"No one encouraged me to be a cartoonist.... I showed my work and they just said, 'I didn’t know you were this unhappy.'..."

"My dream was to be a working cartoonist for the Village Voice... Because that was Jules Feiffer, Mark Alan Stamaty, Stan Mack. There was something very idiosyncratic, very New York, about them, all social comment and not a gag panel. And the New Yorker cartoon was a gag panel. I liked that, but I had no interest in doing that. I didn’t see myself as part of that. I submitted because I thought, Why not? I was working for the Voice and for the Lampoon, and I thought I should try The New Yorker. It’s cartoons—same deal. I think it was a Wednesday—I called up and found their drop-off day, and I left my portfolio. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing ever since. I was absolutely flabbergasted and terrified when I found out I had sold something.... ... I went in to see [Lee Lorenz, the New Yorker’s art editor] and he pulled out a cartoon, and he said, ‘We want to buy this! Are you excited?’ ‘Yeah, I am,’ I said. I thought I might be dreaming. A little bit out of body. I noticed that the lights were very like my elementary school. I liked that it’s not exactly shabby but nothing trying to impress you. Places that are trying to impress me always scare me. They don’t impress me, but they scare me. He told me that Shawn [William Shawn, the magazine’s longtime editor] really liked my work. And I had no idea who Shawn was! I assumed it was a first name, someone named Sean, like Sean Connery, who somehow was allowed to like your work. I nodded. ‘That sounds good.’ I did meet him later, and he doffed his hat and I doffed mine, and I wondered why I was doing this."

From "Scenes from the Life of Roz Chast/In the past four decades, the cartoonist has created a universe of spidery lines and nervous spaces, turning anxious truth-telling into an authoritative art" (in The New Yorker).

Speaking of exciting scenes in the life of an artist, I selected that quote and cut and pasted it here before reading it to the end, and I was flabbergasted to see Sean Connery come up. It's so utterly random. The previous post, which I started writing because I was interested in Dennis Hopper's photography, moved through a sequence of things and ended up on Sean Connery. I'd just created a new tag for "Sean Connery" and added it retrospectively to 3 other posts. Sean Connery had popped up only 3 times in 16 years of writing on this blog, and now, this morning, in the space of a few minutes, he's popped up twice. All 5 of the Sean Connery appearances on this blog have been minimal and random. I'll list them in the order of importance — importance with regard to Sean Connery — with the least trivial thing at #1:

5. Roz Chast heard the last name "Shawn" and thought of the first name "Sean," as in "Sean Connery."

4. Darrell Hammond was identified (in 2011) as the SNL actor who impersonates "Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Sean Connery."

3. Dream-casting a movie based on a new Sandra Day O'Connor biography in 2005, one commenter pictures "a cameo appearance from Sir Sean Connery as Robert Bork, who turns out to have been the arch-villain all along!"

2. This morning's discussion of the 1995 Sean Connery movie "Just Cause."

1. My revelation that I haven't seen a James Bond movie since the last Sean Connery Bond movie, "Diamonds Are Forever" ("It was 1971, and we thought James Bond was absurdly passé").