Linda Presents Roz Chast

Jacquie's Email Reminder

April 11, 2021: Dear Literary Ladies,Well, thank GOODNESS there is no such thing as this miracle book! If there were, where would that leave us?!?! Just a quick reminder that on Wednesday, April 14th at 1 pm, Linda will be sharing more of Roz Chast's infinite wisdom with us.  Until then, I hope you don't experience every emotion known to mankind! Jacquie

Christine's Minutes

On April 14, 2021, fourteen members attended the meeting of the Literature Club, via Zoom, a program in which we are all becoming quite competent. President Fran Greenberg called upon members in their screen order, and we heard the good news of members becoming fully vaccinated, of grandchildren finally returning to in-person school, and of Linda’s “post-vaccine gallivanting ways”.

Our president rang the bell at 1:34 (an exactitude completely reliant upon the computer which hosts our meeting). The minutes of our previous meeting were read and accepted. Our treasury is ample with $396.52. Much of that will be donated to the library, as usual.

And then, even while separately inhabiting our rectangles on screen, we travelled together, guided by Linda Tucker, into the very weird and comical world of Roz Chast. It must be noted that Linda was more than competent in her use of Screen-Sharing: she has become a master of the medium. The theme of the program was Roz Chast and Existential Angst. Existential, as in existence. Angst, as in a gloomy often neurotic feeling of generalized anxiety. How profoundly appropriate for our pandemic times! Since these minutes will not avail of screen sharing, nor – alas - will they be illustrated by your secretary, mere words must be relied on to spark your memory of certain cartoons. So, we began with Lots of Ducks, then Little Things, Chast’s first cartoon to be accepted by The New Yorker, and Linda’s favorite, Reading the Obits while calculating the ages in relation to oneself.

Following the categories listed on Roz Chast's website: Fairy Tales, Fear and Loathing, Kids and Family, and Unclassifiable, Linda shared with us a wonderfully curated selection of cartoons. Just to name a few, we saw "Gregor S’s Further Adventure,;" "Kant at Camp," "The Delusional World of Free-Range Chickens," "Ralph Nader’s Children," "Our Friend Algebra," "Rebels Without a Magic Marker," "Radiator Cooking."

Roz Chast was born in 1954 in Flatbush, Brooklyn, the only child of two educators. She received a BFA from RISD in 1977. She sold her first cartoon to The New Yorker in 1978, and had her first cover in 1986. She has written and illustrated numerous books, including a memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? which won several awards and struck a chord with so many of us with elderly and aging parents. In addition to The New Yorker, she has published cartoons in journals as varied as the Village Voice and the Harvard Business Review.

In a 2014 interview with Steve Martin at The New Yorker festival, Chast discussed her cartooning routine. She generally draws between 5 and 7 cartoons a week, and once something is bought by The New Yorker, she will redraw it and tidy things up. She loves to draw interiors, especially wallpaper and lamps, inanimate objects. She said that her mother “believed in the conspiracy of the inanimate”.

We all enjoyed spending the afternoon in the wonderfully offbeat and idiosyncratic world of Roz Chast’s imagination.

Respectfully submitted, Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary