Gita Presents Peter Mayle

Jacquie's Reminder Email 

April 26 Hello Literary Ladies! A note to remind you that we will be meeting this Wednesday, April 28th at 1pm, when Gita will delight us with the musings of Peter Mayle. Although we won't be together to also enjoy what few in the South of France would call "a little nosh" I hope you all will treat yourselves to something special before or during our virtual meeting/travels. Until Wednesday, Jacquie

Christine's Minutes

Thirteen members and one associate met for our meeting via Zoom on April 28, 2021. As usual, we engaged in our pre-meeting exchanges of news, books, and cultural happenings. Most significantly, on this occasion several sightings of the rogue yellow tulip were noted. This yellow (though sometimes blushing to red) tulip has appeared in the gardens of several members, in places where no tulips were planted, and where no tulips were expected to survive the ungulate depredations. Yet, there it was.

At 1:35 President Fran Greenberg rang her bell, and the meeting commenced. Minutes of the previous meeting were read and accepted. Our treasury remains unchanged at $396.52.

Then, with all due fanfare, Connie announced that our program next year will be: "Biography. "A distant second and third were "Drama," and then "Russian Literature. "The 2021-2022 season will begin on September 22.

We have made our annual donation to the Hastings Library, of $129.00, which was used to purchase several books including Hamnet, Klara and the Sun, and others enjoyed by our members.

Then it was time to visit the beautiful south of France with Gita, and Peter Mayle. The books consulted for our trip were A Year in Provence, a collection of vignettes about the author’s adventures renovating his house, and Toujours Provence, short stories about life in Provence. 

Peter Mayle was born in Brighton, England in 1939, but grew up in Barbados, where the family moved for his father’s work with the Colonial Office. Mayle was married three times, the last one being a success. He began his career writing sex education books for young people. In the 1980’s he moved to Luberon, in southern France. His books about France have been enormously successful. In 2002 the French government made him a Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) for coopération et francophonie, which sounds to me like he was given the award for speaking French so well.

Members first read an excerpt from A Year in Provence, in which was described a lunch on New Year’s Day. Some listeners may have developed francophone hunger pains at the excruciating detail: the meal started off with three homemade pizzas of anchovies, mushrooms and cheese; then came pâtés of rabbit, boar, thrush and saucission; then duck with wild mushrooms; then a casserole of rabbit civet; followed by a green salad, goat’s cheese, and an almond and cream gateau. The digestifs were made, mais oui, following an eleventh century recipe.

In Toujours Provence, members met the plumber who played the clarinet, and the builders who came to demolish the kitchen, otherwise known as the assault troops. We also learned the merits of rabbits, and heard of the architect’s prospective job designing a new brothel in Cavaillon. For any of us planning a visit to Aix any time soon, we learned the de rigeur of café deportment: first arrive in a red Kawasaki; second, keep your sunglasses on when entering; third, engage in ritual kissing; fourth, keep wearing sunglasses.

Our most pleasant sojourn in France ended with some Provençal wisdom regarding the use of lemon to keep away ants. Mille mercis a Gita.

Respectfully submitted, Christine Lehner, Recording Secretary

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

Our Annual Meeting

Jacquie's Reminder Email

March 8, 2021: Hello Literary Ladies! Just a reminder that we will be meeting on Wednesday, March 10th at 1pm for our annual Annual Meeting. Our agenda will include discussing topics for next year, and the nominating committee will announce the officers for next year. Hopefully some of those meetings will be held in person! Until Wednesday, Jacquie 

P.S. For those of you who have been waiting with bated breath for the third season of Shtisel, I have just learned that it will finally air on Netflix on March 25th! For those of you who haven't seen it, I highly recommend the series.

Barbara's Minutes

Signs of almost spring were shared during chat time by 12 members of the Literature Club. Several of us have crocuses or snowdrops blooming in our gardens, and Mary Greenly reported a bluebird sighting in Connecticut. The other hopeful sign was that all members of a certain age have received at least the first shot of the Covid-19 vaccine, so we could talk of meeting for picnics when the weather turns warmer.

