.

1953 Sun (Baltimore)  27 Aug. 85/2 Clare Hoffman..rallied some die-hards from both parties against it... The committee's disapproval was pure, instinctive obstructionism. Clare is a natural ‘ag'in'er’.

1990  P. Taylor See how they Run  i. 20 On election day..many more people voted ‘against’ than ‘for’—a pattern that has become the norm in presidential elections... Jeane Shilling..captured the ‘agginer’ mind-set exquisitely.

2005  C. Shirley Reagan's Revol.  xi. 244 Wallace... had always been just an ‘aginner’ and never really proposed solutions to the problems he identified in America.