We remembered that it was at our annual meeting a year ago that we last gathered indoors in person. Fran Greenberg, then the nominee for President of Literature Club, could not be with us, because her granddaughter’s nursery school in Brooklyn had closed, and she was providing childcare. In the year since that time Fran has mastered conducting meetings on Zoom, many of us have learned how to share screens, and the Club has continued as a source of camaraderie and comfort as well as literary stimulation. We all learned to wear masks and keep social distance, and none of us contracted the virus. There was even a benefit to Zoom meetings, for members who had moved away were able to attend.

Fran led today’s business meeting, at which the minutes were accepted as read. We elected the nominating committee’s rhymed slate of candidates: Jacquie Weitzman continuing as corresponding secretary, Lori Walsh as treasurer, and Christine Lehner as our new recording secretary. Fran asked members to mail $15 annual dues to Lori. As part of the ongoing business to donate books to the Hastings Public Library, we approved Carol Barkin’s suggestion of Pamela Paul’s Rectangle Time in memory of May Kanfer.

Program Chair Connie Stewart led the discussion of topics for next program year, during which we for the first time eliminated as many topics as we added. New topics are "Black Women Authors: American and International" and "Solely Shakespeare." Among the deleted topics were “Adolescent Favorites Revisited,” although the writer of these minutes cherishes a fond memory of Gene Stratton- Porter’s Girl of the Limberlost. Connie will send us the list of topics. For our first vote, we choose 5 or perhaps 6 topics we like, but without ranking them. In the final vote of whittled down topics, we will mark first, second, and third choices.

In closing my final set of minutes, I promise that I will get copies of all to the Hastings Historical Society and that I will send Fran this past year’s minutes to be posted on the Literature Club blog. It has been a privilege to serve this august yet playful Club.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary

Jacquie Presents Neil Simon

Jacquie's Email 

Feb 21 Hello Literary Ladies! As I've been preparing for my presentation on Neil Simon this coming Wednesday at 1pm, I have been preoccupied with Broadway, and particularly the theater seasons of the late 60s and early 70s. How many of you can read those words without your mind wandering to the memory of pulling out the Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times and delighting in the latest Al Hirshfeld, searching for the NINAs and marveling at his brilliance at capturing the very essence of a character or an actor's performance? As I am still battling to find the words to express to you the time I have been spending with Neil Simon and his many, many plays and screenplays, how I wish I could just sum it all up in just a few, pointed lines! Alas, I cannot, but I can leave you here with a few images to whet your appetite for what I hope will be an amusing afternoon. Please let me know if you will be joining us on Wednesday and would like to read. I will be sharing my screen with the text of the plays we will be reading, but I will cast in advance to keep things moving. Until Wednesday! Jacquie

Barbara's Minutes 

Real estate news dominated the chat time of the February 24 meeting of the Literature Club. Carla Potash is selling her apartment on North Broadway in Hastings and moving to Greystone, and Laura Rice is selling her house on Elm Place and moving to Ossining. Both have been engaged in disposing of many boxes of things.

At the business meeting, led by President Fran Greenberg, the minutes were accepted as read and the treasury reported at still $181.52. Jacquie Weitzman and Carol Barkin are continuing discussions with Hastings Librarian Debbie Quinn about donating books from the club to the library. VP/Program Chair Connie Stewart reminded members to think about topics for the Club’s next program year, and send her ideas, in preparation for our Annual Meeting on March 10.

Jacquie Weitzman enhanced her presentation on Neil Simon with montages and photographs, including an image of the prolific playwright, in her words “the chubby cheeked master of the one-liner, with his signature tortoise shell glasses and shy smile,” who got his start writing sketch comedy for Phil Silvers and Sid Caesar.

As Carol Barkin discovered when she revisited the work of James Thurber for her February 3 presentation, Jacquie found that due to changes in our social attitudes, some of the plays she was reading or movies she was watching were not quite as funny as she remembered them to be. But she chose to appreciate the experiences in these works and the complex, flawed, human characters that Simon created. As she noted, Simon “expressed universal truths while at the same time capturing a very specific time and place. He was a child of the Depression, born and raised in New York, who contributed to the golden age of television, and created what has been called ‘the comedy of urban neurosis,’ while also exploring family relationships, the anxiety caused by feminism and the sexual revolution to a host of middle-aged men and women, and ultimately the importance of finding one’s voice and expressing love and commitment.” With pleasure we read scenes from Barefoot in the Park, Chapter Two, and The Sunshine Boys.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary

Carol Presents James Thurber

Jacquie's Email 

Feb 3 Hooray! It's only been a few days, and yet we get to meet again this Wednesday, February 3rd at 1pm for Carol's presentation on James Thurber! Good luck with the snow! Jacquie

Barbara's Minutes 

Poketa, poketa, poketa went the keys of the computer. The minutes seemed to be coming smoothly, when suddenly QUEEP, QUEEP—coreopsis was setting in, and only the proud and disdainful writer could stop it. “To hell with the handkerchief, give me a fountain pen!” she cried, inscrutable to the last.

Or something not remotely like that. What the writer of these minutes should be noting is that it was stole weather, as Joanna Riesman’s grandmother would have said, for the February 3, 2021, meeting of the Literature Club, and during our chat time members recounted their recent adventures in the snow. Connie Stewart’s tale of her car so stuck in a snowdrift in her driveway that even the rescuers from AAA could not pull it out was the most dramatic. After President Fran Greenberg rang the business meeting to order, the minutes were accepted as read and the treasury reported at its customary $181.52. A nominating committee consisting of Carla Potash, Connie Stewart, and Joanna Riesman was formed to present a slate of candidates for the offices of two secretaries and a treasurer, to be voted on at the March 10 Annual Meeting. Connie has arranged for the children’s science book Bat Count to be donated to the Hastings Library in memory of Susan Korsten. Carol Barkin will follow up on a book for the library in memory of May Kanfer, and Jacquie Weitzman will continue her discussions with librarian Debbie Quinn on our donation of $125. At the end of our session, we voted to accept Fran’s smaller version of a Literature Club book plate to go in donated books.

Presenter Carol Barkin interwove the life and work of her author, James Thurber, noting how often in his stories he rang changes on the theme of the dominating wife and the henpecked husband. As sources, she pointed us to Thurber’s mother, the practical joker Mame; Thurber’s socially ambitious first wife; and his second wife, who ran every aspect of his life while also editing the magazines Flying Aces and Sky Birds. Her two expert topics were aircraft and machine guns. Carol also stressed the unhappy effects of a childhood accident in which Thurber lost his left eye, and the positive and nurturing creative influence of The New Yorker and its founding editor Harold Ross and writer E.B. White, on both Thurber’s life and work.

Among the stories we read and laughed our way through were “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” and “The Macbeth Murder Mystery.”

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary

Joanna Presents Alan Bennett

Jacquie's Emails 

Dec 29 ,2020 Hello Ladies! A funny thing happened on the way to scheduling Joanna's presentation for this Lit Club season - it was set for January 20th, which is, as we all have tattooed on our hearts, Inauguration Day. So, to spread out the special events during this long pandemic season, we will be changing Joanna's presentation on Alan Bennett to January 27th. We hope this will work with everyone's schedules. Wishing you all a New Year full of laughter (and maybe a little schadenfreude??!!!) Jacquie

Jan 24, 2021 Greeting Literary Ladies! What a collection of Wednesdays we have had this January - starting with January 6th, as Barbara was delighting us with Shakespeare while the mob was attacking the capital and our democratic institutions, to last Wednesday, with the ecstatic release of grown-ups and competents taking back our capital and democratic institutions, with poetry and music and big words used correctly and with thought and feeling, and the best fireworks display I have ever seen! I for one am so glad Joanna was willing to move her presentation to this Wednesday, as I was unable to tear myself away from my television set, wearing pearls and my stars and stripes scarf, rejoicing in all that is now seemingly possible once again.

To stick with the literary, my sister Robin posted this image on her Facebook page entitled, "This small Fancy Nancy seeing what she can be." For those who are unfamiliar with the book series, this little girl is wearing a costume from Disney's Fancy Nancy collection, sold at Target.

And now we have Joanna's presentation to look forward to this Wednesday, January 27th at 1pm, when she will be delighting us with Uncommon Writer: Alan Bennett. Joanna has requested that I include the following video Maggie Smith in Alan Bennett's Bed Among the Lentils to whet your appetite for her presentation. Enjoy! Until Wednesday! Jacquie

Barbara's Minutes

Last night I should have been writing the minutes for our January 27 Literature Club meeting, but instead I could not stop watching on YouTube a performance of Beyond the Fringe at a theater in London’s West End in the 1960s. Beyond the Fringe was the creation of four young and brilliant performers from Oxford, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett, the subject of Joanna Riesman’s presentation. I first became aware of Alan Bennett in 1965, when I was in London and saw the show. Last night I reveled in Dudley Moore accompanying himself on the piano as he sang Die Flabbergast, Peter Cook, as a Scotland yard inspector, who assures his interviewer that a train robbery does not mean a train has been stolen, Jonathan Miller as a breezy Vicar who asks to be called Dick as he tries to bring young people back to the church, and Alan Bennett, in his plumiest BBC voice, talking about T.E. Lawrence, the Man and the Myth.

But to get on with the writing of the minutes. We had a lively chat period, in which we learned that Fran Lebowitz is Jacquie Weitzman’s first cousin and spiced up family parties by bringing jazz greats. Christine Lehner's life now revolves around an adorable puppy, while Louisa Stephens delights in StoryWorth, an online program which helps users collect family stories and put them in book form. Linda Tucker is about to read American literature with her grandson at Yale. Sharon DeLevie is leaving soon for a trip to Florida with a stack of books, among them The Mothers and Deacon King Kong.  At our business meeting the minutes were accepted as read and the treasury remained at $181.52. Jacquie will continue her talk with Hastings Librarian Debbie Quinn about the Literature Club donation of $125 for books—or ebooks—of literary merit. Fran showed her floral Literature Club bookplate design, but a decision was deferred, since some members would like a design that identifies Hastings.

Joanna offered a wide-ranging view of Alan Bennett’s life and work, drawing from his memoirs, plays, and books, and referencing films, TV monologues, BBC radio plays, and more. We read passages from his memoir Untold Stories, which, as Joanna noted, revealed his talent for observing the small acts that describe a character. Bennett’s ability to describe the unhappiness or regret of women was informed by his experience of his mother’s depression. We read the funny and heartbreaking play A Woman of Letters, then turned to a lighter work, The Uncommon Reader, to conclude our exploration, under Joanna’s guidance, of this inimitable writer.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary

Barbara Presents Shakespeare's Fools

Jacquie's Email 

Hello Literary Ladies!!! As we head into the promise of 2021, this is a reminder that we will be meeting this Wednesday, January 6th at 1pm on Zoom for Barbara's Presentation on Shakespeare's Fools. Barbara will be sharing her texts on the screen during her presentation and assigning parts at that time, but if you would prefer to receive a copy of her (lengthy) texts ahead of time to print out, please let her know and she will send them to you. I hope you were all able to ring in the New Year with a little laughter! Jacquie

P.S. And since we all have Georgia on our minds, here's a little musical interlude to get us through Tuesday. 

P.P.S. And as Barbara reminded me, if you want to brush up on your Shakespeare with the help of another Brit with a way with words, Cole Porter, here you go!

Barbara's Minutes 

All the members of the Literature Club, including our newest member, Sharon DeLevie, were in their Zoom boxes for the first meeting of the new year. Joanna Riesman told us her sister took umbrage at receiving a book called Diary of a Provincial Lady as a gift, but was soon delighting in Delafield’s tale. How the holidays were different formed one theme of many of our stories during our chat time. Since we were not entertaining, there were few meals to prepare, which meant there was more time to relax, even take naps. Fortunately, most of us were able to see our families. There was also time to read. Among the books recommended were novels such as Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, George Saunders’s story Fox 8,,the nonfiction works Bill Buford’s Dirt and Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town, and Obama’s memoir, A Promised Land.

At the business meeting led by President Fran Greenberg, the minutes were accepted as read and the treasury remained at $181.52. Jacquie Weitzman and Connie Stewart said they will continue their talks with Hastings Librarian Debbie Quinn about Literature Club donations. Fran will design an book plate to be used in all books given to the library from the Literature Club.

For her talk on Shakespeare’s fools, Barbara Morrow chose the paradoxical punster Touchstone, master of court manners and morals, from Shakespeare’s romantic comedy As You Like It. She also chose Sir John Falstaff, with his fierce, subversive intelligence and carnivalesque exuberance, from the history play, King Henry IV Part 1.

Although we are not quite ready to tread the boards of the Globe Theater, Literature Club members did a very creditable job of reading three scenes from each of the plays.

Just as it was approaching 3 o’clock, a member announced that something terrible was happening at the US Capitol. We all clicked out of the meeting to learn of insurrection in Washington, DC.

Respectfully submitted, Barbara Morrow, Recording Secretary